Anything Tim at A Vintage Journey

Hi everyone and welcome to a special post celebrating the 1st birthday of A Vintage Journey. Can you believe it's been going for a whole year already! And there's lots to celebrate - for a start we are excited to announce that Trace 'Inkypinkycraft' is back with us, hurrah! and we have a new Creative Guide joining us, Shari Trumbull from 'Ain't That Artsy Fartsy', brilliant!

More news, the challenge schedule is being changed quite significantly; there will now be ONE challenge per month with the winner chosen by random.org so ANYONE who enters could win. The prize is being doubled by our generous sponsor, Country View Crafts, to a £20 voucher! The Creative Guides will continue to pick a top 3 'Pinworthies' and they, along with our challenge winner, will be invited to join us as Guest Creative Guides. A special guest will join us each month and even the Destination Inspiration posts are getting a makeover (more on that to come... )

To celebrate our 1st birthday the theme is 'Anything Tim' and there are some VERY SPECIAL PRIZES up for grabs, but you'll need to go over to the AVJ blog to find out about those. 'Anything Tim'... means vintage, shabby chic, mixed media and journalling projects that have a Tim Holtz influence. Will it be his techniques, his products, his tags, books or videos that you choose to inspire you? Whatever does it for you remember to link up to the challenge blog to be in with a chance to win!

Now for my Tim thing... this is a bit of a different colour scheme for me isn't it! It looks kinda complicated but in reality it's quite simple to achieve, making use of the new 'Flower Garden' stamps, 'Mixed Media' Thinlits dies and Tim's 'Distress Watercolouring' technique from the Compendium of Curiosities III. So how did I do it... (remember, just click on the photos for a closer look)...

For a long time I've been mentally willing Tim to release flower stamps and this year he seriously came up trumps - these 'Flower Garden' ones are simply perfect - thank you Tim! I stamped the leaves, stems, and flowers in Distress Ink and then watercoloured them following Tim's instructions. You'll notice there are no black lines as I wanted them to be softer and more realistic, and do you like the Abandoned Coral ones? This colour has quickly become one of my new favourites. With the floral bouquet 'painted' and fussy cut I picked out a section from the Wallflower paper stash but it looked a bit too detailed and I realised it was only the flower part that needed to be seen. Bring on the Mixed Media Thinlits. It was great to partially remove sections without simply tearing them away as it allowed me to add a coordinating Distress Coredinations background that wasn't just a matting layer. Of course as it is a birthday celebration a Simple Saying was totally appropriate.

Told you there wasn't much to it! You could of course go mad and add extra embellishments, but for me this felt balanced and complete. Thank you Tim for lots of inspiration, education, great products and sharing your passion for creating. Now it's time to let Tim inspire you. Head on over to A Vintage Journey to see what my fellow Creative Guides have been up to then you'll need to enter to be in with a chance to win one of the very special prizes up for grabs this month.

I'll be back tomorrow with my regular IndigoBlu spot and hope you can join me for that. In the meantime take care of yourselves. Jenny xxx