A vintage romance...

Hello Friends!

I hope the winter weather is treating you well!  We have had numerous snowstorms over the last couple of weeks,  leaving us with plenty of beautiful white snow everywhere.  New England is a beautiful place to be in the winter!  (Especially if you have a wonderful hubby who takes care of all of the snow moving duties!)

My favorite snow day activity is to hole up in my craft room with multiple cups of tea, NCIS reruns, and an inky painty project!  Here is my most recent make, a romantic Valentine's Day Banner:

I feel the need to apologize for the photos. (I pretty much always feel the need to apologize for my photos.  Maybe I should add a permanent apology to my blog heading?)  I try really hard to use natural lighting, but at this time of year, there's not much natural light available, especially with 15 inches of snow covering my skylights! Please excuse the dark shadows cast by my flash.

My central item is an altered doily, left over from Christmas.  I used several layers of Distress Paints, and Distress Inks to take it from red to pink, As I was playing with it, I realized that it could be folded into a heart shape!  I included a wedding photo of my parents, layered, distressed and stitched onto cardstock, along with a layered ticket and some hearts cut with my Silver Bullet cutter from That's Scrap, Inc., and distressed with my T.H. Tonic edge distresser and Distress Inks. 

I made four mini bouquets with reclaimed paper flowers (they were part of an Ugly with a capitol U shadow box from the thrift store), a rosette cut with my Silver Bullet, and Distress inks and stains.   I threaded the stems through a hole pierced through the corks of the altered mini apothecary bottles.

It took layers and layers of Distress Paints and Inks,alcohol inks, and Rock Candy Distress Crackle Paint to get these to look the way I wanted. 

As a final step, I inked up a Tim Holtz scroll stamp with Tree Bark Archival and rolled each bottle carefully across the stamp. 

Distress died seam binding was tied around the necks of the bottles.  After tying the bottles with a long length of Distress Inked bakers' twine, I tied on little flags of seam binding, and ribbon scraps which were, of course, inked with Distress Ink. 

I used lots of different brown Distress products on this project, including Tea Dye, Tree Branch, Brushed Corduroy and Walnut Stain.  The pinks I used are Spun Sugar, Victorian Velvet and Tattered Rose. 

I am happy to be playing along in the Frilly and Funkie Be My Valen-twine challenge, and the Try It On Tuesday Add a Photo Challenge.

 I am also entering the A Vintage Journey It's Time to Play Tic-Tac-Toe challenge.  I used paint, ephemera and die cuts for three across. 

As always, thanks for stopping by, and have a wonderful day!

Elizabeth