Attic Exploration Junk Journal by Jane Chipp!

Attic Exploration Junk Journal

Hey, everyone! Jane Chipp of Willow Blue Vintage, one of our amazing Junk Journal Design Team Members, created a fabulous Attic Exploration Junk Journal for us this week. As you know, we feature one new Junk Journal project each week created by one of our creative team of artists. Our Design Team Members select from the 100’s of Vintage Image Bundles on our Premium Membership Site, for their creations, in order to show you beautiful ways to use those images. We hope you will be totally inspired by this series!

Therefore, please make sure you check out the video tour at the bottom of the page…please scroll all the way down to see it. Are you ready to be inspired? I will step out of the way and let Jane tell you all about her lovely project…

This month I decided to make a journal that gives the impression of a rummage through an interesting old attic; uncovering forgotten treasures such as old family photographs, papers and bits of fabrics from precious old clothes. If you’ve seen my previous journals, you will know that I’m a huge fan of textures, and this journal is crammed full of them!

I used the Antique Portraits, Instant Ancestors and Digi People bundles in the main and used my favorite mixed media techniques to add in paint, vintage papers, stitch, antique fabrics, wax and dried flowers.

The journal is an altered book so my starting point was to glue some of the pages together to make them stronger and add collage and gesso over the top as a ‘blank canvas’. I covered the book with some handmade leaf prints, pieces of handwritten letters, fabric and an image from Antique Portraits #2 that I painted and stitched into.

Inside, the book is so full that it bursts open. I’ve added in a variety of old papers of different weights and textures such as:

• rice paper and tissue paper that I have printed with lace and leaves
• transparent protective papers from antique photograph albums
• botanically printed rice paper and khadi paper
• old book pages
• an 1898 letter

In order to give a cohesive feel to the book, I’ve mainly used a color palette of sepia shades and dusty mint greens and repeated a small stencil print of delicate leaves throughout.

I printed the Graphics Fairy images onto a variety of papers such as tissue, rice paper, textured khadi, printer paper and photograph paper. Using photograph paper enabled me to create some very antique-looking photographs that I added authenticity to by using a deckled edge cutter and painting a border on to some of them. I placed some of the photographs in envelopes made from stained rice paper, as if they’d been stored in the forgotten attic.

Throughout the journal I used pieces of antique lace, silk and chiffon (that came from an old wedding dress that I bought at an auction), sometimes to decorate pages and sometimes as the base for images to be transferred onto.

On a lot of the pages, I used an image as the focal point of a mixed media spread using paints, gold leaf, collage and wax and dried flowers or seeds. I made a tag that is like a mini photograph album with an image of the Eiffel Tower, and will be shown as one of the handicraft tutorials on the Premium site soon.

I experimented with printing some of the images onto photograph paper, layering them between fabrics, lace, leaves and paper and boiling them. It was a surprise that they came out a pink color and ,pleasingly, took on some of the lace patterns.

ATTIC EXPLORATION JUNK JOURNAL SHOW & TELL VIDEO TOUR

Let’s take a tour of it together:

I hope you enjoyed looking through the journal and that it’s given you ideas on how to use some of the beautiful bundles. I’ve listed below the ones that I used:

• Instant Ancestors – both bundles
• Antique Portraits – both bundles
• Digi People
• Delicate End Papers
• Mini French Ephemera

Plus, a few images that I found by searching for photographs on the free section of the website.

The journal will be available to buy from my Etsy shop along with a couple of notebooks that I have made with a similar theme. https://www.etsy.com/uk/shop/WillowBlueVintage

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Thanks for reading!

Jane Chipp

Check out the Graphics Fairy Premium Membership Site HERE!