August Vintage Waltz with Waltzingmouse Stamps

The monthly installment of the Waltzingmouse Blog Waltz is on! Thanks for stopping by! This time the theme is Vintage/Shabby Chic. If you heard a loud groan across the ocean, Lisa & Claire, that was me! Most of the time when people ask me what I do outside of work, I will say paper crafting (signs I'm an addict, since my default answer use to be knitting and crocheting - for my paper crafting friends that read this blog, i hear you snickering and grinning shameless-ly. Shame on you!). The conversation usually stops there, but then in some cases the conversation continues: "Oh lovely, what is your style?" ::dead silence::

I generally glue a bunch of things together and it comes out somewhere between clean & simple, sometimes even with a touch of cute & whimsy. I definitely cannot wrap my head around shabby, and only recently did I try to ink up my card stock or tag edges to create a "light vintage" look - but that too still makes me head hurt. These styles are not intuitive to me.

I read "Vintage Chic" and out came "Whimsy Vintage Chic" (if that even exists) --read on to see how it morphed to this:


Stamps: Very Vintage Labels No. 10 (Waltzingmouse Stamps), Victorian Fripperie (Waltzingmouse Stamps), jammybella (Stamping Bella)
Paper: Paper Basics Card Stock - White (Papertrey Ink), Basic Card Stock - White (Recollections), Vellum (?), Pattern Paper - Gray (Memory Box)
Ink: Pigment Ink - Black (Colorbox), Pigment Ink - Gold (Recollections), Brilliance - Black Graphite (Tsukineko), Vintage Touch - Chamomile, Chai (Papertrey Ink)
Embellishments: Rhinestone Stickers (Recollections), Nestabilities - Fancy Tags, Labels Ten (Spellbinders), Double-ended Art Markers - Mulberry, Pink, Warm Grey 50%, Warm Grey 30% (Prismacolor)

Claire has loads of stamps with Vintage in the name, so choosing one of those must be a good first step. Since I was playing with the Label Tens for a previous card, they reminded me of Waltzingmouse's Very Vintage Labels No. 10 -- the first obvious stash choice.  And I have had this obsession that some of the stamps look like mirrors.

Gold and Tans seem to be Vintage 101 elements.  And my newly acquired Fancy Tags also helped as an anchor point for the mirror. The best part was that my Papertrey Ink purchase at CHA could not have been timed better: the Tea Dye Duo set came in super handy to make the card look vintage-y.

The mirror was cut out very carefully using an exacto blade and got a quick outline with a golden sparkly gel pen. This seems to accentuates the gorgeous designs of the mirror frame, and thus a fancy mirror was born. Now for something mirror-worthy to frame ...

jammybella without her jammy pants was perfect to stick into elaborate mirror. With her arms off to the side, and her self-confident expression - perfect for someone who would ask herself "Mirror Mirror on the Wall, Who is the Fairest of them all?" Don't you think? ;) No one needs to know that she has a teddy bear in her other hand and really cute girly jammy pants ...

jammybella is stamped on Vellum, since the sheer texture was mirror-like. I tried to add "smoke" around her since I didn't want her to seem like she was mid-air floating without legs. Too hard to tell from the picture, but the vellum was also backed with a piece of cream card stock that was partially vintaged with Chamomile to add depth.



Lastly, Chic means Bling, right? ;) I actually decided to give jammybella her pink top and add the pink bling (a dissected flower) around the mirror, because of the hint of pink traces in the gray pattern paper.

The sentiment is unfortunately hand-written, since I didn't have the energy to go  set up the printer. I mimicked Claire's Victorian Alphabet font the best I could. Victorian is after all vintage-y, right?

Well I hope this shed some light on how I pushed the boundaries to come up with something vintage chic. Does it work? Is the bright pink and the vintage paradoxical?

So those that have peeked over here for a while, I'd love to hear what kind of style you would categorize my work. Or is it too early to tell?