Vintage - Yippee!

The theme this fortnight on the  Stamp Man Challenge Blog is 'Vintage'.

For me, vintage means anything Victorian / romantic / Pre-Raphelite Brotherhood / William Morris and that's just to name a few! I love the richness of the designs, the colours, the fabrics, the textures and even some of the 'over the top' designs they were so famous for in the Victorian era.

I thought for a while about what I would do for this challenge. My starting point became the lovely 'La Blanche stamp I have which features a young girl and some flowers (sorry - don't know what it's called: probably 'Girl With Flowers'!). Rather than use my usual colour palette of choice (pretty obvious from my blog work I'd say!), I decided to choose violet and green. I know that the Victorians loved both violet flowers and the perfume extracted from Wood Violets. I believe those two colours work well together and for extra impact, I have included a very small splash of yellow in my flowers. The green I chose leans towards the yellow spectrum rather than the greens which have a blue hue.

These are the elements which make up my card. Each individual element is described below except for the two layers of TH C'oredinations card I used as background mats. Both layers were sanded around the edge and finished with Distress Inks. To hear how I made the other layers and components please read on!

In this image you can see the tinting I have done on my stamped image (stamped using sepia and a chintz image which I love). Some of the colour has been done with Distress Inks and other areas use coloured pencils (I love colouring in!). I also added Glossy Accents to most of the tinted areas to give them more impact against the rather strong sepia coloured background. The edges of the layer were finished with Distress Inks.

I die cut the flowers and stamped with sections of floral images. I tinted the edges with Distress Inks and added a little splash of yellow in the centre, to enhance the violet colour. The stamped flowers were then coated with Glossy Accents. Some wired beads were added to the centre of the flowers for detail and what vintage item doesn't have some form of 'bling'?!  Rather than use die cut leaves, I added organza ribbon loops in a toning green to give richness and again to be faithful to the vintage theme. Perhaps I should have included lace but I felt that would be one step too far. (Even for me!).

I stamped the girl image and removed the piece I wanted. I added some stamped 'spots' to give the image an aged feel. A coating of Glossy Accents finished the job. The frame was part of another stamped image which I cut out. I coated the frame with a layer of metallic acrylic paint and some black Stazon to try to give an aged effect. A piece of ribbon was coloured with DI and tied into a bow to complete the vintage feel.

I'm also going to show my work at: That Craft Space blog challenge
                                                                       Simon Says Stamp and Show
                                                                       Let's Ink It Up:Challenge #2
                                                                       Allsorts Challenge Blog
                                                                      

If you like this piece of work, I'd love you to leave a comment. Thank you.