Challenge 17 - Halloween - To Die For

Hello Fellow Travellers, Anne here with a new challenge for you. Firstly, thank you so much for your wonderful entries to Terry's Heavy Metal challenge, you always impress us with your creativity!

You can probably guess from the title that we are asking you to use dies this time to make your Halloween creation. It does not need to be scary (but it would be fun if it was) but it does need to have at least one die and it must be strongly influenced by the style of Tim Holtz please.

Please ensure you are familiar with our Rules to ensure that you are in with a chance of winning a prize.

As always, one lucky winner, chosen by the team, will win a £10 shopping voucher from our wonderful sponsors Country View Crafts. We will also be choosing three Pinworthies who will feature on our Pinterest page and they will receive a badge to display on their blog.

My fellow Creative Guides have created THE most wonderful Design Team pieces to inspire you!

Anne

Halloween is one of my favourite times of the year, I love when the children come to the door, in their costumes to 'trick or treat'. I have used many of Tim's dies to create this shadow box. For more details please visit my blog.

Jennie

I had great fun creating this Halloween piece from Tim's Luminary Die and it looks great with a light inside. I managed to use lots of different dies to complete my project but it was lacking a pumpkin so this is handmade from paper clay! There are more pictures and details HERE on my blog but I hope you have as much fun creating your challenge piece as I did mine.

Terry

I love Halloween and the fact that you can let your imaginations run wild with childish delight. Anne's "Halloween To Die For" was such a treat for me and quite a bit of fun altering this shadow box and combining spooky movers and shapers and vintage lace for my dies of choice! For all the details, you can visit me HERE. 

Nikki

It's all about die cutting and embossing for me this time round for a triptych using Tim's Vintage Cabinet die and lots of his Halloween imagery and textures. Do hop over to Addicted to Art to see the rest of the Spooky creation!

Chris

Using Tim's influence and techniques to decorate this photo' frame and make it into a shabby, vintage style piece of Halloween decor was great fun. Tim's distress paint, ink, stamps, dies and Idea-ology have all been brought together to create this feast of Halloween craftables. A full list of products and a step x step can be found here.

Astrid

Like Anne, I love Halloween, but don't actually own a lot of Halloween themed products so had to improvise. I had great fun doing so and if you want to find out more about how I put this triptych Halloween piece of home decor together, - please visit my blog.

S@ndy

Another wonderful theme for this fortnight from our host, Anne. Such a great chance to make something using our favorite products. For my cascade card I've used some of my favorite papers from Graphic 45 along with lots of Tim's dies. For more details and a tutorial please stop by "My Crafty Life On The Internet".

Julia

I'm excited to be posting my very first project as a Creative Guide today. I love Anne's choice of a Halloween theme. I embossed my clear bottle and decorated it with die cuts using two of Tim's dies, and several Idea-ology pieces. You will find lots of photos and details on my blog post here.

Jenny 

Anne's challenge description got my creative cogs whirring at an alarming pace as I toyed with the idea of which dies to employ - an ATB, a mini book, oh the possibilities were endless! Then Tim Holtz released the latest 12 Tags of 2014 tutorial/challenge and (with the well timed arrival in the post of some new Distress Spray Stains) I decided to keep it simple and make a die cut laden Halloween card following Tim's techniques and ideas. You can see more on my blog.

Julie

This has been such an amazing challenge that Anne has chosen and is my first project with A Vintage Journey. Tim's products make fabulous spooky scenes and his Halloween stamps gave me so much inspiration. If you would like to see what's inside the cupboard and more about how my project was created and what influenced me, please pop over to my blog here.

Jools

I love Halloween so I couldn't wait to get started, my inspiration came from the amazing Configurations box and fabulous adornments that featured in the launch of the Laboratories Range

I decided to create a secret book of Potions & Poisons to see the how I made it and find out what's inside Please pop over to my blog 

Wow, what an abundance of fabulous inspiration! I do hope you feel inspired to get your dies out and create something for our challenge. You have until 18:00 BST on Thursday 30 October to enter. I hope you have lots of fun making something!

An InLinkz Link-up

Welcome Ana as our Guest Creative Guide today

Happy Monday everyone, we are here again with a fabulously inspiring project from our guest Creative Guide today who is Ana from Anina Papirckalnica

Hello dear crafters. I'm delighted to be here with you, this time as a guest designer. My name is Ana and I live in beautiful Slovenia. I started creating about 3 years ago when I accidently found scrapbooking, but when I “met” Tim Holtz I became addicted. I love everything old and distressed and that you can find in my creations...old paper, vintage finds and everything that is trash for “normal people” is treasure for me.

When I heard that a new challenge is “Heavy Metal”, I knew that I would like to use Tim’s metal foil technique and create a small banner...

Here is the quick run through the steps:

I cut 3 bases from a white cardstock and used embossing resist technique for background. Tutorial for this technique you can find on Tim Holtz blog, he used it for his November tag back on 2012.

Next I added metal hinge clips, a Tissue wrap-Melange and stitched fabric. I cut two butterflies with movers and shapers dies and made a heart with Utee.

I covered both butterflies and heart with metal foil, made texture and added some inks- I simply followed Tim’s tutorial from September 2012 tag. I glued everything on background and added some stamped images. I choose to cut another 3 bases, a bit bigger than first ones and stitched everything together. For the final touch I added metal eyelets and a black wax string.

I really had fun making this banner and I am happy with final result, hope you like it too... Thank you for travelling with me here at A Vintage Journey and thank you to the A vintage Journey design team for the invitation!

 

You are most welcome Ana, this is a wonderful banner using metal with Tim’s technique and with each of the butterflies and heart mounted on a fabulous collage background. I love the contrast of the metal with fabric.

Thank you so much for joining us and creating such a special project to inspire our readers.

 

So it’s over to you our fabulous Travellers to get creating if you haven’t already and to get your entries linked to our Heavy Metal challenge by this Thursday evening before it closes. Don’t forget we have another new host and challenge on Friday.

Have a creative week.

hugs Brenda and the Team

xxx

Guest, Winners and new Creative Guides

What a fabulous Friday, there’s so much to share today. Firstly I need to update you about the team. Sadly our lovely Candy had to step away from being a Creative Guide and we are already missing her wonderfully creative projects in our challenge line-ups and also our dear Trace needs a bit of time to work with other things at the moment so will not be sharing her unique style and fabulous projects with us for a while. But I am pleased to tell you that we have chosen two very special people to join us and enable us to continue to share some incredibly original and imaginative works of art with you. So I am very pleased  introduce the two new Creative Guides - Julie Lavalette from Juliz Design Post and Julia Aston from Create With Me who both will be an asset when sharing projects in the challenges and sharing their ideas. You can see their bios and photos in the Creative Guide page on the sidebar.

…………………………………..

Moving on I would now like to introduce Jill Wakefield aka as Tocoart as our guest winner today and when you’ve seen Jill's fabulous project you will be able to scroll down and see the winner and pinworthies of the last challenge.

 

Hello My name is Jill Wakefield and I am very honoured to be allowed to have something feature on Vintage Journey! I am very new to blog land only joining the community in May of this year. One of the first that I found was Vintage Journey and it was right up my street. Being a “collector” of all things Tim I was in heaven. I live alone with my 19 Year old daughter and our small zoo of domestic animals. I have always liked to make things, I remember getting very frustrated with Blue Peter as a child as I never had any double sided tape! I have knitted, but never got the hang of crochet, then like many people probably I got myself sky television and discovered craft…… and the spending began! QVC was where I first discovered Tim Holtz and his tags. My Favourite thing about his work, is his use of colour and how he combines them in his creations.

For the theme Heavy Metal I decided to Alter a bottle I had been hanging on to.

Solid, heavy glass it was far to good to through away. This is what it looked like to start with.

Firstly I placed on the bottle some clear plastic envelope seals. Purchased from the pound shop. I then covered the bottle with acrylic gesso, using a sponge, it had 3 coats in total to look like this. Leave to dry naturally as a heat tool will blister the acrylic gesso and the plastic circles.

Leave the plastic seals in place for the time being. To colour the bottle I used 3 shades of Luminart Paints again applied with a sponge and blended by dabbing with a wet wipe. This is only 1 coat but you can of course do more.

I then stamped over the bottle using a large background stamp. This particular one is called bubble border. I used black archival for this and I very carefully gave it a waft the the heat gun to ensure it had set. At this point I also sprayed the bottle with some Winsor and Newton Satin spray varnish. I do not use hairspray, your materials cost you a lot of money and you invest a lot of hours on your work. Hairspray has chemicals in that are not suitable for long term use on your art. They don’t have the UV and UVA filters that protect your work from light fading either. Your work does deserve the best!

When the stamping is dry you can take of the plastic seals and we have some beautiful little portholes.

I chose to create some flowers for my little vase and to do this I used Ranger Metal foil Tape Sheets. They are self adhesive and super easy to use. I stuck the sheet onto card and coloured with alcohol inks, using a blending tool and felt, 1 felt for each colour.

To make the flowers I cut many petals from Tim Holtz Tattered Florals die. After shaping I added Stickles to the centres. Tim Holtz In flight die was used for the birds around the collar. Some idea-ology on the front of the vase, and voila that is it, a re-purposed bottle

Thank you so much Jill for sharing this wonderful project with us, it is full of wonderful colour and shapes. You have certainly used some great techniques in getting together all the elements you have added to alter this bottle into something completely different. It is a wonderful transformation.

……………………………………….

Now we share the winner and pinworthy mentions from the last challenge and it’s over to Astrid to share this with us.

I would like to start by saying a big thank you to everyone who took part in the Colours of Autumn challenge. What a wonderful array of projects, it was clear to see, that so many of us get inspired by the amazing colours nature provides us with at this time of year! So thank you for travelling with us once again or for some of you for the first time.

Like always, it was the hardest task to choose an overall winner and a top 3 who will all be "pinworthies" and will be added to our Pinterest boards, but with the help of my wonderful team mates, we have now decided and here they are:

The overall winner is no 7

Mona Pendelton from Cupcake creations http://cupcakescreations.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/one-of-kind.html

I loved Mona’s wonderful lay out the moment I first saw it, the subtlety of the colours she chose, the amazing textures, both on the background and on some of the embellishments like the leaves, the whole composition of the lay out, just captured my heart. This is just stunning, and if you have not seen it all yet, check it out. Mona your voucher will be on it’s way soon and your project will be pinned to our winners board.

Now to the pinworthies, in no particular order:

Nicole Wright no 48 from Canadian Nickel

http://canadiannickelscrapn.blogspot.ca/2014/10/autumns-harvest.html

Nicole put together the most amazing piece of Halloween inspired home décor, it just oozes creativity and attention to detail.

Susanne C no 13 from Suzz’s Stamping Spot

http://suzzstampingspot.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/be-yourself.html

Suzz’s tag is full of creative techniques, inspired by Tim, but then adding her own twist to them, loved it

Jann Hill no 42 from Scrapbooking from the attic

http://www.scrapintheattic.com/

I loved the combination of stamping and die cuts on this piece, and such wonderful autumnal colours, bright and subtle in perfect combination.

 

All these amazing creations will be added to our Pinworthies board.

Thank you to all who played along, we all hope you will join us for many more challenges to come. Don’t forget there is still a week left to get on your metal and play in our latest challenge.

 

hugs Brenda, Astrid and The Creative Guides

xxx

Destination Inspiration - Ice Resin

Hi Vintage Journey Travelers - S@ndy here - it is my pleasure to be your guide today as we explore Ice Resin.

First thing is, STOP HORDING IT AND USE IT!  I've heard so many of my friends and team mates tell me they've had some Ice Resin in their stash but for some reason haven't used it yet.  Well - I'm here to tell you that it's fun and easy. 

You are going to love the results because this resin dries crystal clear and is self leveling and self doming. You can use it in layers and it dries seamlessly.

Let's get started:

You can purchase Ice Resin in a couple different ways, both available from our lovely sponsor Country View Crafts. 

You can buy it in the system shown below.  All you need to do is press the plunger on top and you will get a perfect mixture each time with no measuring.  The only additional items you will need is a cup and a stir stick.

Or you can buy it in larger quantities, my personal preference, as shown below.  Country View Crafts has a complete kit that will get you started.

 

Before you mix up your resin you will want to get your project(s) ready to go.  Your choices are limitless for this, you can purchase bezels, casting molds or make something to contain your resin.  I have shared some of my projects toward the end of this post to help inspire you.

Shown below are some products from Media MiXage that are great because they have the bezel and die to match.  Got to love that!  Also available at Country View Crafts.

 

Here are a few more: 

 Shown below are several different kinds of casting molds.  The light blue ones are from Krafty Lady, the darker ones are Martha Stewart and the pink one is made from Mold and Pour.  These molds are designed to release the resin and are soft and flexible.  On the right you will notice some Tim Holtz Tissue Wrap which makes fabulous resin paper which I will talk about in a minute.

 

 

Here are a few more things I found around my studio that will work well.

 

 

While shopping I found some Halloween ice trays so decided to try them.  I won't know if it has worked until I remove the resin from the mold. 

Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

 

For this pour I prepared a leaf mold by brushing it with Perfect Pearls and removing the excess.  One is brushed with green and the other is gold.  The examples below show how the resin looks when used with Perfect Pearls, the color is embedded in the resin and stays true and does not rub off.  Ok, now we are ready to mix our Ice Resin.

When using this two part method, as in baking, measuring is important.  All you need to do is measure two equal parts and pour them together in a cup.  Here I used 2 ozs. of each, doesn't seem like much but it does go a long way.  

With your stir stick - simply stir for two minutes.  Set it aside for five minutes.

After five minutes has pasted you are ready to pour.  Simply pour the resin into the molds or bezels.

When using a casting mold. you will want the resin flat with the top of the mold.  When using a bezel, you will want to fill it as full as possible without running over.

The resin will make a dome.  Most air bubbles will work out while it is sitting but if you still see some, you can pop them with a pin.

With the amount I mixed up I was able to pour the two leaves, and the pumpkin which is larger than most molds.  The small amount left in the cup was used to make some resin paper.  Using a disposable foam brush I simply brushed a thin coat of resin on the tissue wrap.  Be sure to use your non stick mat for this.  When dry you can peel the paper from the mat.  The paper becomes glossy and transparent.  When dry the paper can be Alcohol Inked and die cut to make a strong element for any project.  I like to brush it on both sides, it is messy but worth it.

OK, now for me, the hard part.  Some things will cure faster that others but I always wait 24 hours before I remove anything from the mold.  It is very tempting to touch it- but don't do that!!  You will have fingerprints on your project. 

 

I'll be back in 24

Here we are 24 hours later with the results.  You can see from this photo how easily the resin comes out of the mold.  And I was so happy that the pumpkin turned out great.  It was a little harder to release but it's fine.

Here you can see the difference when using Perfect Pearls.  You can see that the colors mixed on the green one but I'm ok with that.

Here is the paper, it is now very strong and transparent.

Some ideas to share-

 

The face on this journal cover was cast with resin, then painted with gesso and sprayed.  Great 3D embellishments.

For a complete tutorial on the jewelry seen below go to: http://sandydiller.blogspot.com/2013/02/challenge-metal-ology.html

For a complete tutorial on the pocket watch (my January tag) go to: http://sandydiller.blogspot.com/2014/01/tick-tock.html

A couple of projects that I did some time ago.

In the bottom of this one I used red Stickles all over the bottom of the bezel, let dry over night, added some gears (if you want your embellishments to stay put - you need to use a little clear glue to hold them in place.  If not glued down they may float)I then put in a thin layer of Ice Resin.  After 24 hours - I went back and added my embellishments and a final layer of Ice Resin.  Oh yes, another 24 hours.

On the sample below I made a frame out of wire, glued a piece of resin paper on the back, trimmed around it.  I added some embellishments and then added more resin.  Fast, fun and easy!

 

 

I hope you have enjoyed our venture into Ice Resin and you have been inspired to give it a try.

 

Have a great week and try something new!!  Like Ice Resin.

 

S@ndy

 

Sponsored by:  Country View Crafts

To shop click here

 

 

Heavy Metal–Challenge #16

Challenge 16 - Heavy Metal

Terry here and it is hard to believe we are already into October and it is my turn to be your guide, so here we go. For this challenge of "Heavy Metal" which will run two weeks, it is not about music, or I suppose it could be, but the idea is to share your "Heavy Metal" love of Tim and his products. This can be altered or not, metal pieces (Idea-ology), foil backed paper, metallic paints or stains. Pretty much anything with metal in it or any form of, but obviously keeping it in a Tim style. As always for the winner there is a £10 shopping voucher from Country View Crafts our generous sponsor and three Pinworthies, who can proudly display a badge.

Terry

I love altering items that you just can't seem to let go and I love Halloween, so I decided to add some "Heavy Metal" in the form of stains, paints, alcohol inks and metal bits to this once framed tile! For all the details of my madness, please visit my BLOG.

Chris

I love working with metal sheets and embellishments and I especially love rusting things so it'll come as no surprise that my 'Heavy metal' project is full of rusty bits and pieces. Vintage and grungey with lots of Idea-ology, this wall hanging was great fun to make. More details and pic's of how and what here.

Anne

I love using metal on projects and I have used all of the items Terry has suggested, with the exception of the Heavy Metal Music!  I thought it was a good opportunity to start making cards for Christmas. Full details are on my blog.

Nikki

I have used both alcohol inks and distress paints on embossed metal foil to create my frame and flowers. I love this effect! Do pop over to my blog for additional photos and the details.

 

Jools

Heavy Metal!

My Favourite! I love anything metallic and I have to admit my go to is always Steampunk, so I decided to challenge myself to not use gears and cogs!! I also don't make cards very often either so another challenge!!! To see more of my project please visit my blog

  

Annie

This is such a great challenge and I really enjoyed creating this project. I love Tim's faux metal techniques from his Compendium of Curiosities 2. I used the Riveted Patchwork and Enamelled Metals in this projects and several of Tim's Sizzix dies. To see more information regarding the process you can visit my blog by clicking my name above. Have fun and I look forward to viewing your entries x

 

S@ndy

Heavy Metal, yes please!  I'm so happy that our host, Terry, chose Heavy Metal for this challenge.  I love to use my paper crafting supplies in different ways - especially for jewelry and definitely a ‘Tim’ influence with the clocks, gears and his embossing folder on the copper.
This is my take on a project I first saw from Susan Morse in Cloth, Paper, Scissors Magazine way back in July/August 2010.  The base for this piece is a striker plate. If you don't know what that is, please stop by my bog here for more details and photos.


Brenda

My tag today started off with just the lower half where I ran some copper foil through Tim’s spiderweb embossing folder and it went from there. There’s really heavy metal on this piece where I even made my own barbed wire and I used metallic pastes, distress paints and the very new distress spray stains.

 

Now that you have been inspired by the fabulous artwork of my lovely teammates, we hope that you will join us in your "Heavy Metal" projects and you have until Thursday, October 16th, 18.00 BST.

Thank you for travelling with us!