'Recycle for Christmas'

Hi, time for our next challenge over at ATP exchange and this time Yvonne is hosting it. With the festive season nearly upon us she has come up with a great challenge theme and is asking us to 'Recycle for Christmas'. It could be a box, a piece of packaging....there are lots of possibilities.

I decided to alter a star shaped bottle that I've had for years and could never quite decide what to do with but certainly didn't want to throw it away. It's about 6.5 inch/16cm high and originally contained some liqueur....which was a Christmas present!

I have been wanting to try Tim's Faux Cracked Glass technique for a while now and the idea developed of creating 'something' inside the bottle. The technique is the only part I won't explain as it can be found in Compendium of Curiosities III. I'm quite pleased with it as it's my first attempt....the only thing I will say is that as it's a star shaped bottle with many surfaces I probably should have tried doing a surface at a time, not the whole lot at once!

Firstly I used the houses from the CI 257 set to stamp onto a circle of tissue in black archival, then tore around the edge and adhered to the back with matte medium. On the front I masked off a circular area before covering the whole bottle in faux cracked glass.

I did use a lot of WV cornflower blue archival ink as I wanted a really intense colour.

Whenever I use shrink plastic I always think why don't I use it more often....I love it! At first I was going to make stars but then realised that stars belong in the sky not below the houses.  I found a snowflake stamp that would be small enough to go through the 1.5cm neck of the bottle....I do like a challenge. The star and text embellishments were made with PaperArtsy stamps (ID07 and Xmas plate 1)

There are 5 snowflakes suspended inside the bottle. I also applied some PVA to the edge of the circle and applied glamour dust before colouring with blue archival.

The cork was split and holes made in the top to thread the metallic thread through. A crackle effect was applied to the cork using frescos in space cadet and antarctic with PaperArtsy crackle glaze. I finished the cork with a button from my stash that I gilded with sapphire treasure gold.

Hope you enjoyed your visit, please do hop over and see the wonderful creations of the Design Team, I'm sure you'll be inspired and we can't wait to see what you'll recycle! Thanks as always for stopping by.