CCM 111 Anything But a Card Winter and/or Slap It On

We have a brand new type of challenge for you at Crafty Cardmakers this time around and it will run for a whole month. We are delving into the world of Mixed Media! We would like to see your NON card creations along a Winter theme, or if you don’t want to do Winter as we realise it’s a little late in the year, in the UK anyhow, you could go for the alternative which we are calling Slap it On, but basically that’s an anything goes type of challenge.

I went with Winter, and kind of wished I hadn’t when I realised how limited with colour I was for my chosen design. I mean who has green snowflakes! This is what I ended up with

and this is how it started

So I began with this old photo frame which I purchased from my local refuse recycling centre, which luck would have it, is within walking distance of my home, or the Tip to you! I think I paid 50p for this and another almost identical picture.

I thought they were both wooden frames, but after pulling this one apart and getting down to the basics it appears that they were very cleverly moulded plastic to look like wood!

Having gessoed the gold finish I then set about applying diecuts to the frame. I didn’t have any chipboard snowflakes or indeed anything suitable for Winter, so I set about making my own. I die cut each of the white things you can see four times for each one, and then glued them on top of each other to make a very thick diecut. I wanted the finished product to have real dimension because I was going to paint over it.

Next I applied some texture paste with a spatula to give the effect of snow. I also took the opportunity to fill the gap with a few brass charms.

I forgot to photograph the next stage, but I painted it all with a very pale blue acrylic paint, which I had mixed with Titanium White to be even paler, but unfortunately it was still too blue, so I let that dry and went over with another layer of plain white.

You can see hints of the blue here! I gave it a final coat of white acrylic and then sprinkled glamour dust over the wet acrylic paint. Sadly the light isn’t picking up the finished sparkle at all well. I don’t know if it’s because I am photographing basically white, but it’s very sparkly like moonlight or sunlight on snow, and isn’t showing up here at all well

The photographs are almost thirty years old, and are of my Daughter and her Dad and I having fun in her first Winter in the snow. We didn’t have a sledge so her Dad tied some string to a tea tray and we slid her around the garden on that. Between us we built the world’s most misshapen and tallest snowman.

Just as I finished it, I leaned forward on the craft desk to reach down my ruler to measure the aperture for the photograps before I printed them, and C-R-A-C-K…. I snapped the glass, which I had very carefully taken out of the frame at the start, clean in half!

This last photograph didn’t make the frame as it’s quite badly blurred, but shows my Daughter perched on top of it!

It’s taller than her Dad and he was six foot! Such a shame that when she was small there weren’t the all singing, all dancing digital cameras of today, or we might have managed to get some shots that would have still looked good today, instead of these washed out ones. But doing this project brought back all those memories.

Anyhow I am entering this into the following:-

All Crafts Challenge – Feb/Mar: Anything but a Card
Altered Eclectics – Mar: Anything Goes
Card and Scrap – #71 Use Dies
Crafting From the Heart – #8 Anything Goes Use Dies or Punches
Crafts4 Eternity – #165 Texture
Kitty Bee Designs – Aloha Friday Challenge – #18 Monochrome (obviously the frame, not the photographs are monochromatic!
Rhedd’s Creative Spirit – Mar: Anything Goes
Scrappy Hands – #7 Mixed Media
Scribbles Designs – #14 Frame It
The Cheerful Stamp Pad – #81 Anything Goes