The Good Old Days by Alison Bomber

Hello everyone, Alison (butterfly) here for my final post as Guest Designer this month with The Artistic Stamper.

So, I promised you something simpler for my final piece (in the hope of writing a post shorter than War and Peace for once)... and I did make something simpler, but I ended up making it in two different versions!

I knew I wanted to work with the glorious Victorian advertising bills - they are so much fun: fantastically detailed in their wording, with brilliant cartoons.  They are simply wonderful pieces of print ephemera that rocket me back in time when I look at them.

So my first thought was that I wanted to stick them on a wall; a grimy, crumbling wall in a forgotten alleyway, with these three ancient posters still clinging on.  So I had to create a wall background... lots of ways to do that - you could use the Decorative Strip Die by Sizzix, or some texture paste through a stencil.  I used an embossing folder, Tim Holtz's Bricked Texture Fade on a large tag (running it through twice to emboss the whole thing).

Then I set about it with some inks - Vintage Photo, Pumice Stone, Black Soot and Aged Mahogany - until I had a suitably grungy look.  I used the Paper Distresser on the edges, and then ran the Black Soot DI pad around them to give it a good strong inky edging.

For the posters themselves, I did a bit of TH's wrinkle free distress technique using Old Paper and Antique Linen DIs - not too much ink, as I wanted age spots rather than a complete change of colour.  (I'd already done one version with darker inks, very beautiful, but once I'd stamped the images, they didn't really look like posters.)

So with this new, paler version, I stamped the three adverts in Black Archival, and then did lots of distressing - ripping, rolling, using the TH paper distresser, and adding Vintage Photo to some of the tears and creases.  It's one of my favourite things to be able to age a piece of paper like this!

Simple enough then to stick the bills on the wall (hope I don't get prosecuted), all in a row, and add some trimmings.  And you can read what you like about Victorian society into those trimmings: it's raffia, inky twine and some leather all tied up with a beautiful shiny satin black ribbon.

I was pretty pleased with that, but I still had those spare stamped images still sitting on my desk, stamped on the darker inky paper (two sets in fact, safety in numbers you know).  I started shuffling them around, thinking that they'd look pretty good in a slightly grungier version of the tag.

I grabbed some corrugated card, and added Distress Stains and thick Gesso to it randomly and roughly.  I created a background like this for a recent project and really liked it, so it was fun to resurrect it.  It creates a fantastically grungy, textural mess - no other word for it really.

I gave my three posters the distressing treatment again, and started positioning them on the tag.  They seemed to want to go in the other direction for this one, so I let them.

It was crying out for some metalwork, but I didn't want to go too smart, so I used some black alcohol ink to grunge up a key and some pen nibs from my stash, as well as an Idea-ology clock.

I particularly love how the clock looks, with the black face and the figures sanded back to reveal the gold underneath.

I've always sort of thought that I was born in the wrong century, and I'd love to go back in time and visit, but looking at these images did just make me wonder whether my historical glasses are a little rose-tinted... were they really the "good old days"?

So I added a little slogan at the bottom asking just that question... stamped in black on paper inked to match the advertisements.

Again, I added some varied trimmings: string, raffia and some black paper string to tie them together.  So there are my two variations on a theme using these fabulous little stamps, and I think I've brought it in under the 10,000 word mark!

I'd like to say a huge thank you to Jennie and Emma for having me here - I've had a ball; and thank you also to the rest of the DT and all of you for your fantastic support.  Happy Crafting!

Ingredients:
Stamps: Goose Grease, Phineas Pinchbeck and Squaretoes Continuous Lunch
Distress Inks: Vintage Photo, Aged Mahogany, Pumice Stone, Black Soot
Distress Stains: Vintage Photo, Walnut Stain, Old Paper, Antique Linen
Ranger Archival: Black
Alcohol Inks: Pitch Black
Gesso
Idea-ology: Time Pieces, Game Spinners
Decorative Strip Die Brick Wall (as an alternative to Bricked Texture Fade)
Tim Holtz Paper Distresser
Manila Tags