Milling around

Hello all - Friday at last, and time for a new challenge over at Fussy and Fancy... the task for this fortnight is to make an Easel Card, but other than that it's entirely up to you.  There's lots of inspiration from my fellow Design Team members, and here's my contribution.

I'm loving autumnal crafting - though I've yet to be tempted down the Halloween path... I'm still obsessed with trees and leaves, and particularly with my new die, the Tim Holtz Decorative Strip Die called Autumn Gatherings.

I used it on this tag in pretty much the formation suggested on the packaging, but for this card I've broken it apart a bit, scattering leaves and twigs across the whole card.

And, as regular followers will spot, I've cut it out of my much loved bread wrappers!

Making the easel card was more straightforward than I'd feared.  I found this very clear tutorial at Crafty Devils Paper Craft just by doing a Google search.

A few simple folds and you're done - and I found it made sense not to stick the main square onto the base until most of the work was done... it just made it easier to get the layout arranged.

You can do all sorts of fancy stuff with the shape of your easel card - as you'll see over at Fussy and Fancy, but I thought I'd stick to the basics on my first one.

I have made this card which I loved, and which worked as an easel card - but only by chance really, not with this properly structured architecture.

I used some textured white cardstock to create the card base and main background.  It's got a nice weave in it which shows through the blended DIs of Tea Dye, Antique Linen, Frayed Burlap and Vintage Photo.



I tried to make sure that all the surfaces were inked which would end up visible, even from the back.




And I used the card leftover from cutting the Autumn Gatherings die last time around as a template to do the stencilling, inking the leaves mainly in Walnut Stain DI.







I love these stamps from Artistic Outpost - the Old Grist Mill set - they're just so full of vintage atmosphere, and seem so perfect to me with the autumn colour palette.

And the water mill, using the power of nature to create energy, is coming right back into fashion of course, with alternative energy - tapping into the power of the natural world.

For the main image I blended Sepia and Coffee Archival inks onto the stamp and stamped onto white cardstock.  For the echo, it was Coffee and Black Archivals stamped onto kraft glassine paper.




You have to heat the kraft glassine after stamping, or the ink will remain smudgeable, and the heating also has the amazing effect of making the image sit somehow 'inside' the paper rather than on the surface.




The two mills are layered in a fan with a paper doily which has some more Walnut Stain on the edges to weather it, and a piece of Core-dinations embossed with the TH woodgrain embossing folder.  And more bread wrapper autumnal bits and pieces are scattered around, adding autumnal leaf mulch texture.

I also added a third stamp from the set - the lovely little olde-time newspaper advert.

I adhered one of the Autumn Gatherings leaves to a tiny tab (cut with the TH Tiny Tabs and Tags die) which I'd used a few weeks back to practise one of the Andy Skinner Timeworn Techniques on - the textured rust.

And you can see one of the Autumn Gatherings acorns here too, as well as the pale mesh ribbon from The Funkie Junkie Boutique which I chose as decoration.




Simple garden twine tied in a bow is the final touch on the main panel.

When you create the base for the easel card, it's really good to give it some dimension so that there's some height.  This will mean there's something to prop the main image against, to hold the easel in place, as it were.





I've built my base embellishment on some corrugated cardboard, also from the FJB, gesso'd and inked very roughly for a rustic look.  

Then there's another strip of the embossed Core-dinations, sanded of course to reveal the contrasting core, and the wonderful sentiment from the same AO set.  

More bread wrapper leaves and twigs scattered around complete the look.

I hope you'll be inspired to join in this fortnight over at Fussy and Fancy - we'd love to see your easel cards - and it's definitely worth hopping by to see what the rest of the DT have come up with.

Nature will bear the closest inspection.  She invites us to lay our eye level with her smallest leaf, and take an insect view of its plain.
Henry David Thoreau

Never say there is nothing beautiful in the world anymore.  There is always something to make you wonder in the shape of a tree, the trembling of a leaf.
Albert Schweitzer

I'm entering this in the following:
Simon Says Stamp and Show are offering us some Leaf-spiration this week
The Artistic Outpost October Referral challenge has begun - Anything Goes using an AO stamp
There's a new Vintage Stamping Challenge blog, sponsored by Flonzcraft, who are starting out with an Anything Goes
Papertake Weekly are celebrating their 5th Birthday with an Anything Goes
The Artistic Stamper challenge for October is the Natural World
Crafty Creations would like to see projects with the Colours of Fall
And with the ribbon and corrugated cardboard bought from the Funkie Junkie Boutique, I'd like to add it to the Sunday Share over at Frilly and Funkie