Vintage Folio for A Vintage Journey's March Challenge

Hello lovely visitors, it's the first Friday of the month and that means a new challenge is starting at A Vintage Journey.
March is our birthday month and there are a lot of exciting changes coming, as you may have seen already, if not make sure to head over and check them out.

The wonderful Brenda who is our host this month chose "Share your Treasure" and this is what she had to say:

Treasure can be described as wealth or riches we store or accumulate, a collection of valuable, interesting or useful things, bits and pieces we highly value, articles that we hang onto that we’ve bought or found and might never be able to purchase again. What is in your crafty or artsy treasure trove - those items we squirrel away to keep for something special? Maybe some elegant embellishments, that hoard of ephemera or memorabilia found in a junk shop, a tin of old buttons, rusty keys or diamanté jewels, a paper pad you get out and stroke then put away again, some beautiful fabric or lace you can’t bear to part with. We invite you in this challenge to share a project that includes a part of your treasure trove, just let us know what it is so we can see it and comment on it and remember our focus styles and genres to work in (which can be seen under out blog banner) if you would like to be considered for being chosen as one of our top 3 Pinworthy mentions.

Well those that know me know that my greatest treasures can all be found in my craft room. There is no doubt about it, I am a hoarder of stash, and one of my great loves is design papers! So for this project I decided to dig out some of my most beloved treasured papers and create this vintage folio. By the way, this was very much inspired by one created by Cathy Clement from Kathy by Design, which she made for a challenge at the Frilly and Funkie blog a little while back.

I used mostly papers from Blue Fern Studios. They are hard to come by in the UK but The Mad Scrapper, a wonderful little shop not too far from where I live stocks them. (She has an online shop too if you are interested, with many stunning paper collections hard to get elsewhere).
The folio's base is a trifold card made from Kraftcard, and then I added loads of flaps, pockets etc, either glued to the base card, or inserted with the help of washi tape.
Below I will show you some of the main pages, just flipping through from left to right.

Inside left of the original gatefold. (all the pages were inked with 2 of my new Oxides, Bundled Sage and Forest Moss). They are decorated with various paper dolls, washi and other ephemera, mostly by Tim Holtz.

The little tag came from a paper collection by Stamperia (another treasure). Again hard to come by in the UK, but being a treasure hunter I found it at Craftelier, if you are anything like me and live in the UK, it's worth checking out, - they have a huge selection of stuff and very reasonable prices!

I found that different collections can be easily combined if you use the same inks on them. I also used the same sets of back ground stamps (Stamperia and Andy Skinner) through out, to make the project coherent.

This is the final page, the bit sticking out is the back of the front cover.

The little book closes with a clip to which I added a bit of seam binding (another idea from Cathy Clement, - thank you Cathy)!

The dies used to decorate the front are by Sue Wilson. The flowers are from my stash of treaured ones, both the flowers and seambinding where coloured with Distress Spray in Antique Linen.

Finally the topper was cut from a scrap of one of the Blue Fern papers, I covered it first with clear gesso and when dry with Decoart Crackle glaze, highlighting the cracks with Antiquing Cream.

Well that's it, sorry for this very long post, I hope you got some idea of the nature of this project.

Thank you for your visit and do check out my teamies' amazing work and even better join us in our challenge and show us your treasures!!

Happy crafting and creating,

xxxxx