A Vintage Journey Guest Design Spot

Hi Everyone

Thank you so much for taking the time to drop in

Once again I have been very honoured to have been asked by the team to be Guest designer over at

A Vintage Journey. It is Jennie's turn from Live The Dream to host the latest challenge and the theme she has chosen is With a Flourish. Now I don't have any problem at all finding ways of using flourishes in my work as they are so perfect for subtle stamped backgrounds or as die cuts in the foreground to create a feature. I chose to create a card this time pictured below. You can find more pictures of the finished project plus a few close ups by visiting A Vintage Journey and I have given a quick tutorial below. 

Firstly I made a 6" x 6" base card from 300gsm white card stock and placed my cabinet M/S die face down centrally on the card and placing the magnetic base plate over the top to run it through (so effectively upside down to how we would normally do it) this is just so you can get it central

Next I used a piece of cut n dry to apply  picket fence distress paint to an Indigo Blu Vintage Flourish stamp and stamped randomly all over one side of the card, re applying the paint for each flourish.  I dried with a heat gun and repeated this step on the other side. I blended Shabby shutters, Tattered rose and Victorian Velvet Distress inks all over both sides of the stamped card and the distress paint resisted the ink giving a lovely soft effect, then I used the same stamp and the Victorian Velvet distress ink to stamp over again giving a darker layer of flourishes.

I die cut 3 frames for the apertures using the m/s die together with the bigz cabinet card die and painted them with pumice stone distress paint. Whilst the paint was still wet, I sprinkled pumice stone distress embossing powder over and heat embossed. I mixed some white texture paste with pumice stone paint and used it through the speckles stencil to get even more texture on the frames and give them a stone look.

I inked the edges of the frames and glued one on the front, the second on the inside left back to back with the front one and the third I glued onto a found relative card and trimmed to fit.

To get the frames lined up correctly I added glue to the back of the found relative frame, placed it directly on top of one on the inside left, and shut the card.

I die cut 4 vintage flourishes and painted with tattered rose distress paint, sprinkled distress embossing powder over as earlier but this time using a mix of pumice stone, vintage photo and antique linen. (note: as these are placed back to back, you need to do 2 on the right side, and 2 on the wrong side) the photo does not show this - schoolgirl error!





The sentiment is an adage ticket spritzed with water, screwed up tight dried opened up and inked and stamped with the sentiment on the back. The little tea roses were all made using the bigz tattered pine cone die and inked up using tattered rose, Victorian velvet and scattered straw.





A tutorial by Tim himself can be found on This link for the making up the pine cones, the roses are done in the same way but keeping them more in line on the top and curling the edges with a poky tool rather than just creasing them. If you have Tim's Compendium of curiosities book 3 the faux tea roses are on page 65.  I made a few as I could not decide how many I would use on the final layout.


The leaves were left over from my bursting flower box project and I gave a detailed how to on that post, you can find it on the link Here.

All that remained then was to put it all together, with the addition of a wishbone which I drilled a small hole into the top to take a ring pull and a small linen ribbon bow the card was complete.

There is still a whole week to enter their current challenge. In Jennie's own words, this is what she is looking for in your entries.
' Have you ever noticed that much of Tim's packaging includes that fabulous flourish? It has always been one of my favourite Tim images, so for this challenge let's see what you can do with your flourishes! You might not have the "actual" Tim flourish but I am sure everyone has a flourish die or stamp in their stash which can get the shabby/vintage treatment.

Our challenge runs for two weeks and then a winner will be chosen by the team. The winner will receive a £10 shopping voucher from our host Country View Crafts on-line shop. We shall also be choosing three blog badge winners, our "Pinworthies" who will be pinned to our special winners Pinterest Board.'

I also have the lucky winners of my atc's from my Tiny Things post picked out by my hubby Alan randomly
The winner of my arrows set is Julie  http://julizdesignpost.blogspot.co.uk/
The winner of the Butterfly/Dragonfly set is Rita http://rmgcreations.blogspot.co.uk/
Congratulations to both winners please email me your contact details so I can get them in the post to you. Thank you also to everyone for your lovely comments

I do hope I have inspired you to have a play with some of the techniques.

Mo x