Crazy About You

Does Steampunk have to be grungy? well maybe traditionally that would be true but I do not believe that it has to be and hope that I can convert those of you who think that it is not girly with this project that is very pretty and most definitely not grungy or metal laden in anyway.

The starting point for this project was in fact the wonderful Mintay Papers - Flora book for fussy cutting - this seemingly small book has hundreds of flowers in several different colour ways with coordinating foliage just waiting to be cut out - This project used just one page of flowers and one page of leaves leaving many more sheets for future projects. As an added bonus the colours coordinate with Mintay Papers so they can be used in lots of different ways.

I painted the Birch wood lage wheel with white gesso mixed with some sand to give it texture and then applied fragments of winter botanic rice paper using a file to neaten the rough edges.

I knew that I wanted to use some MDF cogs and also the steampunk butterfly that I bought at the September craft retreat (check out the dates for September this year and remember to put them in your diary) but did not want them to be coloured in metallic shades so instead I coloured them with a mix of  pale blue and aged silver embossing powders - giving them a metallic sheen but not a metallic colour. The centre of the butterfly is actually a clock hand from another MDF set.

I then layered on all of my paper elements shaping some of the flowers with a ball tool and tucking in leaves here and there. To add another textural element I added lots of fabric flowers before finally adding a chipboard word sticker from the Mintay Love Letters collection.

I used