DT Project #1 by Astrid

Featuring Graphic 45 "Olde Curiosity Shoppe"

Hello dear Snazzys visitors, this is Astrid here with my first project using the wonderful Olde Curiosity Shoppe papers from Graphic 45. If you have seen all the wonderful projects my teamies have created already, I hope that by now you will be as addicted to these papers as I am; they are just stunning, fun, quirky and beautiful all at the same time!!

When I first saw these papers, my first thought was to create a little shadow box curiosity shoppe, but hey, great minds think alike and Lesley did something very similar already. So change of plan, houses was my next thought, and so instead I created an "Olde Curiosity Street".

This is how I went about it:

First I drew and then cut out some different houses out of plain chip board

Next came the fun bit, covering them with a variety of the papers and then decorating them with some of the elements, fussy cut from other papers. I wanted my street to be colourful, so I went for the brightly coloured papers. So much fun and so many possibilities!

Here I used one of the stamps that come with the papers, there are 3 sets in all, I used set 2.

Now for to create a background for my houses. My plan was to use one of the papers in the set, but not having thought ahead, I found that my four houses were too wide for the 8 x 8 papers. it really needed a 12 x 12" sheet. So I took one from my stash, it's a Tim Holtz paper showing some house plans in a suitably muted colour. I cut it to 12 x 6" and then created a frame from bits of old card I had flying around. For the fancy bit at the top I cut a template first, by drawing one half, folding over and then tracing the other half to be an exact mirror. I then painted the frame black with acrylic paint.

Now for embellishing the frame. I generated the title Curiosity Street on my PC using a similar font to the ones used on the papers. I cut a piece of 12 x 12 G45 paper from an old collection I had in my stash (Botanica Bella) to A4 size and printed it onto that. The great thing with Graphics 45 papers is that no matter what collection you use, they usually match!. The rest was embellished with bits and pieces from my stash, mostly Tim Holtz Ideaology, one of the Chipboard tags that come with the collection and some more fussy cut bits from the papers. The three little bottles in the right hand bottom corner are made by stamping the bottle stamps from the Cling Stampset 2 onto white Shrink Plastic.

Well, I hope you enjoyed my first project, I'll be back later in the week to show you more. Bye for now.