Inspired by Alison - Alice and George!

This week on the Paper Artsy blog, the inspiring Alison Bomber aka 'Butterfly' of Words and Pictures has created some absolutely amazing projects - her dolly street just has to be seen to be believed: inventive, playful and original - a tour de force! I would love to have made something inspired by this... but I had to make cards! Now, like a lot of crafters, my crafting journey began with a few handmade cards and I so loved being creative I wanted to branch out. Now cards just don't seem to provide the challenge they did and I have to confess to putting off making them sometimes; but people do ask for a handmade card from time to time and I want to make them special, if I can, for that person. This month it's my dear Auntie Rene's eighty-sixth birthday and as well as wanting to make her a card from me, my mum asked if I would make one from her too! I set myself the challenge of exploring some new techniques courtesy of Alison and creating two cards that would be just right for Rene! And thanks to Alison's wonderful ideas and a desire to create special cards for a special auntie I really enjoyed myself!
A while back while sorting out my mum's house I came across two lovely old photos of a couple who turned out to be my Great-Great Grandparents. Auntie Rene, thanks to her interest in family research, has been able to put names to this couple and provide me with information about them. I needed to make 2 cards - that suggested a matching pair!

 I wanted each card to tell a little story. Oh, yes and the parrot feather in the middle! My hubby found this in the street the other day! It just had to feature, as my Great Grandfather, Percy, the son of this couple, had a beloved parrot. He was often to be seen walking around Peckham with Polly on his shoulder! All my mother's family including Aunty Rene have loved gardens and wild life! I wondered if they inherited this from my Great Great Grandfather, George Allen Payne whose card I began to create first.

For the backgrounds of both cards, I used an Ink and the Dog stamp from the Letters plate. I stamped this in Wendy Vecchi Archival ink, Cornflower Blue on a background sponged with Mermaid, Ice Blue and Lake Wanaka Frescos. George came from a little village near Abingdon called Milton. He loved music and he was a good student at the village school. He played the violin, but his great love was the church organ and when he was old enough to leave school, he was apprenticed to an organ builder in Lambeth by the name of Hunter. I tried to create the countryside origins of my Great Grandfather and his love of music by using the Hot Picks stamp with a dragon fly, the little birds in the grasses, musical notes and then a butterfly just landed above the photo, snipped from an Ink and the Dog Wings plate. For this I used Alison's technique of blending two different colours of ink in the stamping - in this case Potting Soil and Cornflower Blue - both by Wendy Vecchi - and clear embossing. I used a Tim Holtz stamp on a blended Cinnamon Fresco and Snowflake wash with some Lake Wanaka and a little Cornflower Blue for the background: it just seemed to fit with this studio photo of George that I transferred onto yellow cotton. Another technique I lifted from Alison's 'Wings' canvas is the button covered with stamped tissue and glazed with Metallic Glaze.

This is Alice, George's wife. All Rene could tell me about her was that she was the sister of Mr Hunter, George's employer. The Hunters would have been quite well-to-do yet Alice and George, the simple country lad, married.  I don't know if it was Alison's use of those lovely Paper Artsy feathers on her canvas - I now so want this stamp - but I knew I wanted to use the Paper Artsy Mini feather on her card and as I worked a Natural History theme seemed to form itself. I  would like to have used all Ink and the Dog stamps as Alison did, but I didn't have enough of these so I used Tim Holtz and Artistic Outpost stamps and a collaged bird's egg.  I would so love to own more 'Ink and the Dog' stamps - maybe Christmas? As I explained on my WOYWW a little story about this couple suggested itself. I imagined the Lambeth lady captivated by this simple country boy with his tales of finding nests of speckled eggs, hearing music in birdsong and watching the flight of dragon flies and butterflies. 

 Alison had used text as a background for her canvas. I took just a small torn piece of text from Alice in Wonderland with a wash of Cinnamon. For dimension I curled the edges of my torn pages and accented them with different Treasure Golds. You can just see the words, 'Said Alice' under the Hot Picks flowers stamped in Cornflower and accented with a pearl at the centre.

Although my projects are nothing like Alison's journal, canvas or street, I feel that her ideas have helped my imagination take flight and inspired me to create something that I hope will appeal to my much loved Auntie. Thank you, Alison and Paper Artsy for some great inspiration this week!