Smashing Fashion

Hello all!  It's fantastic you've been able to drop by, as I'm thrilled to be able to share a piece of news with you today.  

I've been invited by the fantastic Caro (a.k.a. cbee) to join the Design Team at Fun With ATCs, and today's the first chance to share some ATCs with you, and for you to find out about my new team members.  I'm sharing two ATCs today... and I'll explain why.  WARNING: what follows is not in my usual vein (though normal service is resumed further down the page).

The challenge of the discipline of the ATC format - Artist Trading Cards, 2.5 by 3.5 inches in size - is a really fresh and exciting one for me.  However, I did feel a slight sinking of the heart when I found out that the first theme I'd be involved with was to be Fashion.  It's really not my world... and although I was mainly thinking about it in vintage terms (of course!), I still kept getting caught up in my internal response to the word "Fashion", which is a politically pretty angry response.  A lot of ATCs ended up in the bin, simply not working out.

In the end, to get it out of my system, I decided to put that response down in black and white, on an ATC, in the hope that it would free me up to do something a bit more fun and 'challenge-appropriate'.  So, those of a nervous disposition, you're welcome to scroll past this one straight to the 'vanilla' vintage version of Fashion further down the post... but this is what the word really triggers in me:

I offered this up on the Fun With ATCs Design Team forum, to let them know I really was trying to come up with something (and where, to be honest, it went down pretty well), and then also uploaded my lighter take on the theme later in the day.  To this moment, I'm still not sure which of the two the lovely Caro will choose to feature amongst the DT projects over at the Challenge!  

(I ought, of course, to give you the lowdown - perhaps I should say "the skinny" - on the stamp: my skeletal model is from Oxford Impressions' Dr Coffin's Apothecary set.  I hadn't previously noticed how provocatively he was posing...)

So, in a return to usual business, here's the vintage fashion ATC I finally came up with once I'd got that all off my chest!

The stamps are from Indigoblu's Yorkshire Evening Post set, stamped in Coffee Archival, and I've used Distress Markers to rough in some colour - Tumbled Glass and Bundled Sage (ooh, that pairing is doing wonderful things to my Word Coach brain).

They are edged, of course, with Vintage Photo and the Tim Holtz paper distresser.

They're backed onto some leftovers - the trimmings from the embossed panel in my gingham tag, using a TH embossing folder. 

Here, the embossing has been shaded with Antique Linen, Vintage Photo and some lovely Sea Breeze Versamagic Chalk Ink.  There's also a touch of that on the image edges.  I love its chalky opacity and, of course, the colour!

 





So, ATCs make for pretty short posts (for me)... so I really hope you'll take the time saved here to visit Fun With ATCs and see what my amazing DT compadres have cooked up - there are some familiar faces amongst them that I think you'll enjoy!  We would love it if you played along with the Fashion challenge - and, as you can see, whatever you come up with will be fine by me!!

Thanks so much for stopping by today, and I look forward to seeing you again soon, perhaps with an ATC for me to visit...






Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
Oscar Wilde

A fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic.
George Bernard Shaw

Fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are.
Quentin Crisp

I'm going to stir the pot a little further by offering up my fashion smashing ATC to the Anything But a Card challenge which is to Incorporate Black on, of course, anything but a card