Altered Alphabet

Another swap on AFTCM is to alter an alphabet letter representing the first letter of our partners name.

My partner's given name starts with the letter L and she likes vintage, Victorian, lace and filigree .

I took several pieces of chipboard, cut them out in an L shape and glued them together. I covered the piece with some script scrapbook paper.  I had some large pieces of lace and glued it to the bottom of the L shape then sprayed the whole thing with some Dylusions Melted Chocolate spray and some glimmer mist.

I felt like it need something on the left hand side so I attached some wood scroll pieces to the edge after painting them with a deep red and brown acrylic paint. I also sprayed some roses and daisy flowers with the Dylusions spray, and attached them at the bottom left corner along with a leaf and a broken piece from a broach (which is the closest thing I had to filigree!).

I wanted some texture so I added some Stampendous Ancient Wine embossing enamel at the top, edges and on a few areas of the scrolls.

I coloured two little ceramic pieces with Smooch gold and attached them above the flowers along with a home made hat pin and an old safety pin. I layered two Memory Box bird house dies together and put it at the top with foam tape underneath to raise it a bit. I added an old earring at the top which looks like grapes; added a little bird cut from some scrapbook paper. I had a stamped butterfly on my desk so I glued it in with the flowers, then added a little bottle cap with the letter L imprinted on it.

On  the bottom I added the wood embellishment with the word Dream on which I had embossed the edges with the Stampendous enamel; added a little screw brad to it. I coloured two little dragonflies with permanent ink pens and Smooch Ink, removed the backs and glued them beside the wooden embellishment. The last step was to add tiny gems scattered throughout.

A Garden Journey Book

On AFTCM I am participating in a swap where we are making a house shaped book themed " A Garden Journey". A friend on the group was kind enough to send me a template of various shapes for the house and I cut them out on some cardboard.

For the front I printed off a gate on a piece of acetate and cut it to size.

The first page is an picture of a door from my friend Adrienne from her personal collection which she shared on one of our groups. I cut out images from an old calendar which had various garden themes and worked them around the door image. For the peak of the house I chose a butterfly from a brochure - one of my favourite things.


The back of this page was covered with some scrapbook paper and again I used some flowers from the old calendar as well as a magazine page.  The image of the lady is from magicmoonlightfreeimages.blogspot.com. I added a border from an old greeting card at the bottom and the word sticker on the top.

Page 3. I coloured a piece of cardstock with Cathie Allan's Stamp Smoosh technique, and lightly stamped a music stamp all over, cut it out and attached it to the cardboard shape. I stamped and coloured the LaBlanche stamp of the little girl in the daisies, cut it out and added it to the stamped background. To complete the page I added a transparency which I recently bought and a little sunflower button to which I added a punched image and a dewdrop which I coloured with alcohol ink.

The back of this page was covered with scrapbook paper which really is not floral but I thought it would work well with some little dimensional plastic flowers that I had in my stash. I added gems to a couple of the flowers that had holes in the centre.

Page 5, I started by stamping an old favourite PSX stamp of a garden pond scene and coloured it with Lyra coloured pencils. I then added colour to the background with chalks then added stamped trees, rocks and grass. I printed off the bird image which is a freebie from Elizabeth's blog. I then stamped the "welcome" stamp coloured and cut it out and added it at the bottom.

The back of the previous page started off with what my friend Trish B calls "worksheet wonders"; basically a piece of paper that has been under a project while stamping or spraying. In my case this was a piece of cardstock that was under a project that I was spraying with Adirondack color wash. There were a lot of white spaces so I added Ranger distress stain over the whole sheet, which is transparent enough to allow some of the original colours to show through.

I stamped a Judikins Sunflower stamp on the background using distress ink and distress embossing powder.

I printed off a poem and put it under a cute little frame that I bought for a couple of dollars at Michaels. The bird image is a thin sheet of self-adhesive cork precisely laser-cut from Magenta which I coloured with pigment inks. Finally I added a butterfly, a little rainbow and a grass sticker.

Page seven, I covered with a floral themed paper. I had some chipboard pieces left from my Ezee Pzee design kits and decided that the tree would be my centre piece. I coloured it with acrylic paints. I found some apple and squirrel stickers in my stash and added them to the tree. I also had a smaller Magenta cork bird that I had already coloured and added it on one of the branches. The little pink cat was from a stash of embellishments and I thought he/she would be perfect sitting under the tree, perhaps hoping the squirrels would come down?

At the top I added the acrylic daisy and the Escape stickers  to finish off the peak.

The opposite side of page 7 started off with a piece of a brochure with a floral design at the edge. I printed a poem/quote and coloured over it to make it blend into the background, but the edges still showed so I added some sticker borders around it.

The bird image is from Elizabeth's blog and the 3-D bunnies were a gift from my friend Tracy. To complete the peak I cut out a large flower from the old calendar to make it look like a roof. The little bees are from a free sheet of images from vintagepaintworks.com. I am not sure if these are available anymore as I could not find the site when I recently did a search to link to them.

For the back cover I cut a piece of thick vinyl and stamped a saying at the bottom in Stazon ink. I had some wooden bird pieces from Kaisercraft which I painted with acrylic paint and glued to the cover.

This will be on the way to my partner later this week. Hope she likes it as much as I enjoyed making it.