All orders are charged in UK pounds sterling. 
Click here for details

Christmas Shadow House

17 November 2015  |  Admin

Last year I created this Christmas house using a mix of stamps and LOTS of glitter.  It has been carefully wrapped in tissue all year, nestled in with the baubles and fairy lights and it is now time to welcome it back to get our house dressed for the festive season.

The original post is no longer on my own blog, so I am re-blogging the project here with some details of how it was put together.

 

Believe Shadow House01

When I first published this, I ran a contest for you to guess which stamps I had used, so you'll find the answer to that at the bottom.

I have always loved house shaped shadow boxes and this one sat in my big box of 'things to alter' for some time. I originally painted it pink and green, but not long after we moved to our house by the sea, I re-painted it in shades of turquoise and aqua. I had plans to use our sea inspired stamps to make it a home for my growing collection of sea glass and driftwood. I sat down with a bunch of sea themed stamps, and sat... I looked at the images, tried out the seaglass in the sections, played around and in short, was thoroughly uninspired. I realised it was just the wrong colour to use with seaglass - there wasn't any contrast. A sandy colour or even pure white would work much better, but I couldn't face painting it for a third time so I put it to one side and decided to make a Christmas card. I had been playing with Stampbord and had a couple of pieces out on the table, including the bright red piece below. Inspiration struck - I put it against the blues of the shadow box and the idea for turning it into a Christmas box was born.

Believe Shadow House03

Out came the Stickles and the sparkly embossing powders, flowers and pearls and I delved deep into my stash of lasercut chipboard. I even found some old German scrap borders to put along the roofline. Deciding what to use and where to put it took longer than actually making the stuff. I spent quite some time trying out different arrangements before I was happy.

Believe Shadow House04

 

The largest section called for a 'feature image' so I chose this stained glass madonna and painted it with Distress Stains. When it was dry, I patted it all over with Versamark, then embossed it with a layer of clear embossing powder. I sprinkled a little crystal glitter onto the halo, but I didn't want to use any of my sparkly embossing powders as they are just too sparkly and would obscure the detail of the stamp too much.

 

Believe Shadow House06

I used a couple of pieces of domino sized Stampbord, both mounted onto a background made with Tim Holtz Melange tissue wrap. The green piece holds another laser cut shape, a wreath which i painted and embossed with clear powder. I used a few laser cut shapes in this project, the red rocking horse is a wooden shape and the little houses and the word Believe are laser cut chipboard.

Believe Shadow House05

 

I used embossing powders on all these shapes. The word and the rocking horse are embossed with one layer of Ruby Romance WOW embossing powder then a couple of layers of clear embossing powder. The houses are embossed with Sparkling Snow (three layers to give really good coverage).

 

Believe Shadow House02

One of the problems with shadow boxes is that if you just stick an image to the back, it can get lost in the shadow, so I came up with a cheap and cheerful way to bring items forward a little. I have some old, scruffy mountboard and I cut it up into small pieces, about 1 inch x 1 inch. Using PVA glue, I layered them up into several stacks to give varying heights to my stamped elements.

And as promised - here are the details of those stamps used.

Here are the links if you want to take a look at these stamp sets:

One of the things I love about Christmas is seeing the old favourites come out of the Christmas box, each one imbued with fond memories and nostalgia.  Wouldn't it be fun to create something like this yourself with your family, perhaps your grandchildren, to serve as an ongoing, living memory each time it comes out.

I hope my project inspires you and I hope you'll get out some of your stuff and make something this evening or this weekend - make the time to get your creative wheels turning, it's good for you on so many levels!