Steampunk electric guitar

I recently attended my husbands end of year office functon and at the end of the evening we were invited to choose a gift sitting under the tree... there were tiny ones, large ones, and strange shaped ones...

I chose the strange shaped one... it was a kids electric guitar... truth be told... the gifts were all kids games or toys, two of the guys got mini helecopters... imagine what the office was like the next week?

I imediately knew that I was going to steampunk it!  The question was... HOW?

First, I took it appart, well only sort of, as in, I took off the white plate and added black grit paste through an Antonis Tzanidakis stencil and let that dry before later spraying it with black spray paint.  I replaced the stencil over the grit paste and rubbed some Treasure Brass over it so that I did not get any on the base plate, only where the grit paste was.  This worked a treat!

While the spray paint was out, I sprayed the rest of the guitar black too! 

I got out my Tim Holtz gears dies (yes, I have 2 sets of  Tim's Gearhead thinlets set of dies and a ton of other brands too, because one can never have too many cog dies!)and chomped up a whole A4 piece of black cardstock with them.

They then got glued to the base of the guitar with Tim's Distress Collage Medium - Matt.

When this had dried, I rubbed Treasure Brass over the whole guitar.

Using glossy accents I attached the Mitform Castings items from my stash as well as other things made with polyurethane in Finnabair molds, also sprayed black and rubbed with Treasure Brass.

After the glue was dry, I added some drop shaddows round the dimentional objects with black acrylic paint to make them stand out from the background.

I put the whole thing back together and glued on some silver gears from my stash to finish it off and make a visual link with the silver screws of the plate thing.

Vintage, Steampunk giant Christmas Baubles

I decided that I wanted giant Christmas baubles on my tree in the garden... so off I went to purchase some pollystirene balls to decorate myself... The shop only had 5... I have a big tree... 5 wouldn't do!  Luckily I found some affordable ones ready made and purchased those for my outside tree...

Which left me with 5 balls to be decorated any way I wanted... no longer restricted by weather...

Let the fun begin!

I decided on the vintage look...

I got out my various books baught at markets, hoarded from my childhood or raided from my mother's clean outs... and set about finding 5 very different papers to tear up.

I started with my school hymn book and Tim Holtz Distress Collage Medium - Vintage.  This stuff has two advantages... one: it gives the paper an instant aged look in one step and two... you can see where you have put the stuff!  What a pleasure!

In the photo above of normal book paper, you can see the new piece has been placed on the bottom layer of Collage medium, ready to have its top layer applied.  Thats how you roll... bottom layer on ball, place paper, add top layer and repeat till you have covered the whole ball.

 Here are all the balls finished with their different papers... ready for decoration!  I used half a jar on these 5 x 12cm diameter balls. 

 I started with some die cuts which I adhered using the matt Distress Collage medium.  This works great with the fiddly writing of the Christmas Ribbon die as seen below where I placed a black die cut off set below the red one to create a shaddow.

I went on a trip to Poland and visited a shop called Paper Concept, there I found these Babule Hangers... they come in lots of sizes. 

 I could not decide between traditional Christmas style for these baubles... or Steampunk... In the end... I went with both!  So they have a vintage Christmas look with a subtle hint of steampunk... some more subtle than others!

As I worked through the day, each bauble took on a life of its own, depending on what I found as I shopped my stash.

 This technique was done using matt collage medium over the Merry christmas die and then rubbed walnut stain distress crayon over it.  What an awesome vintage look.

 At the moment, they are all haning on my vintage suitcase tree... my storage solution in my lounge... each case has various art/steampunk materials stored in it!  The best of both worlds.... suits my vintage penchant and holds all my stash!

Here are the (police file style) close ups of  each ball... front, back and top...

  The Noel die cut was run through the rivits folder and then I rubbed blacksoot distress paint into the hollows and rubbed the excess off again as per Tim's technique called Painted Industrial on page 46 in his Compendium of Curiosities book, Volume 3.

 These were real clock parts found at a vintage market in Berlin

 The Pinecones were made using the Tattered Pinecone die.

I added a drop shaddow to the letters with a permanent fineliner and the white "shine" dots with a posca pen, this then started me on the white accents for this particular bauble...as I said... they took on a life of their own as I worked.

 I drilled a hole in the top of the wishbone using Tim's tool to hang it from the chain.

 To go with the wishbone, I aged a ticket with Ground Espresso Distress ink after crunching it up in my hand so that the distress ink caught the creases.

 I decided that "less is More" for the bauble below, I rather liked its simplicity.

The copper paper is rather hard to photograph, it is quite shiny in real life...

 The bauble hanger was coloured with copper alcohol ink to match the metal embelishments.

The various dies I used were:  Vintage Noel, Christmas Ribbon, Holly Branch, Festive Greenery and Holiday greens all adhered with hot glue.  The metal embelishments were adhered with Glossy accents.

Steampunk Finnabair Canvas with Mitform Castings metal embellishments

I recently won a parcel of Mitform Castings metal embellishments on an Instagram post.  So I have been plotting to create a project worthy of their use!  You know what it is like when you have something precious... You keep it for THAT special project that never comes around...

To avoid these delicious metal pieces from forever living in a box I created a canvas just for them!

I had also recently been to a craft expo here in Berlin and purchased some Antonis Tzanidakis stencils and wanted to use them too... they were all shiny and new... still in their packaging!

Coming from South Africa where post is not the most reliable way to receive anything (think affirmative shopping)  ie Theft...  Online shopping is not a thing...

Having recently moved to Europe, I can now shop on line and know that the stuff will arrive in one piece and on time!  So I had purchased the Finnabair moulds with the wings and the cogs last month and needed to use those too...

With all these exciting new "toys"  I spent the day in my studio yesterday blissfully creating away!

My inspiration was this project found on Pinterest by Antonis Tzanidakis:  I loved his colour usage here


Here is my project:


I started with a black canvas 30x40cm and stenciled the design in the background with Wendy Vecchi texture paste in black.  When this was dry, I set about designing my layers of Mitform Castings metal embelishments and the Finn items I had moulded with poly urethane.

Once I was happy with my design, I glued it all down and sprayed the whole canvas black with matt black spray paint... I like this option as it does not leave brush marks and gets into and under all the the grooves of the various layers.

I took out the Finn paint sets for rust and Patina effect pastes as well as her Ginger Magic Sparks acrylic paint.  For some deeper colours, I used some normal acrylic paint in Indian red oxide, burnt siena, umber and black.

Above, you can see the first layer of burnt siena ... then I got engrossed in my project and forgot to take photos!

In the photo above you can see the turquoise is quite bright so I knocked it back a bit and added the sparks on the gold rust areas.


Finally I added some ginger sparks to some of the stencil work in the background to link the two as well as some turquoise in the metal embellishments and behind the objects, also as a way to join the foreground and background.

Frayed burlap distress oxide spray is addictive

I am totally in love with Frayed Burlap Distress Oxide Spray! (FBDOS) for future reference...

I sprayed a ton of things with this stuff and it gives such amazing results each time!

Below you see the finished tags, sprayed at the same time, on the same day next to each other on my craft sheet and they have a very different look.

I started with Finn's crackle paste through Tim's stencils and let that dry overnight.

I then sprayed them with FBDOS and added a spritz of water.

 You can see here how different they each are, the one below had far more blue on it when it dried.

I used my Dymo for the wording.

Decided on a wishbone for birthday wishes...

I drilled a hole using Tim's drill, seen above so that I could put a jump ring through it as seen below.

After adding Ground Espresso distress ink to the tags as well as some metal embellies and tissue tape with some stamped die cuts, I called them finished!

To make this tag more "girly"  I added some Finn Opal magic wax