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

Steampunk Christmas tags

I used 4 Snip Art laser cut tags

Tim Holtz grit paste was pushed through a Unique Hobby Products stencil which I purchased at the craft fair recently.  You can go online www.hobbyproducts.nl to see what they have.

I scraped the grit paste on thinly so that I could level it with the top of the plastic of the stencil

I did an experiment with some rusting powder on the far left tag...

Being the control freak that I am... I did not like the randomness of the rust outcome...It did not match the other 3 tags in my set...

So I painted it to match the rest of the tags using Black, Ochre, Burnt Siena and Indian Red Oxide acrylic paints

I die cut green paper with the Festive Greenery die and painted some card stock gold using Finnabair's Vintage Gold Icing paste which I then die cut with Tim's Christmas Ribbon and Vintage Noel die.  The noel got run through the rivet die and I aged it with black acrylic paint.  I also cut 25 from the Christmas Bells die and passed it through the rivet folder and aged it to match the metal embellishments.

The gorgeous steampunk metal embellishments are from Mitform Castings and I added some Burnt Siena in the steam gauge to make it stand out a bit and relate to the background too.