Hold fast to dreams...

...for if dreams die, life is like a broken winged bird that cannot fly.

I'm very proud to show you my first altered project! I'm so ridculously proud of it. Mostly because I manged to silence that little voice in my head (coming from my mum) asking "what's it for?" and just going all out! It inspires me and makes me happy. Maybe that's what it's for? I've never tried it before so I never realized that could be the answer.

I started by having my new Whiff of joy stamp Willow catching leaves and a clear stamp set from Hero arts. Somewhere in my mind I put those two stamps together. I initially wanted to make a card, but it would be quite big so I decided to alter something. Luckyly I came across this box at a sale for $1. It has a clear sheet window that came off (probably why it was on sale). It suited me perfectly. I started by painting the whole box in brown shades with golden smears here and there (only shows on the back) I glued on a sheet of paper from old world stack from Die cuts with a view. I bought it years ago. It was sooo expensive so I've just used two sheets so far, lol. I added silky ribbons to the front edges with a buckle on the brown ribbon and lace around the sides.
Willow is coloured with my promarkers and I used different versamarks to colour in the birds before I embossed them with clear EP. All the flowers and cut outs are from a paperpack I bought a while ago. It's from Webster's pages called magical wishes & a sweet life.. Box measures around 18x20cm (7x8").

I made one of my custom made birds by cutting it with a qk die and embossing it with a CB embossing folder.Then I added "tailfeathers" by cutting up a flower and using three petals that I distressed and edged with red ink. I computergenerated the saying to fit one of my cuttlebug labels. The flowers are different prima with different pearls and blings added to the middle.

I added a metalcharm to the upper flower. It was silver in the beginning, but I alcohol inked it with "espresso" and "butterscotch" to make it suit the project better. Thought I was very clever with that. I remembered Tim (Holtz) saying you could colour anything in in the shade you want. I did the same with some of the middle pearls. They were very yellow golden from the start. I also added a decoration to the left flower and something else to the right. Can you spot the purple shrink plastic butterfly?

 

I'm entering this project to a Swedish challenge blog called handarbeta scrap that wanted you to alter something.

I hope you enjoyed seeing my project as much as I did making it. I'm definately putting this up somewhere in my corner.