A Very Vintage Necklace

Servus, dear crafting friends!
Today I want to share with you an altered art jewelry piece I made:

 

Maybe you already know Retro Kraft Shop, Meresanth's fabulous online store for vintage and steampunk items? I really love the range she offers - especially the watch parts and metal embellishments - but also the range of media she offers is perfect for creating steampunk and/or vintage projects that look heavenly aged and as if they had a story to tell.

I used some of her lovely stuff (watch gears, a watch dial, a vintage button, a metal watch case and some lace ribbon alongside the metal chain) to create a vintage necklace.

I especially love the "damaged" watch dial and the lovely openable watch case which I turned from shiny silver into aged bronze (with a hint of patina) by using Inka Gold guilding pastes which you can also buy at Agnieszka aka Meresanth's Retro Kraft Shop! You will find a short tutorial including a detailed materials list over at the Retro Kraft Shop blog .

The inside of the watch case holds some tiny watch gears and a lovely background paper from the Prima "Cartographer" pad, which is one of my favourites at the moment.

The frozen charlotte was a find at ebay. (I am working on making casts from frozen charlottes using white UTEE at the moment so I won't run out of my real antique ones...maybe I will show you the cast frozen charlottes with a later project...but for now I am still experimenting with my melt pot and the "perfect" cast ;).

The single items were wrapped with black wire and built into loops so I could fix them to the chain with jump rings later. I still have to practice a lot with creating these wire loops and wrappings as you can see... (looking at the photograph while writing this post I find that I forgot to bend in the ends of the wire thoroughly with the vintage button pendant...uh oh...  ;) . The wire was given some dabs with Inka Gold "Brown" guilding paste to soften the dark black colour.

I hope you like my necklace and I really recommend you visit Retro Kraft Shop to see their awesome range of vintage treasures!

Hugs and happy crafting,

Claudia x

52 Card Pickup - Session 5

It's been quite some time since I have done any altered playing cards for my 52 cards pickup project. If you don't know that "52 Card Pickup" means, learn more about it here.

This time my group of four cards look a bit less "lighthearted" and "fun"...which mainly is caused by the fact that I have been struggling with constant nervousness and sometimes also panic attacks from out of the blue for the last months. And although I still try not to let it take me down too much, I have reached a point where I can feel the exhaustion quite a lot. (The source for this still isn't found yet, but my doctors and I are getting closer it seems...).

You will find that the quotes I used on these four cards indicate some of the struggle I am in at the moment. But then I think: in that hectic life most of us have they should be helpful to others too sometimes.

#17

#18

#19

#20

Materials used:  Paper Artsy Eclectica Fresco Finish Chalk Acrylics "Chutney", "Chartreuse", "Seaweed" and "Tikka" alongside some scraps from the Prima "Cartographer" paper stash. Washi tape, some Bo Bunny, Kaisercraft and Prima stamps for texture and Distress markers "black soot" and "broken china" to shade in the word tiles and hearts.

Hugs,

Claudia x

My Birthday Quiz at Our Creative Corner

Servus, dear crafting friends!

Just a short invitation for you today to Our Creative Corner's Birthday party! As OCC celebrates the first anniversary since lovely Laura became its owner, the whole team does some Q&A sessions throughout this month.

Today it is my turn to answer some questions and I chose some that show the Claudia behind the crafty curtains. So if you are in the mood for a bit of sentimentality, some vintage photographs, shared memories and secrets revealed, I recommend you hop over to Our Creative Corner to learn more about me.

I would love to see you over there!
Happy first anniversary, Laura! Looking forward to another year full of artful adventures under your careful and dedicated lead! xx

Big hug!
Claudia x

Steampunk Angel

Servus and welcome to my creative spot! So glad that you stop by again (or for the first time)!

Yesterday - while trying to fight a nasty panic attack - I thought I'd do something fun with the goodies Lisa from "That Craft Place" store sent me to play with. So all the stuff used on this tag can be either bought at her bricks and mortar shop or the online shop or with her facebook shop page. 

You can also visit That Craft Place Natter&Chatter on facebook, where you will not only get a lot of inspiration but also hints and tipps on (almost) all your creative questions.

They also have a challenge blog. So why not join in the fun?

The wings and stars used on this tag are Ditzie Design wood embellishments and I really love them! I coloured them with Distress stains "brushed pewter" and "tarnished brass".

The skirt was first stapled to the tag and then embellished with six tiny brads (also from That Craft Place store).

The octopode stamp, the black fabric and the gold border at the bottom of the tag can be bought with Lisa's shop as well. And if you need some new Copic markers for colouring these are available too ;)

I hope you like my Steampunk Angel tag! Thanks for stopping by!

Hugs and happy crafting,
Claudia x

Art Journaling in Progress

Servus, dear and true creative travellers!

If you remember the journal page I recently created for the actual challenge at Our Creative Corner, you may also have noticed how much I enjoyed using all those old and meaningful ephemera and scrap on it. If you don't know what I am talking about have a look here.

I actually had such a ball creating this page that I did another one! Now there are these two pages in my journal and I just love all the layers and the aged look and that they were made mainly from stuff that other people consider as trash. Well, we creative folk see the world with all the stuff in it with different eyes, I guess ;)

On my other - more "serious" - art blog "Von Pappe" you will find a more detailed post about the how-to, a lot of close ups and even a short "animation" that shows how the right page develloped throughout the process. So all those who have always wanted to peek over my shoulder and watch me creating the stuff I usually do: hop over and have a look! It isn't a video (I'm too shy honestly to do a video tutorial *blush), but it is a short animated slide show that lets you follow the process step by step. See what I added and in which order.

I would love it if you stopped by my other creative spot! And I will try to repay the visit! Promise!

Hugs and happy crafting,
Claudia xx

"The Potatoe" - Craft Stamper's May Take It Make It Challenge

Servus and welcome back to another start of a new challenge issue. Only yesterday I posted both my DT projects for the new challenges over at SanDee&amelie's Steampunk Challenges and Our Creative Corner (and I recommend you join in too as both challenge themes are just great and you will find a lot of awesome inspiration done by both design teams.  Learn more about my two DT creations by following the links above to my blog posts)!

Today it's Craft Stamper's Take It Make It challenge's turn - hosted by the lovely Trish Latimer!

The theme for this month's challenge is 

The Potatoe

and it is so much fun! 

Use good old potatoes to carve/cut designs you use for stamping on your projects. To learn more about all the details hop over to Craft Stamper's blog!

The arrows were stamped with a potatoe too, but I used the same half of the potatoe to create the black dotted circles afterwards. So there are just these two stamps I can show you.

It was a lot of fun and reminded me of happy childhood creations too.

I used DecoArt Americana acrylic colours to do the stamping and I love that with some spots you can see the texture created by the potatoe starch that blended with the colours during the printing process.

To add some detail and depth I also used black, orange and green watercolour pencils and a fine detail brush to accent some of the stamped shapes and create a border.

I hope you like my PP (= Potatoe Project) and take a look at all the other amazing inspiration the Take It Make It DT has created for you!!! Check out what prize there is to win and don't miss the chance to see your winning project published in one of Craft Stamper's issues!

Hugs and happy crafting,
Claudia x

Heavy Metal Steampunk - the May Challenge over at SASPC

Servus and welcome back to my creative spot! I am so glad that you stop by and hope that you will leave my place inspired and motivated to join our Steampunk Challenge this month!

As always the 1st of the month is Double Feature Challenge Day with my place, remember? The new challenge over at Our Creative Corner is up too and you can find my DT project/inspiration and all information about the challenge theme by scrolling to the previous post.

But now it's time for introducing the new challenge theme over at SASPC (short for Sandee&Amelie's Steampunk Challenges *lol)! This month we want to see

"Heavy Metal"

.

We want you to use metal with your mixed media pieces, tags and cards or create the look of metal (or even take the theme literally). Think of the use of metal embellishments, about creating faux metal effects from paper, about heat embossing, creating patinas, rust, or simply enjoying the shine of pure metal used on your make.....the possibilities of interpretation are almost endless.
To learn more about details and challenge rules hop over to our challenge blog! I would love to see you play with us this month!

I had an aluminium sheet that had been lying around for ages in my studio and decided to use this for my DT creation for the May challenge. As I recently stumbled upon some awesome tin-types and fell in love with their look I wanted to try create a look that has some of that aged feel to it that I find so capturing with the tin-types. 

As it is very difficult to photograph the metal tag so you can see the shine of the metal AND the images I stamped to it, I hope I succeeded at least a bit in showing you both...in separate pictures.

I used a Darkroom Door background photo stamp and the gentleman and handle are from a Wendy Vecchi stamp set I recently won at a challenge. Before I stamped my background and images I gave the aluminium some colour washes of heavily diluted acrylic colours which I heat dried so they were almost "burnt" onto the surface. 

The handle was stamped onto a separate piece of aluminium and cut out. Then I fixed it to the main plate with two brads. 

The frame around the gentleman is one of my recent fleamarket finds. The band with the "Victorian in nature" is aluminium too, which I fixed with two brads after drilling two tiny holes using my Dremel. 

The handle with the steampunk banner on it was fixed the same way and given some light dabs of gilding wax afterwards for a more aged and patina look. 

Except the lace at the top and the ribbon at the bottom of my metal panel everything else is metal. I love that the stamped image is faded with some areas! 

I think in this picture you can see the metal best! Who would believe that it started all with a shiny new aluminium sheet?!

I hope you like it! My wonderful teamies from SASPC have prepared a lot of metal inspiration for you! You will find all kinds of "metal" - from faux metal effects created with card and/or paper to heavily used metal embellishments and more!

Hope to see you over there and that you give my teamies blogs a visit too!


Hugs and happy crafting,

Claudia x

I enter this project to Simon Says' Wednesday Challenges - "Anything Goes" and to Vintage Stamping Challenges' "Anything Goes" challenge too.And there's a new challenge blog in town - "Crafting At The Weekend" - where their very first challenge theme is an "Anything Goes" as well.

Let's Get Scrappy Again - Our Creative Corner's May Challenge

Servus and welcome back to my creative little corner East of the wonderful Alps ;)
Art journaling time again....and time to show you my make for the May challenge at Our Creative Corner!

I was very happy that after Linda's challenge "Let's Get Scrappy" was cancelled in March due to some general issues that needed to be fixed and the break, we now were asked to use our hoarded and beloved scraps again and redo that wonderful challenge! And in my case it led to this art journal page!

Linda says: "use your scraps and left overs from previous projects, pieces of paper, scraps of ribbon, embellishments made and never used.  If you are like me and can't bear to discard all those yummy scraps, you'll have a variety of possibilities to use for this project.  Let's put some of them to use!"


And a variety of possibilities to choose from I had! I finally decided, while cleaning up my studio and re-organizing that lovely watchmakers cabinet I got for X-mas, that I wanted to use the fallen off watch glass labels and tiny pieces of wrapping papers I had collected (because I simply couldn't throw them away...you know what I am talking about, don't you?).

You can see the labels on the watch glasses? When I received the cabinet I took out all the glasses and stuff and dusted off all the drawers...finding a lot of crumpled paper pieces in those tiny compartments that were stuffed in to protect the watch glasses edges. First I put them aside to throw them away, but then....well, I guess I am not alone with being a scrap hoarder *lol

May also is a special month over at Our Creative Corner as wonderful Laura celebrates her first anniversary as the blog owner! There will be a lot of birthday specials and even an additional special surprise give away! Please make sure that you don't miss any of it and of the information over at our challenge blog!

As you can see I used some of the round labels, but there were also oval and square ones that looked a bit like tiny letter stamps - all of them with numbers on them that maybe indicate the size of diameter, thickness or watch series they were made for...as I am no watchmaker I honestly don't know for sure what the numbers stand for. ;) But I love this feeling that there is a "code" on them that I cannot decipher. A bit of mystery....oooooh!

I also used scraps of a magazine page I used on a previous project. The issue I tore the scraps from dates back to 1938 and is all about literature, book recommendations, reviews and latest publications.

For more depth and texture I added some stamping - using the fab Tim Holtz stamps from the "classics #6" set. The fab numbers stamp is from Ditzie Designs.

I also used black and white watercolour pencils to draw circles and activate the pigment with a water loaded brush. Oh, and with some spots I used the pink watercolour pencil too.

I especially love the colour of that bleached red paper scrap! As soon as I had glued it to create my background I had a clue for a colour scheme. So I was very happy that with some of the magazine scraps there was this red print too!

I loved glueing all the various scraps with the bleached and aged paper tones, the blues and reds to the page and it was exciting and surprising even for me to see how a certain colour scheme and design started to form by only preparing the background doing all the collaging!

My quote was printed on heavy printer paper, glued to the stamped and collaged page and blended in by shading the edges with Distress markers (and smudging the outlines with my fingertip).

I really think that "scrap" often is the wrong word for left overs and found or forgotten things....as they all are evidence of some action or event they were involved in. By taking a closer look at those scraps, touching them, finding traces of time and usage, we can do a little "timetravel" - not with precise ideas of what it is that we see, but with that hint of incidences or meaning that these scraps once were part of.

I hope you like my journal page and will have a lot of fun using some of your own scraps to turn them into something new and give them a new purpose! Can't wait to see what you will enter to Linda's challenge!

There's a prize to win too - this month sponsored by Crafty Individuals! Yay! So what are you waiting for! Hop over to Our Creative Corner to learn more about challenge details and also see the fab inspiration my team mates created for you!

Lovely Susi froebelsternchen told me my page would also fit the actual "Circles" theme over at Art Journal Journey - so thank you for the hint, Susi! Of course I enter my page gladly to your wonderful art journalling collection over there! 
I also enter it to Simon Says' Wednesday Challenges, where "Anything Goes" this time and to Vintage Stamping Challenges - "Anything Goes" challenge as well.
And last but not least: the very first challenge over at the new "Crafting At The Weekend" challenge blog, where they start with an "Anything Goes" challenge too. 

Hugs and happy crafting,

Claudia xx