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.