Fragile Paper Challenge from Paper Artsy

I love the challenge that Leandra at Paper Artsy has set using fragile papers.  I love old books, and now that I am getting into mixed media, I'm delighted to see I can incorporate them here.  I am also an incurable romantic of the Victorian and older history stripe....I love ruffles, lace, doilies, all things delicate, ruches, or both.  Though I imagine most people who actually know me would never guess that, lol!

For this challenge, I decided to Walk on the Frilly Side, and imagine that I have found an old framed photograph in an attic trunk in my wonderful  (imaginary) Victorian townhouse, wherever it might be....London, San Francisco, Paris, Prague.  That is the great thing about imaginary doings - I can magically transport it to wherever I want - even that beautiful winter palace in Dr. Zhivago (can you tell it is cold here at the moment?!)



I wanted to use the woman's portrait stamp from the Lynne Perella 017 Collection as she fits my story.  The image also fits within the aperture of the Tim Holtz Ornate Frame die, hooray, so that I could cut the frame from chipboard to give it some depth.  The oval shape gave me my direction of using roundish things, and I turned to my growing doily die collection, using here some Cheery Lynn dies as well as some pre-cut Bo-Bunny doilies I found in my stash.

I also knew that I wanted to use some fabric (Symphony from the Eclectic Elements collection by Tim Holtz), and thought it might be fun to die it with coffee, per Lynne Moncrieff's tutorial.  You can see the difference above.

I also did this with a dictionary page and an older book page.  Forgot to take pictures but you can see here what they look like.  I think this also reflects some spraying with the brown family of distress stains, like antique linen, frayed burlap, and brushed corduroy.

I decided to work directly in my journal, unlike my last project.  So I put gesso on a page and applied distress stains, again in the brown/grunge family.

really liked it..... until it dried.

Hmmm....time for paints in the brown family, applied by dabbing with a crunched up paper towel (these are actually made for car mechanics - so pretty tough!) Much better!  Might actually bye the leather cover of my attic trunk :-)

I wanted a fabric ruffle from my coffee-stained fabric, so basted one together.

And also want some bling - my inner crow cried out for this despite the vintage theme, so I sprayed some tissue paper with a Prima Bloom metallic spray for the bling, and Vintage Photo distress spray to knock it back to a vintage feel.

Time to construct, using the frame aperture cutout as a guide for where the image would fall.

I tried the stamp on glossy and also on specialty paper, but after applying Rock Candy clear distress crackle as the "glass" and distress stain to age it and show the crackling, did not like the reaction at all on either paper.

So ended up using regular card with much better results, and forwent the aging stain process.  The frame is coated with Art Basics Copper Crackling medium (Finnabair for Prima).

As I had to paste the new image over the old, having already secured everything, I embellished the frame with Hot Cocoa Liquid Pearls to hide the gap - I did not do a great job of trimming the top image due to my hand cast.  I added a sentiment on a Curved Banner, and then masked off the portrait and the gold tissue to sling some dilute gesso about.  Here is the final page.  Thanks so much for visiting, and comments most welcome!

 I am also posting this at Brenda's non-challenge Visual Journey for sharing art journaling.  Great inspiration for this mixed media novice!