I don't know about you, but my heart beats a little faster for vintage items. Brightly colored floral vintage tablecloths, pillow cases and aprons. McCoy pottery from the 20's to about the 50's. Brown and cream transferware. Milk glass candy dishes and cake plates. Dainty teacup and saucer sets with cheery flowers on them. Crocheted doilies. And especially, my beloved Fire King Jadeite. Happy sigh.
When it comes to crafting, I'd love to have a whole stash of vintage notions and vintage postage stamps to craft with but 1) I think I'd have a hard time ever using them....I'd much prefer to hoard them and 2) I wouldn't want to do anything to interfere with the integrity of said vintage notions or postage and therefore, I'm quite sure I would merely be a collector of those items rather than an actual crafter.
I loooove the look of them though, so this week, I set out on a little project involving creating my own vintage inspired stash of crafting goodies. Vintage notions and postage and labels that I can use any time I want on any project I want until my supply runs out, at which time, I'll simply have to make more. :)
It all started with these postage stamps. Hands down, these images are my absolute favorites from Papertrey's new Postmarks stamp set, so I whipped up a pile of about 30 "stamps" using the Postage Die and Postmarks stamp set and I must say, they just about made me giddy all piled together in that little vintage saucer which typically resides on a little shelf in our bathroom.
Next came the button cards. Ohhhhhhh, the button cards. Glory be, I love vintage button cards so in my book, the next best thing is vintage-looking button cards! I pulled out the Button Card Dies and the coordinating Button Boutique stamp set to create these beauties.....and of course, lots and lots of Papertrey's fabulous buttons, which are the stars of the show here.
I have a tip for you when creating your own button cards: If you're creating quite a few, do everything assembly line style. Die cut all of your cards first. Then stamp them all. Go ahead and lay them out on your work surface and lay the buttons out on each card that you want to stitch to the cards. Next -- this is key -- use a tiny piece of scor-tape on the back of each button (avoiding the button holes) to hold the buttons in place. THEN -- this is also key -- punch out all of the holes next, with a paper piercer or your needle, by laying the button card on a piece of foam or the like so you can punch out the holes. Now you're ready to stitch the buttons to the cards. By having the buttons lightly secured with the adhesive and by having the holes pre-punched before you start stitching, it makes it sooooo fast and easy to stitch the buttons in place.
One last tip for you: I use two small pieces of regular old scotch tape to adhere the ends of the twine or thread to the back of the button card, instead of tying knots on the back. This makes the back of the button card much flatter and less bulky. If you're adding bulk to your cards and projects, you want it to be in the form of pretty things on the front of the card -- like the buttons -- rather than extra bulk on the back that just gets in the way.
After creating the postage stamps and the button cards, I decided to create a pile of vintage inspired labels, so out came the Rectangular Labels and Angled Labels Dies and the Label Basics stamp set. I saved time on these, by laying several of the dies on my big shot platform at the same time and running them thru with one longer piece of card stock, therefore allowing me to cut out several labels all in one pass. Much faster!
I couldn't resist showing you what all of those goodies look like piled up together on a Jadeite dinner plate. I can't even tell you how happy that photo makes me!! It just makes me want to create and create and create!
Here's the thing......we all have times when we're "just not feelin' it".....when we're just not feeling crafty and it seems like the mojo has just packed up and left, perhaps never to return. I'm just "keepin' it rill". And I know how much I hate when that happens, but it happens to all of us at one time or another. Life just gets busy or we're distracted with other things or we're just plain tired and feel like we don't have the brain-power required to muster up any creativity.
BUT, the good news is that when those times come, there are still crafty things you can do, that don't require a lot of creativity -- such as creating a pile of vintage-look postage stamps or button cards or labels. Not only will you be doing yourself a favor because you're getting items ready to use on those days ahead when you ARE feeling crafty, but you're also likely to spark your own creativity a bit, just by going thru the motions of creating SOMEthing.
Plus, if it comes up that you need a sweet little gift for a crafty friend, you'll have some adorable hand-made items at the ready. Tuck them into little glassine bags and slip into a card and you've got a darling gift ready to go.
Since we've had all this talk of gettin' crafty, I have to share a card I made with a few of those goodies, right?
In the upper left corner of the card, I stamped a couple of the images from Postmarks and then layered a die cut "Parcel Post" image over the top. (That image and several others from Postmarks fit the smallest Angled Labels Die.)
I really wanted to let the "stamps" take center stage here, so I stamped the "air mail strip" along the bottom of the card and then adhered the stamps directly above that little border I'd created. To finish things off, I stamped the "sentiment" for this card -- a "Thinking of you" postmark image across the top of the stamps. All in all, a pretty simple card, but one that I think will be fun to send to a friend.
Well, I hope that I've inspired you today, to get out your stamps and dies and create some of your own vintage inspired goodness. What do you think? Something you might want to do this weekend?
Wishing you a happy St. Patrick's Day from the McVeys!
{Thinking of You supplies}
Paper: vintage cream, rustic cream
Stamps: Postmarks
Ink: dark chocolate, new leaf, raspberry fizz, pure poppy, hawaiian shores, ripe avocado, orange zest, vintage touch tea dye
Other: postage die, angled labels die
