2019 #11 Retro Colour Palettes: Nostalgia with ECF {by Jennie Atkinson}

2019 Topic 11: Retro Colour Palettes

For Jennie this is quite a colourful post! Love how she builds such stunning layers. This painty background and the way the light catches it is a delight! ~ Leandra

Hi everyone, it's Jennie (Live the Dream) with you today on a trip down memory lane! 

I started my paper crafting life scrapbooking memories and I still do, although in a more mixed media journal way rather than the classic layouts of the past. What I do love about scrapbooking is hunting out a photograph and letting it speak of the past. 

After pulling together some 70s colours I got stuck into an old album to find photographs of the period which brought back so many lovely memories. So my project contains many little evocative references to 1975 when this photograph was taken ..... yes its me! 

I have used Courtney's fabulous leaf stamps as I felt they had a real retro feel and added a little background stamping with a mini.

ECF06

Mini 23

These are the Fresco's I pulled together which to me evoke the 70s - it was a good mix of opaque, semi opaque and translucent which led me to get the gel-plate out.

Pumkin Soup, Autumn Fire, Bora Bora, Brown Shed and Toffee (although in the end I didn't use the Toffee).

This was quite a mix of colours so I started with a frame of Bora Bora ...... 

...... and took repeated pulls adding a little colour at a time, along with a little stamped interest. You can see how I brayer in all directions ... !

And this was the final result which I loved - it reminded me of some of the early Basic Grey papers!

I am never too confident stamping directly onto background papers I have taken a little time to make and which I know will never come out right again. So I always stamp on tissue so I can experiment with placement.

I used the mini numbers stamp to fill in some of the spaces around the tissue edges which merge so beautifully into the background.

In the photograph I am wearing a long cream linen dress which had a Belgian lace top ... the bees knees at the time (I still have it!). It was bought from a little French shop which had just opened in the town. So in keeping with these memories I used French script paper, a little lace backed by pieces of muslin which was also very fashionable for those peasant tops at the time. The little wooden button speaks of the period too.

I cleaned my brayer on some left over Smoothy Cardstock which gave me a lovely surface to stamp the leaves in Tsukineko Versamagic White Chalk Ink - the circles on the leaves and flowers a reminder of the orange and green retro circles on wallpaper and dress fabrics.

This really was a lovely project to pull together and brought back so many wonderful memories. I always start my scrapbook projects with the photograph and let it sit for a while on my desk as it is amazing how this triggers tiny little events, colours or emotions. I prefer my scrapbook memories to speak to me in colours and little bits and pieces of embellishments rather than long sections of text journaling. The finished size at 5" x 7" also sits nicely in a standard photograph frame allowing me to enjoy the finished project rather than having it stuck in an album.

I hope my explanation of my process and thinking for this project might prompt you to look back in time through a photograph in order to create a project which is personally creative and nostalgic.

As always thank you for joining me today.

Jennie x

Blog: Live The Dream