Let's celebrate!!

Hello everyone and a very warm welcome to you all! Great to have you visiting at this very busy time of year!

Today sees the start of a new challenge over at A Vintage Journey. Our host is the lovely Nikki, and this is what she had to say about the challenge theme:
You can make something to celebrate Christmas if you wish but lets not forget about those December birthdays, anniversaries, Hanukkah and New Years. It may be fun to focus on celebrations other than Christmas, it's up to you.

Well, I decided to alter one of Tim's wonderful worn covers.

Of course Nikki makes it clear that the projects don't necessarily have to be Christmas related, but, Christmas is a big deal in our extended family, and so my mind automatically did turn to Christmas.

I know Tim has designed a special Christmas version of this book cover, but mine originally was the "Chronicle" one.

Singing Christmas carols is a big feature of our festival celebrations, - two of my husband's siblings are professional musicians, (he is the oldest of 7 children) so with Christmas family gatherings of up to 30 people, singing carols in 4 parts is a regular occurrence. This led me to the idea that it would be great to finally have a place to keep some of the sheet music in. So, onto my project:

I started by adding areas of texture using two of Tim's layering stencils. When the texture paste had dried I covered both sides with washes of Distress Paints in Antique Linen, Weathered Wood, Pumice Stone and Walnut Stain. I also added some spritzes of the Distress Sprays in Pumice Stone and Walnut stain, while the paint was still wet, this helped to blend them.

Below you can see the back:

When everything had dried I added some stamping, using the pine branch stamp from the Christmas Nostalgia stamp set. The vines are a Johanna Sheen die.

Time for some embellishing:

The layered Snowflake, to which I also added a cut out snowflake from a Sheena Douglas embossing folder, raised bits highlighted with copper Treasure Gold.

The perfect stamp for this project, from the Festive Sounds stamp set by Tim of course. I stamped it and embossed with copper embossing powder, fussy cut it and then inked around it with Vintage Photo. The embellishments are several older Spellbinder dies and some bits and pieces from my Christmas stash. I also melted some bits of embossing powders around it, to fit in with the little arch below:

A little rusted up Tando arch. First I stencilled the numbers 2 and 5 from one of Tim's stencils, when dry I coloured them with a Faber Castell Big Brush pen and then fitted the arch over it. The rusting was done with the help of two Ranger Antiquities powders, Rust and Verdigris.

I decided to fix the ring binders inside with some twine, to make it easier to add further pages if needed.

Well, that was pretty much it. Finally a place to keep all my carol sheets together, even though I won't be using it much this year as we are off to sunny Australia in just a few days time. Carol singing around the Barbie is not quite the same somehow....

Hope you will pop along to the A Vintage Journey blog to see the wonderful projects my team mates have created, and hopefully you even find some time to play along and celebrate with us! It's always good to have a creative break from all the other holiday preparations!!! Remember if you do, you are in with a chance to win a voucher from our wonderful sponsor: Countryview Crafts, or win an honourable place as a pin worthy on our special Pinterest board.

Now before I sign off, I just wanted to mention that the design team have been doing an exchange of gifts as a Secret Santa bit off fun. If you want to see whom I sent to and the amazing gift I received, do come back on Sunday, when all shall be revealed!

FINALLY, - WORD VERIFICATION ON MANY BLOGS IS A BLOGGER GLITCH, - GET IT SORTED BLOGGER! I FOUND IT CAN JUST BE IGNORED, COMMENT AS USUAL AND IGNORE THE SILLY WV....

Thank you for visiting like always and have fun celebrating in the weeks to come!!