/* */ Beulah Bee: Aunt Esther
Showing posts with label Aunt Esther. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Aunt Esther. Show all posts

February 13, 2023

Kansas

Most times, my inspiration for tag-making starts with a vintage photo that speaks to me somehow. I'm never sure where I'll end up but usually that voice gives me an idea on how to proceed. This one said, "Dorothy, you're not in Kansas anymore."

It began as a vintage postcard that I trimmed and pasted to give it the standard tag dimensions. Then I applied an image transfer of the photo (technique here) and used thin washes of acrylic paint for color.

I knocked-back a portion of the postmark where it covered the dress with transparent white, used glitter on the corsage and shoes and added the appropriate text cut from a book page.

Most tags look better with a border, this one is washi-tape. Since it was too wide, I taped it to my cutting mat, used an X-Acto knife to cut smaller strips and (as is always the case) it was still sticky enough to be reapplied to the tag.

I'm linking up to Simon's Monday challenge, "Frame It."

As always, I hope this post finds you well and happy and I appreciate your visit.

Until next time, take care.

December 05, 2022

No. 5 for Christmas, 2022

I inherited multiple copies of professional portrait photographs of my great aunts and their relatives/friends (circa 1900-1940) mounted inside thick, tri-fold paper folders. Since I don't need to save, for example, ten copies of a graduation portrait of the same person, I recycle the folders to use in my artwork. That's what makes up the foundations for this tag.

It features a die-cut pattern of poinsettias (Tim Holtz) that were filled-in with Stickles along with a Christmas Collage Paper covering. I used a laser-printed vintage photo mounted inside an old Idea-ology sticker frame antiqued with paint and Liquid Pearls. The numerals were cut from scrapbook paper and covered with Stickles.

I'll share a tip for anyone who doesn't like the unavoidable shedding of glitter--just cover it with a layer of clear medium to seal it. And if you use a matt finish it creates a more subtle, vintage appearance.

I'm linking this one up to Simon's Monday challenge, this week's theme is Holiday Cheer.

As always, I hope this post finds you well and happy and I appreciate your visit.

Until next time, take care.

November 24, 2022

No. 3 for Christmas, 2022

I took inspiration for this Christmas tag from Paula Cheney and a piece she created several years ago for an Advent calendar (see it here).

I cut the wings from a vintage portrait folder and distressed with paint, sandpaper and crackle medium then mounted on paper, tissue scraps and fabric. The text was made with a Tim Holtz Christmas stencil and covered with Glossy Accents.

The crown was cut from a discarded book then covered with Stickles, Glossy Accents and Nuvo Crystal Drops. I outlined the edges with more Stickles and darkened them with a water-soluble graphite pencil.

The crowning jewel (so-to-speak) is a vintage button from my great aunt's collection.

As always, I hope this post finds you well and happy and I appreciate your visit.

Until next time, take care.

July 23, 2022

Bird Post

 

I inherited my great Aunt Esther's collection of post cards and I used a pair of them to create a bit of mail art with some Stampendous birds.

One bird was stamped on plain tissue paper, the other on a vintage book page, and both were cut-out and pasted on the cards. I did this mainly because I could play around with the placement and avoid a mis-stamp that can't be undone. The pine trees and leafy dots were also done this way.

There's a bit of collage paper and miscellaneous stamping to fill things in and I tinted with colored pencils and ink markers.

I was inspired to make these by Simon's challenge this week, "Let's Go On Vacation!"

Both cards were mailed by Esther's sister while traveling through St. Louis (on vacation) and of course, birds are great travelers, too. 

Fun to see Ada was excited to report she procured a hotel room with a bath for $1.50.

My, how times have changed....

As always, I hope this post finds you well and happy and I appreciate your visit.

Until next time, take care.

May 21, 2022

Sweet Life

This piece was an exercise in texture using a copy of a vintage photo of my great aunt Esther (in the foreground) and a friend.

The photo was hand-tinted, mounted off-center behind tinted and embossed mulberry paper (Botanical Texture Fade), stenciled with script using texture paste (Finnabair Read My Letter) and anchored with tinted book paper and a piece of crochet. The embellishments include lots of hand and machine-stitching, dots of dimensional paint, a vintage button, satin ribbon streamers and a Remnant Rub.

I'm linking up to Simon's Add Texture challenge.

As always, I hope this post finds you well and happy and I appreciate your visit.

Until next time, take care.

April 09, 2022

Easter Greetings

Greeting Card

Welcome to a longer post today to explain my inspiration for this greeting card and to share some family memorabilia.

It was made with an old pillow case scrap and I traced a design that was machine- and hand-stitched, tinted with watercolors and framed on texture-embossed mulberry paper.


I took my inspiration from a collection of vintage embroidered postcards sent to my great Aunt Esther by her brother (my grandfather) from France in 1918 when he was a soldier during World War I.


The cards were made with machines that imitated hand embroidery and were provided with patriotic, romantic or religious messages. They were sent home by the officers and soldiers that lived and fought in the trenches of northern France. You can learn more about them here.




These were mailed in an envelope to protect them, were lovingly stored for more than 100 years and are in excellent condition. One has an inscription on the back which reads, "Dear Esther, the money enclosed is worth 17-1/2 cents American money. That's what these postcards cost a piece."

It's worth noting that my aunt was an avid postcard collector so I expect she was overjoyed to receive them. Though her greatest joy, I'm sure, was when the war ended and he returned home. My grandfather was very young when he served and the experience had a detrimental affect on his mental health.


My hope for Easter this year is to see an end to the war in Ukraine and I will pray for it.

I'm linking to Simon this week for their Easter/Spring challenge and my card will be mailed to my good friend, Thelma, who introduced me to card making many years ago.

As always, I hope this post finds you well and happy and I appreciate your visit.

Until next time, take care.

H A P P Y   E A S T E R !

July 23, 2021

Fudge

Manila Tag

Simon's challenge this week is Food and/or Drink so I rummaged through my great Aunt Esther's recipe box. I found a yellowed slip of paper written with pen and ink (obviously quite old, she was born in 1893) and it prompted me to Google the history of fudge.

Unlike many of your other favorite candies and treats, fudge is a relatively new product, dating back to just the 1880s. In fact, one of the first recorded mentions of fudge was in a letter written by Emelyn Battersby Hartridge, a student at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1886.

The exact origin and inventor of this delicious confection are hotly debated. However, many believe the first batch of fudge was created by accident when American bakers “fudged” a batch of caramels. Hence the name “fudge.” (Wockenfuss Candies)

I used her recipe in the background for this tag along with some Tim Holtz paper. The "ingenue" was an image transfer and I clipped the text from an old book.

My aunt's recipe is really basic and oh-so-similiar to the earliest versions and, since a portion was covered up, here is the transcription if you'd like to try it. ☺

Melt one cup of milk with two squares of chocolate or four tbsp. cocoa. Add two and a half cups sugar and one heaping tbsp. of butter. Boil eight minutes until it forms a ball when dropped into water. Add one tsp. vanilla and beat.

As always, I hope this post finds you well and happy and I appreciate your visit.

Until next time, take care.

May 02, 2020

Blue Skies



Does anyone know what day it is because I am seriously starting to lose track of time.

As one day runs into another during this sequester, I'm grateful for my hobbies which have recently grown to include playing the piano--something I haven't done for a while.

I've spoken about my two great aunts, Esther and Ada, and how I inherited many of their keepsakes. Ada was a college professor with a masters in Music and I have hundreds of pieces of her sheet music including the song "Blue Skies" by Irving Berlin.

That was my inspiration for this tag made to link up with Simon's Monday challenge this week because it is not a card.


I modified the image by replacing the wings, punching holes in them and scraping away the printing to lighten spots for tinting. I used a Gelly Roll and various ink pens to modify the umbrella.


The background is an image transfer that came from an old book page, I drew circles and made dots for the border and the text was produced on a vintage typewriter.

As always, I hope this post finds you well and happy and I appreciate your visit.

Until next time, take care.

November 24, 2019

12 Tags for Christmas 2019 - Twinkle


Making Christmas tag number two was a bit like decorating a cake! And since I used vintage buttons, I'm linking this one to Simon's Recycle challenge this week.


I began with a tag shape cut from some Tim Holtz Halloween paper (Abandoned) then I inked snowflake stencils with Versamark and embossed the shapes with clear powder.


The next step was to use a resist technique where you paint (or in this case, gesso'd) over the embossing and let it dry only slightly before wiping the paint off the embossed areas. Don't expect perfection with this technique--it's really meant for a distressed look.


My great Aunt Esther snipped many a button from her frocks over the years and I inherited quite a collection. I keep the little white buttons in one box and have another, bigger box with colored buttons in larger sizes. I gathered up an assortment and pasted them on.


I lightly tinted the background with Faded Jeans Distress Oxide and frosted the cake tag with glitter glues and dimensional paint (Scribbles and Stickles).


I always feel my tags need some kind of border. Since I used buttons, I reinforced the sewing theme by machine-stitching a mini zig-zag with green thread.

Stayed tuned for more tags--I appear to be on a roll--ha! Hope it lasts :-)

If you want to see my tags from Christmas pasts, here's a link.

April 12, 2019

Maurice Crooks


My Great Aunt Esther took a photo of a neighbor whose family was homesteading in Newcastle, Wyoming. She wrote his name and the date on the back--Maurice Crooks, August, 1921.

I made a copy of that photo and used gel medium to transfer the image onto a manila tag.


Then I used gesso to white-out some areas, blending the edges of the photo into the background.


Then I went about stamping and tinting and embellishing and came up with what you see here.


I know it's best not to put the focal point of a composition directly in the middle, but in this case, I threw caution to the wind since Maurice seemed to stand so proudly right in the middle of his family's meager garden.

I'm linking to Simon, the Monday challenge is "Down on the Farm."

December 18, 2018

12 Tags for Christmas 2018 - No. 10 & 11


I'm still looking back to Christmas tags from the past and I've saved some of my very favorite tags for when we get closer to Christmas. This is one of them.

The background is made from mulberry papers and the tree was hand-cut out of kraft paper that had been randomly stamped and embossed to create texture. I added the tinsel using glitter glue and a white gel pen.

The text was cut from a recycled store-bought Christmas card and illustrates just how far I will go when it comes to fussy-cutting. Crazy I know but I loved the style of the lettering and I was several years away from owning a die-cut machine.  Since the text was wider than the tag, I just let it bow out when I attached it to the bottom of the tag.


This one's a favorite because of the Thomas Nast Santa (an image transfer). It's an early example of learning how to blend Distress inks, how to emboss (the white scrolls) and how to use masks when stamping.

If you don't recognize the kind of stamps I used at the bottom of the tag they are called Christmas Seals. I inherited a small collection from my Great Aunt Esther, they're a terrific embellishment--I must remember to use them more often!

November 28, 2018

12 Tags for Christmas 2018 - No. 4 & 5

I started making tags when I discovered Tim Holtz and his blog at the beginning of December 2009 and got caught up in his daily posts for the 12 Tags of Christmas.

I had little experience stamping, didn't know about Distress inks, and his tutorials were very detailed and very helpful. I was mesmerized and I was hooked.

Tim has kept links to these posts on the sidebar of his blog and I recommend them to paper crafting beginners as a learning tool--they are so much fun!

I've decided to share a few of the tags I made during this period (before Beulah Bee) because I'm a little short on time this year and won't be able to complete all 12 new ones.


This one shows my penchant for paper-cutting even back then but before I learned to tint the cut paper edges with a darker shade of ink (so they would blend in better). Scraps of pages from an old German bible were pasted on the background.


I used the same image on this tag (photocopied from a vintage greeting card that belonged to my Great Aunt Esther) and embellished it with a stamp embossed frame using antique gold powder.

The background is Tim Holtz kraft card stock and the tiny stars were recycled from a store-bought card and tinted with alcohol ink.

I could never have imagined back in 2009 that this year I'd be short on time making tags because of working on projects for Tim's Idea-ology booth at the January 2019 Creativation trade show!

What a journey (thanks, Tim)!

There are links in the sidebar to my Creativation/CHA projects or Christmas tags from past years.

December 11, 2017

12 Tags for Christmas 2017 - Time of Wonder


Back in the day, Christmas postage stamps were printed using an elaborate process without benefit of the digital equipment we take for granted today.

And, sadly, a beautiful series of stamps commemorating great religious works of art is not something I'd expect the post office to take on in this day and age.

Thankfully, we have postage stamp collectors (philatelists) who preserve this vintage art form like my Great Aunt Esther who saved the one I've used for the tag I share with you today.


It was mounted in a little box I made that was lined with old book paper and sits on top of Tim Holtz Ephemera and a page from his Tidings paper stash.

The holly, pine branches and calendar page were cut out of that same Ephemera collection. It's mounted on a red satin ribbon and embellished with Rock Candy Stickles and Glossy Accents.


I used Folk Art gold metallic paint (good stuff) to trim the tag, box and text edges. For the text, I originally chose a Clippings Sticker but botched it up so I made a new one using another relic from the past, a typewriter.

Well, as this is tag number eleven (and also my favorite), I've only got one more to go to complete the set. It will be an homage to Tim Holtz if there ever was one and I hope you'll tune in!

July 17, 2017

Rejuvenation


This is my mother's recipe box. Kind of sad, huh? She would say, "The contents are more important than the container."

But it seriously needed a make-over and since the theme for Simon's Monday Challenge Blog this week is Get In Shape, I decided to give the box a face lift (and won't she be surprised?!).



First came a good scrub down--scraping off the white stuff (it was paint) and lightly sanding the entire surface to prep for painting with a "multi-surface" off-white acrylic craft paint.

Sections from the Wallflower paper stash were cut to size, matte Modge Podge was used to attach them and I gave the paper's top surface a protective coat using matte Perfect Paper Adhesive.


Using design tape from the Idea-ology Rose collection, I trimmed-out all the box edges. Even though the tape is quite sticky, I used a quick dry PVC adhesive (Aleene's Tacky Glue) to make sure it stays put.


More pieces of design tape from the Rose and Butterfly collections were placed randomly over the surface of the paper (ala-collage).



Final touches came from thin black satin craft ribbon attached with fabric glue along with a rhinestone button, rescued by my great Aunt Esther, and kept in a button box that I inherited.

The button was attached only to the lid so it can still be opened. Now all I need to do is make some new index card dividers. I'll let mom do the alphabetizing!


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I really hope you'll join us for this week's challenge--the theme is so versatile with endless possibilities. What will you come up with?

The creation you upload to the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge Blog will give you a chance to win a $50 voucher at the Simon Says Stamp store!


Here's a list of products I used for this challenge: