Vintage Shabby Chic Style

Vintage style Nature themed pocket

The size of the pocket is 51/2 by 73/4 inches. I made this for the Nature prompt May 2020 on The Mixed Media Emporium with Nina Ribena and Kylie Coo on Facebook

The pretty bird image is from Vintagebyme on Etsy. The pocket is made out of a manilla file folder that I cut to size. On the fold of the pocket, I added Tyvek to strengthen it and then I glued down both sides to make a pocket.

For the background I made a spray using a mixture of Distress Oxide ink in Vintage photo and Distress ink in Vintage Photo and added these to a small amount of water in a spray bottle and mixed them together, then sprayed the mixture over the folder and heat set it. When dry I gave the pocket a light coat of white Gesso this not only gives the option of being hand stamped on when dry it also adds strength to the pocket, I used a script stamp and randomly stamped that over the pocket.

Using pretty paper I hand-stamped in one corner to match the printed design on the other corner so it looked balanced. I then layered with a brown piece of patterned paper and then the bird image distressing the edges with scissors on all of these to give a shabby look. I added more cheesecloth around the edge of the layers and then glued everything down to the front of the pocket.

The paper flowers that I used were blue and purple as I did not have anything to match the project. I painted the flowers with copper paint so that they will match the rest of the project.

I used burlap fabric, cheesecloth and funky fibre yarn all in similar colours and arranged them so that they would look nice on the bottom right and top left of the image. I added die cut leaves that I had distressed with ink and glued those to the bottom right and the top left of the image. Then when the flowers had dried I glued those down on top of these.

Finally, I added lace trim to the top of the pocket and on the bottom of the pocket