Vintage Christmas post 2

Hi it's time for my 2nd design team make for Country View Challenges to hopefully inspire you to join in our current challenge. The theme for June is "Vintage" so your make must have a vintage vibe to it...so no cute cartoon characters for this one please! You can enter a maximum of 5 times and into a maximum of 10 challenges, including ours. As always there is a fab £20 voucher up for grabs for one lucky randomly selected winner to spend on the website.  You can find all the details of the challenge and more examples made by my talented teamies here.

I love a vintage Christmas, this is one of the many sets of Christmas crackers I have made over the years. 

  Remember that when you buy from the Country View Crafts website UK postage is FREE on orders over £20.00 I have added some live links within my post to take you to some of the products I used. 

Now to me no one does vintage like Tim Holtz and so both of my design team make for this month use Tim products. Also no one does Christmas like Tim so I also decided make a 2nd Christmas card. I do find that having a couple ready made in my stash is very helpful before I start my big Christmas card making in the autumn. 

This is what I got up to;

I sprayed a piece of card using iced spruce and salvaged patina stain sprays. 

I added some background stamping using distress archival inks

I used some of Tim's ephemera and circles 25th December...I wonder why!!!

I then put my design together adding some stars and ribbon and mounted it up and onto a kraft card base.

with a couple of close ups;

and one final shot;

I hope I may have inspired you to join in with the challenge this month? Once again here you can find all the details for our June challenge here;

Enjoy the rest of the month.

Bye for now,

Jane x

Vintage vibes for Country View Challenges

Good morning and welcome to (hopefully) sunny June.   It's also time for a new challenge over at Country View. The theme for June is "Vintage" so your make must have a vintage vibe to it...so no cute cartoon characters for this one please! You can enter a maximum of 5 times and into a maximum of 10 challenges, including ours. As always there is a fab £20 voucher up for grabs for one lucky randomly selected winner to spend on the website.  You can find all the details of the challenge and more examples made by my talented teamies here.

  Remember that when you buy from the Country View Crafts website UK postage is FREE on orders over £20.00 I have added some live links within my post to take you to some of the products I used. 

Now to me no one does vintage like Tim Holtz and so both of my design team make for this month will be using Tim products. Also no one does Christmas like Tim so I also decided to get a start on my Christmas cards  (yes shhhh  don't tell my friend Vivienne, she will have a fit!) I really do find that having a couple ready made in my stash is very helpful before I start my big Christmas card making in the autumn. 

This is what I got up to;

I took some of my Tim Holtz ephemera and teamed it with a paper doll and a 3D angel wing which I embossed using white card.

I made a distress stain spray background using mermaid lagoon and saltwater taffy oxides.

I added some background stamping using distress archival inks

and added Gilded foundry wax to the wings. They shine beautifully IRL.

I then turned my Christmas paper doll into a Christmas angel with them.

I added glossy accents to the holly berries and glitter to the pine needles and put my card together. 

Here it is

with a close up

and 1 final shot

I hope I may have inspired you to join in with the challenge this month? Once again here you can find all the details for our June challenge here;

I will be back with my 2nd "Vintage" make on 11th June. 

Bye for now,

Jane x

The Christmas hearth

Good morning I have already opened window 3 of my vintage advent calendar and my decorations are up. I have put 3 of my handmade Christmas projects in my hearth.  2 are from years back and one is a newbie which I finished last week. 

This is my newest make. 

  I shared the making of this vignette box over on Instagram recently so do join me over there if you would like to check it out. This is the link;

It's time for my 2nd design team make for our current "Anything Christmas" challenge over at Country View. As always there is a fab £20 voucher up for grabs for one lucky randomly selected winner to spend on the website. What a cool pre Christmas treat that would be. You can find all the details of the challenge and more examples made by my talented teamies here.

For my second make I decided to create a vintage Christmas hearth scene card inspired by my own 1930s hearth. This is what I got up to;

I made a background using crackling campfire, squeezed lemonade and brushed pewter distress stain sprays. Susan has some of the colours in stock here .

Sorry it's so blurred but you will see it better in later photos.

I used a fun older Tim Holtz die which I must admit was very fiddly to put together but I think the end results justified the time!

I die cut and put all the elements together.

The wreath and stamped sentiment are from other Tim Holtz sets.

Here it is finished

and one last shot.

I hope both my hearths I may have inspired you to join our "anything Christmas" challenge. All the rules and the link are here.

I hope you are also enjoying the count down to Christmas. Our trees went up yesterday and Billy is beavering away typing up his annual post...well he'll start when he has had little think about it first! 

Hmmmmmm....

Back soon,

Bye for now,

Jane x

The start of Christmas

Good morning everyone and happy December. Today I regard as the real start of Christmas and it is my absolute favourite time of the year. I love counting down the days with one of my vintage advent calendars. This is my choice for this year.  

I have gone for my biggest as I thought of all the years to have the most spectacular of them all it had to be for 2020.

It opens out from 3 pieces

A close up of the top

The middle

and the bottom

and what is most unusual is that is the only 1 of 2 advent calendars I have ever seen that has a No 25 door. The only other one I ever remember was one my brother had when he was about 10 (in 1968) , it was a clock face and had a No 25 too. 

Take a peep...it has a blue door.

I just adore the artwork on these German vintage pieces. My whole 1960s childhood Christmases is wrapped up in these images. 

Today is also the start of our last challenge of 2020 over at Country View Challenges. The theme is of course "Christmas" it really couldn't be anything else could it!

As always there is a fab £20 voucher up for grabs for one lucky randomly selected winner to spend on the website. What a cool pre Christmas treat that would be. You can find all the details of the challenge and more examples made by my talented teamies here.

My makes for December just had to be Christmas cards using stamps and dies by Tim Holtz as to me they epitomize the perfect vintage Christmas. They scream Christmas past, present and yet to come to me. 

This is what I got up to;

I made a background using these distress oxide sprays

I die cut some festive greenery using some inky mop up card.

I made a lantern using one of my very old Tim Holtz Bigz dies. I also stamped a Christmas sentiment.

and then assembled everything.

Here is my finished card

with a close up

and one last shot.

I would like to link my card up in the following challenges;

Simon says stamp anything goes

Crafty Hazelnut's Christmas #518

Dream Valley 1/3 Christmas

I hope I may have inspired you to join in with our December, "Christmas" challenge. You can use any stamps/products, the choice is yours. 

You can enter our challenge as many times as you like and combine with other challenges. There is also a £20 crafting voucher up for grabs to the lucky randomly selected winner to spend over on the Country View Crafts on line store. Remember that UK postage and packing from CVC is free on all orders over £7.50! Once again all the details for the December challenge can be found here.

I will be back this Thursday, 3rd December, to share another of my vintage inspired Christmas cards

Thanks so much for stopping by today.

Back soon

Bye for now

Jane x

A alternative 75th VE day celebration, Mindful Moments 7

Hello again I am back with my 7th Mindful Moments post.

If you did not see my first post and wonder what these are do check it out here. Thank you to everyone who has been reading them. I can see from my stats that these are getting at least twice the usual traffic of my other posts, which has really inspired me to keep trying to get them written weekly if I can. I really hope you are finding them a moment to make you smile and stay mindful during these very turbulent times.

This is a long post so grab a large cuppa or even a mug!
Today is the 75th anniversary of VE day and time for us to remember victory in Europe in 1945. I love seeing the old BBC footage of everyone celebrating back then. My dear parents and their parents were a part of that historical day. I think it is also helpful to keep in mind that we will be able to look back at this pandemic one day as another piece of history.  There will not be 1 single day we can celebrate this but a time will come when we can acknowledge that this invisible enemy has been beaten.

I have been thrilled to see how many people have thought of alternative ways of celebrating today and I decided to get into the swing too. People in our road are going to sit in their front gardens for afternoon tea later so I got cake baking and printed out some posters of my Union Jack cards I recently made and put them into my downstairs windows.
How apt are my STAMPlorations stamps I used here!

Today also made me think of one person who would have really celebrated the 75th anniversary of VE day big time. That person is Rebecca, the owner of Dotty's Teahouse in Carshalton and Tea Garden in Coulsdon in Surrey. Her vintage cafes celebrate all things 1940s and I know the bunting would be out there today if she could.
I made and sent her this card to let her know how much I miss her and the Dotty family but that one day we will be back sharing a cup of tea with friends.

Who would have known in 1945 that 75 years later we would be fighting a different and very invisible enemy ie Covid 19. So many businesses have shut that it is hard to stay positive for the future but we must be. I thought that today I would also share a "virtual" celebration for Dotty's Teahouse's 4th birthday which is next week. If you are not aware this is a family run tea house which opened in Carshalton High Street, Surrey in May 2016. I replied to an advert in the March to sell my handmade cards there and met Rebecca the owner. She loved what I made and I loved what Dotty's was to become. Well, the rest is history and during these 4 years I have sold over 1,000 cards from my shelves there.

Throughout this lock down obviously both Dotty's Teahouse and her brand new Tea Garden, which opened last September, have been shut.  I really do miss Rebecca and her lovely team. I usually walk down to the Teahouse with my latest cards to put up for sale on my shelves on a Monday and Friday.

 She is managing some home deliveries though and

this is the great sign on the door at the moment.

Rebecca,  loves all things vintage and would have had a huge VE celebration today if she was open. Instead she is delivering a VE Celebration tea...what a fab idea. 

 I thought I would have a little reminisce of the last 4 years and how things have grown at Dotty's.

She opened with a grand opening in May 2016 with the Mayor cutting the ribbon.

We celebrated her 1st and 2nd birthdays in style with 40s music and dress. 

We had fun hosting a little Christmas market 2 years ago and last year I enjoyed hosting my first Meet the Maker event in the shop. 

Here I am with Rebecca.

 We celebrated last Christmas with a staff party at the new Tea Garden in Coulsdon

This is one of her displays from her new tea garden, always such fun!

Her afternoon teas are legendary and delicious. I so hope her doors are able to open very soon. 

So inspired by all this  I decided to get baking myself. I decided that in 1945 I am sure the cake of choice would have been fairy cakes if rations allowed (and perhaps dried egg too) and found that I had just enough ingredients to bake some. The cake cases are from years ago and I thought looked very retro!

I also spotted something else vintage right in front of me as I made my cakes, my scales.

These were once used at the labs where my Dad worked many moons ago in Bermondsey, South London. The firm he worked for closed down in the 1980s and was demolished and he brought them home and gave them to me. I use them for all my weighing and they are in pounds and ounces, just as I like it.  I looked up the firm, Hunt and Co. They were founded in 1861and have long ceased trading but these scales would certainly have been around in 1945. So many things would have been weighed in these, a real piece of history.

While I was looking at the scales I had a little light bulb thought that it would be really fun to serve my fairy cakes on one of my Nan's plates which were handed down to me. I mostly use at Christmas or for family celebrations. My Nan was born in 1904 and probably was bought this as part of a dinner service as a wedding present when she married in 1928.

I love the pretty pattern on it.
Here  are my cakes, just out of the oven.

I wanted to make a retro glace icing topping with hundreds and thousands on.  Luckily I had just enough icing sugar left and found these hundreds and thousands in my cupboard.

So here are my cakes all ready for my Hb and I to enjoy at our afternoon tea in our front garden at 4pm.

If my Nan was still alive she would have been so thrilled to see this and the wonderful memories evoked as I made my fairy cakes

There is surely only one quote I could share today as we remember all those who gave their lives for our freedom, it has to be these immortal words

“Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.” » Winston Churchill

Thanks so much for stopping by and for the kind comments you have taken the time to leave me, they are so appreciated.

Please keep safe, keep mindful, keep washing those hands.

For those of you in the UK enjoy all the VE day celebrations. Us Brits have a habit of making do and keeping up our spirits whatever is going on around us. We may well be hearing of some gentle easing of Lockdown on Sunday..fingers crossed we may be over the worst.  I hope so.

Back soon,

Bye for now,

With love, Jane x