Our Creative Corner - Flowers, Ribbons and Illuminations!

Hello and welcome to Magpieheaven! One of my favourite blogs is Our Creative Corner. I love to see what the Design Team come up with each month! They set such fun challenges too! This month it's to create a project using hand-made flowers and hand-dyed ribbons! I couldn't wait to join in because lately my cooker has been bubbling away with red cabbages, purple onions and avocado skins. These 'witch's' potions are very innocent compared with Macbeth's Weird Sisters' brew! I've had all manner of laces and ribbons drying. My daughter thought something nasty had crawled from out of the shower head the other day when a length of lace drying over the shower curtain flicked across her face during her morning shower! Here they are, put to use on a project for Our Creative Corner's Challenge!

I've used some Lynne Perrella stamps and a PaperArtsy mini, which resembles Gothic Script. For a long time now I've been fascinated by Medieval illuminated manuscripts and some of Lynne's designs remind me of these beautiful creations. I love all the activity that takes place in the margins: birds, flowers, animals and people become so vivid it is as if they could fly off the page into our world! I wanted to create the idea of manuscripts blossoming into life on this project.

 I decided I wanted to work with blues and browns. I was going to create flowers, but I wanted them to give the impression of parchment, vellum and ink. The ribbons in this picture were dyed with avocado to create one shade of brown and red onion skins for another. I die-cut some fabric dyed with avocado skins and some gauze. I also stamped over the fabric and the ribbon, using Stazon and the PaperArtsy mini. The lace, which I decided not to use in the final project was dyed with red cabbage. I created lots of die-cuts and shrink plastic shapes before playing around with different flower combinations!

I also got busy with the rusting powder!

This is the little house of illuminations! I bought it when I was in the Danish store, 'Tiger' with my friend, Lucy. It took several coats of Gesso then PapertArtsy Stone, Chocolate Pudding, Crackle Glaze and a nice thick coat of Nougat before those rather 1970s style shiny flowers vanished!

I created an arched window with a die-cut wrapped in a mop-up baby-wipe stamped with some PaperArtsy Mini script and touched with some Florentine Treasure Gold. The decoration at the top is a rusted 'corner'.

The flowers were created using Tim Holtz Tattered Florals with my own hand-dyed fabrics, Shrink Plastic and Smoothy Card painted with PaperArtsy Caramel, Toffee, Chocolate Pudding, Vanilla and Nougat - all very yummy colours! The Lynne Perrella images inside are coloured with Frescos and Inktense pencils.

The birds are die-cut using a TH Sizzlits decorative strip and they are painted with Antarctic and Elephant Fresco Finish paints.

Another close-up showing the manuscript flowers I created. The Fleur de Lys on this one is from Stampington's 'Clearly Impressed' 'Butterfly Girl' plate. I used a Prima Stencil of flourishes and coloured Grunge Paste onto tissue to get into those awkward little sections inside the house.- a tip I learned from Lucy Edmondson at True Colours. My rose stands in a half cotton reel covered in stamped tissue and that little resin bird also perches on a toadstool from Retro Cafe Art Gallery covered in stamped tissue.

Hand-dyed gauze, stamped with Stazon forms part of this flower.

Sorry if this is a little blurred! It's a tiny peek inside to look at a little flower with a tiny shrink plastic sun at its centre.

The feather shape is Lynne Perrella stamped onto a Tando chipboard feather shape and the text is from Sara Nauman's Eclectica range for PaperArtsy, stamped onto stacked card.

These tiny scrolls are tied with avocado dyed seam-binding.

Here is the Crackle on the outside of the house. I used that wonderful Mini again to create the impression of worn calligraphy.
Thank you so much for your patience, if you've stayed around for the whole of this rather lengthy post! I should like to enter this little house for the Our Creative Corner Challenge here.