Vintage Elements - Day 5 of the MDC Blog Roll!

Mother's Day is a time for us to reflect back on the special women in our lives - mother, grandmother, daughter, mother-in-law, aunt, cousin, mentor, and friend. In honor of the special women in our lives, today our blog roll will feature two awesome challenges and I am the host of one of them!

I have always been interested in vintage styles from different eras. It my teenage years I was building and refurbishing dollhouses, which naturally lends itself to a lot of hisotorical periods . I especially love Victorian influences - floral patterns, intricately carved wood moldings and cornices, rich colors, and classic time pieces and framed photos. When I am trying to create a vintage feel to a project, I tend to pull a lot of these loves into my modern day scrapbooking and card making. It's interesting to think about a favorite period in history and see how the influences carry over into shapes, colors, textures, and embellishments.

Here's the page I created for my part of today's challenge (to create a project using vintage style...)

I used a lot of different elements to create a vintage feel to my page. First, you can see some Victorian influence in the nature elements on my page - flowers, butterflies, and leafy vines. I added some embellishments straight from my grandmothers sewing box and finished the page by adding a decorative corner piece and an antique looking bookplate to highlight the year of the photo.

I have to say, I loved the Best Creations paper that I used as my page base... it already included a lot of the key elements I needed to make my page vintage style and saved me a lot of time and work. First of all, the bottom layer of the pattern has a slightly worn and distressed look, and the edges are darkened so they appear inked. Distressing is an important feature of vintage style.

In addition to the flowers and vines I already mentioned, the paper also has a preembossed frame for your photo - it is very intricate and accented with a light glitter, all of which is very vintage. It's very hard to photograph this paper so you can see all the elements, but here is a little bit better of a close up on the frame:

You can see that I allowed my picture to hang down outside of the frames boundries. Here's another aspect of vintage work - it doesn't all have to be perfectly symmetrical or follow boundry rules... the vintage look usually incorporates a lot of building on layers that splay out from each other. Notice the cornice in the upper left corner - that's from my stash and adds a small bit of texture and depth to the border. Make sure you check out Leah's blog today - she's going to illustrate vintage style with some border work and layering on a card!

See those super cute buttons on either side of the picture? Those are real buttons from my grandmother's sewing box - they used to be on one of her coats and are probably from the 40's or 50's. Cool. Check out the scalloped circle under the left button, and here under the felt flower (from Zva Creative):

I punched them from newsprint and inked them to match my colors. My scalloped edged ribbon is from Prima and the pearl brads are from Imaginisce. Pearls are a form of bling sadly under used - they have a very vintage feel! I added the year from some old rub-ons I had. The felt butterflies are also from my embellishment box. I love this little cluster of embellishments - to see more of this technique check out Robin's blog today - she has a sneak peek of a vintage page she created using clustered embellishments to add to the vintage feel of her page.

Office elements often create a vintage feel - here the file tab and bookplate are from a tag sheet made to match my patterned paper, which again made it very easy to create my page since everything went together nicely.

So I definitely want to see some of your vintage style... To win some fabulous vintage-style blog candy from me, all you need to do is leave me a comment with a link to your project! Don't forget to check out Leah and Robin's blogs for more vintage inspiration.

By the way, are you wondering at all about the picture on my page? It's me and my mom - my favorite baby picture. Thanks for sharing it with me, mom!

For our second challenge today be sure to visit Melita's blog -she's hosting a very special challenge honoring the mother figures in our lives. Laurie, Mia, and Maria have all made samples for Melita's challenge, so make sure you visit them all!

Thanks for stopping in and have a scraptastic day!!