Witch Myrtle's Favourite Travel Case

Hello, dear readers and followers old and new,

welcome back to my tiny spot! I am so glad that you stopped by again (or even for the very fist time!) and I am ever so thankful for all the lovely comments you leave with me. They really mean a lot to me and I know I have been MIA for quite some time now (due to our long school holidays and all the preparations for my son's start at the new school directly after returning home - gosh, they grow up sooo fast!) I hope you forgive me that I have just started to try catching up with visiting your blogs and leaving some lines there.

Today I want to share my first Halloween make with you. I made it on the first day with enough spare time to sit at my workdesk and although I had planned to do something "quick and easy" it turned out as a whole day's project in the end ;)

Last Halloween you met the three witches Amealia, Prudence and Porticia who live together in a flat sharing community. They had some problems when you saw them the last time, but those luckily seem to have been fixed shortly afterwards. ;)

Well, they have a very dear friend, Myrtle Twizzlethwaite, who is one of the youngsters among the witches' community.  Young witches often get used special items from their witch ancestors. So did Myrtle. She got her Grandma's Travel Case - a very practical item, even though it is not as modern as the tiny Witches' Emergency Kit I showed you last autumn. But it provides a lot of space for travel equipment and therefore Myrtle is using it very often and with pride.

Myrtle's Grandma became very forgetful and absent-minded during her last years - so she put on the "Poison" stickers as a reminder of the dangerous load the travel case carried then. A lot of the labels on the travel case are remnants of Myrtle's Grandma's great times as a highly notable witch...which makes the travel case even more precious to Myrtle.


And maybe you have already spotted Archie, Myrtle's Hercules guard beetle in there.

Every witch has an animal partner with her - some love to have ravens by their sides, some love the company of snakes and lately some have started choosing small creatures like mice, rats and even beetles or spiders (which some of the old fashioned witches think is humbug and just a short-lived fashion).

But Archie has already proven very useful, as he drives off  pickpockets by his rather ghastly sting (which is extremely hurtful and makes a victim puke for four days).








Archie always guards Myrtle's Spellbook, which is the most important thing a witch owns.

Myrtle also carries a crib with her, as she still is not too firm with some of the spells.

As you can see she has been using it quite a lot and has also added a lot of handwritten notes to it during her first years as a graduated witch.




One of the compartments holds a pencil and some stamps, as Myrtle loves to travel and write postcards to her friends and family from all over the world.




The tiny metal tin once held a dangerous poison but now holds Myrtle's earplugs, as she is a very light sleeper.

But the most important things Myrtle carries with her are her tiny bottles with spells ingredients - from simple ocean salt over glowing termites, poisonous spider bones, ancient scarab's shine, hornet's sting, bristles and wings to concentrated pumpkin crystals.

The "Happy Haunting" pennant on the case's handle is a memory of Myrtle's very first studies trip to "Blocksberg Manor", THE meeting point and seminar hotel with the best sorted library of the world.




 With this project I'd love to enter Frilly and Funkie's "Anything Goes" challenge.

I leave you with some more close-ups and a materials list and hope that you enjoyed your visit!
Hugs and happy crafting,

die amelie - Claudia x

Materials used:

cardboard, glue, scissors, ruler, hole punch, crafting knife, cutting mat, crafting sheet,  DIs "spiced marmalade", "walnut stain", "vintage photo" and "gathered twigs", Distress paint "brushed corduroy", DecoArt Traditions Acrylic Colors, DecoArt "Weathered Wood" Crackle Medium, 7Gypsies label stickers, new Tim Holtz stamp sets "Poisonous" and "Laboratorie", alcohol inks, masking tape, MyMindsEye brad, Prima brads, stamps from Martha Stewart, archival ink "jet black", leather from an old leather rucksack, corked vials from idea-ology and Vaessen, papers from Echo Park's "Chillingsworth Manor" stash and Graphic45.

Three Halloween ATCs

When I fist saw this background paper, I knew this had to be used for a halloween project! As I usually love to do more than one ATC at a time, I made a threesome.

I cut out the ATCs and distressed the edges, which I afterwards blended with "black soot" Distress ink and a rough kitchen sponge cube. I tore strips from a page of an old book and gave them the same treatment.

Then I stamped the images of the skeletton, the crow and the Snake Oil label on them and set them aside to dry.

In the meantime I stamped the quotes (from My Mind's Eye and Martha Stewart) onto lilac cardstock with embossing ink, covered them with black "Sternenstaub" embossing powder and heated them. The finished quotes were cut out, the edges distressed and again treated with "black soot".

To add some depth, I stamped images of a pumpkin (My Mind's Eye), a skull ((My Mind's Eye) and a raven (Tim Holtz) onto the background as well as a text-border from the Martha Stewart Halloween stamp set.

I covered small brads with lilac nail polish and added some orange glitter flakes as embellishments with a "bling". Book page strips and quotes were glued onto the background, brads fixed. Done!

Hope, you like them! (Maybe you wanna trade? ;)


Hugs,
die amelie x

Here are some close-ups as usual:

I am going to enter the City Crafter Challenge blog's challenge "An Early Boo" with these.

Emergency kit for Witches

Inspired by Laura Carson's lovely projects on her Arfully Musing blog, I just HAD TO create this altered Altoid's tin box modelled on her gorgeous apothecary! (click the link to see her awesome stuff!)

As I love to write, draw and try to produce most of the afforded stuff myself, I did not use lots of collage sheet scraps or bought embellishments, but thanks to those awesome friendly people out there in the web, I found some wonderful spooky freebies, which were very inspiring and useful!!! Thank you so much at this point!

So behold, honourable witches and sorceresses, our fabulous apothecary: "The practical Witches' Companion"!
Very helpful for witches, who love to travel and have the most essential ingredients and tools with them. A handy accessory for the resourceful, modern mobile witch! To provide full safety, the "Companion" can be locked (key and lock included in delivery)!
It usually comes with three ingredients, safely bottled in carefully corked, reusable glass vials. According to the witch's individual magic preferences, various combinations of ingredients are available. "Teeth of Wolves", "Muddled Mummy", "Spider Venom", "Devil's hair" and "Eye of Newt" to name only a few. Your witchcraft's success is our goal!

The shown version contains the ingredients "Wool of Bat", "Toe of Frog" and snake's "Venom", our top seller in the popular "Webbed Potions" design.

Once you open the outer cover, which is held in place by delicate metal fittings and a pure leather string, the list of contents on the left, the key and the lid of the travel box come to the fore.

After unlocking the light aluminium travel container, you can easily open the lid, which on its'inside shows a lovely group portrait of the honourable company's foundresses, the "Southwick Witches". On the right - as you can see - the vials are safely held in place, perfectly designed to fit.

The official "Wicked Seal of Approval" on the back guarantees 100 % quality of contents and materials used in our products!

We are looking forward to count you among our satisfied customers!

I entered the challenges from Try it on Tuesday , Fashionable Stamping Challenges , Pin And Tack and Anything But a Card with this project.

Products and techniques used:
Ranger distress inks "rusty hinge" and "vintage photo", Ranger embossing ink, blending tool, black fine tip marker, AAI "rust" and "sunset", embossing powder "copper", heat tool, some halloween print out freebies (labels and witch-photograph), papers from "The Timeless Type Stack" and BoBunny's "et cetera" collection, leather cord, two old pieces of jewelry, stamps from Tim Holtz ("Witch Hazel"), My Mind's Eye (Lost&Found Halloween), flonzcraft (frame) and Prima's "Printery" stamp set, black felting wool, air drying clay, felt tip pens, green acrilyc paint, brush, glue, scissors, Altoid's box, thick cardboard,  white card, an old key, three corks and three glass vials from my friend's lab.

"Bad Moon Rising"

According to the challenge from Haunted Design House, "Bad Moon Rising", I made this card, which I would like to enter.
I also enter this project to the challenge at Inspiration Avenue
"Doorways and Windows".

The "bad moon rising" topic immediately evoked a picture in my imagination, even the story of an unsuccessful poor writer, staying in a quite dangerous neighbourhood due to his latest mission for the newspaper he is working for... strange things have occured during the last days and his mind is filled with fear and worry. He yet cannot grab exactly what has been going on here lately, but he is sure and can feel it down to his bones: it is something profoundly evil....

I wanted to show his writing desk with his typewriter on, being lit by the light of a "bad moon rising". Some red stains (could this be blood?!!) on the pale white of the table tell a story of horror and crime. As I am a huge fan of Crime Noir Comic Art, I wanted to make it look a little like that genre. So I needed pure white on a black surface. White stamping, painting or embossing would not deliver the results I had in mind, so I decided to cut out the shapes of white and black cardstock.

But first I created the "sight" through the window, which was going to be the inside of the card and be seen through a cut out window on the front. I lightly sprayed some white card with Glimmer Mist "Moonlight" (how suitable *gg), then stamped the image of a skull with embossing ink from Ranger and embossed with clear embossing powder. Only now I started to ink a pale blue-greenish moon, using a circle mask I cut from card, using both, the circle and the "surrounding" as masks - one for the moon and the other for the dark sky, which I inked with a rougher kitchen sponge to get some texture with distress inks "pumice stone" , "broken china" and darker blue stamping colour. I finished the background with a layer of black stamping ink "clouds". Then I stamped the house from my beloved Martha Stewart Halloween stamp set, in "Graphite Black" archival ink from Tsunekiko. It should be a spooky house on a dangerous spooky cliff, but I had no stamp for this, so I cut out a cliff-shape from a foam rubber mat and used that for a stamp, which worked out better than I had expected. Some additional bat silhouettes in front of the bad moon - done!


On the front cover I did some embossing with clear embossing powder, which I love as a textureal effect especially on black or dark grey card! The white areas had to be planned very thoroughly to match the window opening and the position of the bad moon. I stamped the tipewriter onto white card and after having decided about it's exact position, I marked the lines of the shadows with pencil and ruler, to match the moon's position and the lit areas on the window cross. The tipewriter and "desk" was glued onto the black card in one piece. At last I added a black velvet self-adhesive ribbon on the inside of the card, because the back of the front looked quite boring and missed some texture, but not too much not to detract from the main scene on the right page.Voila!

Hope, you have enjoyed your visit!!!

Hugs, die amelie!