Decorative Blocks for Home Décor Displays - DecoArt Media Team

This was my February project for the DecoArt Media blog.

All during my teaching career I loved designing and building displays of children’s work and general classroom displays to support teaching and learning and show children their hard work was valued. This love of exhibiting special treasures has been carried through to my home where shelves, sideboards, dressers etc. around my home have continually changing displays on them. I love making projects to add to them to give that personal touch. I have a couple of small collections of children’s vintage play blocks and have bought some new wooden ones to alter as well. What I like about this type of project is that it is so easy to get some lovely distressed and aged effects in a short time and with just a few basic colours of paint.

Instructions:

Step 1: 

Take all three wooden blocks, seal them with a coat of black gesso and because I wanted a shinier look I also gave them a coat of carbon black acrylic paint.

Step 2: 

Gather the collage elements for the large block to build the theme for the display. I have gone with transport/travel.

Step 3:

Please be very careful with these layers as repeated drying with the heat gun causes the blocks to get very hot and could burn to the touch.

Layer 1. Again take all three blocks and apply a wash of raw umber and dry. This creates a subtle distressed look.

Step 4:

Layer 2. Very lightly brayer some white paint randomly over all the surfaces, leave a lot of the dark background exposed. Dry.

Step 5: 

Layer 3. Dip and dry the surfaces with titan buff and burnt umber washes. Dry.

Step : 6

Put the two smaller blocks to one side. When the larger block is cool, build the collages on all four sides with the gathered collage pieces. Keep the collages simple so as not to lose the lovely distressed look you have already achieved.

Step 7:

Take the metal embellishments (a clock and a spinner) and alter with gold paint. Then secure it to the top.

Step 8: 

Layer 4. Go back to the smaller blocks. Take a small text stamp and titan buff acrylic paint to add a small amount of words/numbers to all the sides.

I am building small collections of different colours and just love this combination.

xxx

Altered blocks for DecoArt

My DecoArt Media Team project for February is a collection of three altered wooden blocks that I made for display purposes around my home.

If you'd like to catch the creative steps for making these please pop over to the DecoArt Media blog for all the details.

xxx

A red photo block

I have an old calendar block that had a Christmas image glued onto the top of it, so I removed it and am making some photo blocks to use as photo birthday months for the family.

Process steps

Paint all the sides with your chosen colour - I mixed pyrrole red, bunt umber and a tiny amount of black.

Dip, drip and dry four of the sides with a couple of different watery washes to create some texture.

Cover one of the sides with stamped tissue paper.

Stamp a large image straight onto another side using black archival ink.

Use a snippet of stamped tissue paper, a stamp and some stencilling on the third side.

Add more random stencilling in two colours and a stamp on the fourth side.

Adhere the photos to the two blank squares and leave them to fully dry.

When dry sand the edges back to the wood, blend brown distress ink over and seal with a coat of soft touch varnish.

I've actually added four photos and got two more blank blocks to decorate and add another 6 photos to cover all the immediate family.

xxx

Wildflowers and cultivated flowers - mixed media journal page.

I went out with a friend for her birthday recently and I bought an old book of Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities. Unusually there is no printer's date in it but it was scribed by someone and dated the 7th January 1910, over a hundred years old, so now I don't want to tear it up or alter it lol.

However my friend had some books in her car ready for the charity shop and one was A Country Diary birthday book, certainly not old at all but the illustrations are all flowers and are hand painted prints so I decided to take it off her hands and have a play at using some of the gorgeous flower designs in some journal pages.

This is the first one stuck into my nature journal which already had some tissue collage paper glued on it.

To age the illustration I stamped with some text and gave it a light coat of watery gesso and distressed the torn edges.

I painted some wildflower stems .....

.... and drew round one of Tim's transparent butterflies on watercolour paper, dipped it in some pinky paint washes, glued the two together and covered the surface with glue to make it matte. I also added a crochet die border and a quote.

You'd think this would be quite quick to do but as always I overthink everything.

I am also sharing this over on the Country View Crafts project blog.

xxx

Supplies from Country View Crafts

Tim Holtz wildflowers die and crochet die

Tim Holtz stamps Nature's Wonder

Tim Holtz Transparent acetate wings

Happy Birthday 'A Vintage Journey'

Today we see AVJ celebrate its 5th Birthday. Can you believe we have been offering challenges for five years? It has been an amazing journey and adventure.

We are hoping that lots of readers will join the journey for our Birthday challenge. To do so we are asking that you include the word or any images that depict a 'journey' or even something that shows a creative journey you are on. Please tell us how your project fits the theme in your blog post and remember to create in one of our preferred styles of vintage, shabby, mixed media, art journaling, industrial, timeworn or steampunk.

 

I created this shabby piece of home decor which is going to fit in beautifully in my dining room.

I haven't included any of the process steps as a description of how I put this together will be available on the AVJ blog on the 15th March.

There is though lots of inspiration from my very dedicated and talented friends on the challenge blog so please pop over to AVJ and leave us some love for our birthday and it would be wonderful if you could find time to add a project to the line up.

Have a great new month of March.

xxx

Supplies

Tim Holtz stamps - Mercantile, air travel, dapper, purely random, vintage auto

PaperArtsy stamps - HP1802EZ

Paper Doll
Tim Holtz wooden vignette box
My candlestick was from Ikea

Visual Journal - altered book and cabinet card for AVJ

As promised my step by step of the altered book I made to start our new year of challenges is now up at A Vintage Journey. You will see how I prepared this cover and how the embellishments and finishing touches pulled the vintage collage together. To see my original post and my 'Treasure' that triggered this project for this month's challenge click here.

I have already created the first pages in this book so keep an eye here on my blog in May when I will  link to the DecoArt Mixed Media blog when the project goes live.

Thanks for being a reader and supporter of my blog, I do read all your comments and really appreciate them.

Have a great weekend and hopefully enjoy some crafting time of your own.

hugs Brenda xxx

Updated from AVJ

I began by preparing a couple of old books by painting the outside covers with gesso and adding some texture using the gesso with a palette knife when it was dry.

Having chosen the larger book and this cabinet card to use .....

..... I decided that as it was quite plain I would alter it and I found a piece of old Graphic 45 paper and cut an oval shape from it.

I had ensured there was plenty of space around the oval to fully cover the card.

I aged the centre cut by rubbing round with an emery board and blending over ground espresso DI. Then I adhered it onto the cabinet card and used a sanding block to sand away the excess patterned paper. This had then distressed the edges as well and again I blended in ground espresso DI.

I started to gather bits and snippets to make some decisions on the embellishing first. Every piece has been painted, inked and/or distressed in some way. I sealed all the card embellishments with satin varnish before they were added to the cover.

This cabinet card covers quite a bit of the front cover so I felt I needed to create a layered background with textures and neutral covers. I began with a text stencil and texture paste mixed with gesso that I heat dried and then, dribbled, dipped and spritzed my gorgeous decoart media acrylics.

 Using quinacridone magenta, titan buff and yellow oxide I dribbled and spritzed the colours to create a light mottled background.

I stamped with the same colours using a text stamp from the Andy Skinner shabby chic set.

I darkened the background by dribbling and spritzing some raw umber with titan buff and dabbled over some watery titanium white (all the time I am heat drying between each layer).

At this point I decided to seal it and used the DecoArt satin varnish. I wanted it to be very sturdy and ready to take the punishment of it being used regularly and creating and making the new journal pages. I began adding the collage elements in layers ....... getting the base parts adhered and flattened under a heavy box.

Now to add in the collage elements. I used the new clear modeling paste from DecoArt and oh boy does it have a strong bond for the card, fabric and metal pieces.

Looking at the book I felt there was something missing - contrast in the background - so I took a fine brush some quinacridone gold, paynes grey and raw umber ........ and with some dabbling of the colours around the collage elements the shading, shadowing, aging and framing has brought it together more.