Junk in your Steampunk Trunk

Hi there everyone.

I am so excited to introduce to you the amazing Belinda of Bella's Scrappin Place.

With an originality of note in her creative enterprises and inventiveness in her approach to art materials, supplies and tools - she quickly caught my admiration in the crafting blogworld.

I always love reading her blog, where she makes and shares fantastic things.   I was thrilled to find out that she is a fellow South African like myself and that she teaches art and craft at her studio in Cape Town.  Recently she has joined the U-stream circuit and made her creativity and ideas instantly accessible to anyone, anywhere.

Without taking much more time I am going to hand over to her to amaze you with what she has come up with. I know that you are going to love it.

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I am very excited to be invited here as Guest Designer by Candice and accepted her challenge of using the Junk In My Trunk!

All I can say is that I must have been a magpie in a previous life!  I cannot pass by an interesting object or product without it coming home with me for the sole purpose of making something out of it eventually.  I am always on the lookout for things I can use in ways that were never their original designers intention!

Therefore, I have various trunks from big to small to scratch through for this project.

I eventually settled on my mini trunk of keys and my general trunk of useful items to raid for this project.

As an art teacher I land up with many sample canvases which I have used in my day to day classes to show paint techniques on, so I decided to recycle one of the 12"x12" ones into a steampunk creation using the "DIY" straws which I found at our local Mr Price Home Store in the entertainment department.  When I bought them about a year ago, I knew that they needed to become copper pipes on a project, quite when that was going to happen was debatable, until Candice invited me to do this challenge!  Sometimes one just needs a little nudge to get going!

They are meant to be used for drinking straws as a fun party idea.  However, after a light coat of copper spray paint they soon looked like real tubing!

I then set about laying out the cogs, clocks and various items I had in my stash to see what needed to be glued down before adding some distress paint.  The white clock is a Sizzix die by Tim Holtz and the manila cogs are by Spellbinders.  The embossed clock is a Couture Creations folder called Renaissance which I cut out by hand after embossing it.

Below you can see the wet distress paint which I added over the top of the glued die cuts.  The paint looks very different when it dries.

Here is my mini trunk of keys.  I took out my two favorite ones and made a silicone mold of them and poured some polyurethane into the molds and made my own keys.  This way I can use them again and again and again!  The brown ones in this photo are the originals and the white ones are the molded ones.  The nice thing about the molded ones is that they have flat backs and glue down so easily to a canvas or project.

I used ordinary acrylic paint in raw umber to paint the keys and then when they were dry, I lightly brushed them with some Inka Gold gold cream paint by Viva to bring out their textures and patterns.

Once the spray paint was dry on the tubing, I used a paint brush with my distress paint in Gathered Twigs and Black Soot to give the pipes a more aged look at each joint.

Having made all my embellishments, I glued the whole lot down and added some rusty buckles and studs from my general trunk for added interest as well as some distress inked and Rock Candy crackled Tim Holtz Sizzix cogs cut from left over mount board for added texture and depth.

I could make a canvas/project a week for the rest of the year and not use up all the junk in my trunks...I think I feel a personal challenge coming on!

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Holy Steampipes Belinda, I had no doubt that you would come up with something incredible but this just blows my mind. What an amazing transformation.  I can hardly believe you took that and made it into THAT. Totally loving it.

I hope that seeing Bella's wonderful Steampunk creation will inspire you to come along and play with us this month.  

Remember, we're looking for creations made with JUNK items - lets see them remade into works of beauty!

You have until 28th March to play - and you'll find all the challenge details here as well as lots of inspiration from the brilliant Our Creative Corner design team...

Happy Crafting!