Curiosities and Celebrations

Today at A Vintage Journey we are celebrating our first anniversary and what a year we have all had - so much amazing inspiration from the Creative Guides and Guest Designers but also from our fabulous followers too. As we move on to another year we are moving into a monthly challenge and the Destination Inspiration will be a little different too. We hope you like the changes - do hop over to the blog for more details.

And so on to our current challenge, hosted by our the wonderfully talented and lovely Brenda:

ANYTHING TIM 

It couldn't get much easier than that could it, so I hope you all find time to join in with the challenge. 

Whilst I love all the wonderful Tim techniques there are out there, the one thing I love more than anything is being able to use his wonderful products in my own style. And my project for this challenge is my favourite! I love taking a disparate collection of items, equalising them with gesso and then spraying, inking and painting them. 

I started with a piece of greyboard (measuring 5" x 6") painted with gesso and added tissue tape and texture paste, various die cuts, flowers (handmade from the Tattered Florals die and others bought in a craft shop sale), buttons, bits of wire and a pen nib and this little frame I picked up in a charity shop - a set of six for a doll's house. 

I went for a design running from left to right across my board.

And then my favourite part of the process - covering everything with white gesso. These photographs were taken after two coats, and I went on to add a third, so you can see it needs quite a few layers!

Then out came the Spray Stains: Broken China, Faded Jeans and Picket Fence.

I love the way the different substrates take the colour - again I (tried!) to spray from left to right and top to bottom with the darker spray.

Then when everything was dry I started adding little touches of gesso and some splatterings of Vintage Photo Distress Ink.

You can keep doing this for ages and sometimes it is difficult to know when to stop!

I rubbed a little Treasure Silver back onto the frame, the metal pieces and also the tips of the roses.

I really love this technique and it is such a great way to use up bits and pieces which you wouldn't normally put together.

I do hope you will join us in our challenge this month and do hop on over to the challenge blog for some amazing projects from my Creative Guide teamies. And look out for the new Destination Inspiration too which is going to be great fun!

I am still on holiday in Ireland, so this is a scheduled post, but I hope to get along to your blogs when I return on Monday. There is no wifi in the village where we stay - just occasionally in the pub, but we are normally too busy chatting and playing music!

Jennie x