Gothic Arch #12 Fabric

Hello! Well, DH has done a herculean job of getting the computer functioning with everything I need (photo editing software and blog capabilities, and email). Other things are even working too, like word processing and spreadsheets. It's always a lot of work getting a home computer all loaded up with things. Anyway, it seems to be ok now and I am ready to post.

As I've mentioned before, I'm a big fan of the blog Stamping Mathilda, and it was there that I learned of the Gothic Arch challenge on Inkurable Stampers. I thought I'd start at the current challenge (#12, Fabric).

Sidebar on drawing a Gothic Arch:

Before I got started, though, I needed to draw an arch. I googled "How to draw a Gothic arch" and got quite a few hits. The first one was more for artists who actually want to draw these things and was three pages of art terms and math. Moving on.... The next one was "Mathematics and mysticism", which was quite intriguing. Turned out to be a lot of math, not too much mysticism and a basic explanation of how to draw these things on large blocks of stone using a pencil and a piece of string. Undeterred, I read on, to discover that I could draw a circle, with a square inside, and draw evermore complex geometric shapes with tremendous precision and eventually wind up with a Gothic arch. However, since I am not a medieval mason building a stone monolith that really shouldn't collapse due to slipshod arches, precision isn't quite that important to me. It turns out that if you draw two intersecting circles of equal radius, the intersection will give you a Gothic arch (fig. 3 in link above). So that is what I did. (And once again I am grateful to DH for being an engineer and having kept his super duper Staedtler [sp?] compass from drafting class). If you don't have a compass, you can rig one up with string and two pencils. I had also thought that tracing a Nestability circle would work, but I didn't need to do that. I made an arch from scrap cardstock that is my template for all of them.

Back to Stamping!

The challenge was to incorporate fabric into the arch, so I stamped my image (Sunshine Designs, The Stamp Barn) onto some aida cloth that I pinked with shears. I coloured the flowers with Tombows, reinforcing the line with my microliner. I embellished it with embroidery (stems) and beads. I didn't have yellow beads, so I used clear and coloured them with a yellow Copic marker.

The background is Almost Amethyst (SU), stamped with a wonderful vintage image of a marriage certificate (Heather's Stamping Haven, and this stamp is actually Heather's own grandmother's marriage certificate! neat!!!). I also added some larger words about cherishing, etc. that are from a Darkroom Door set.

The navy panel is navy metallic paper, run through the Victorian Cuttlebug folder and rubbed with black paint (Adirondack) and then rubbed off so the shine only shows on the raised portion. I rummaged through all my buttons to find this perfect one that says "Paris" on it and tied a crochet cotton bow throw it.

Here is a close up of the button

bit. I normally don't go in for these arbitrary closeups of things, but I am really in love with that button, so if you have made it this far through the blog, I will reward [?] you with a close up of it. Also you can see the stickles and the stamps on the embroidery a bit better too. The photo isn't great, or at least my photo editing skills are not great. I have this superfabulouswonderific software that is 1000x smarter than me and I have no idea how to use any of it. Everything is in technical terms that mean nothing to me and every step is broken down into tiny, tiny steps involving thousands of clicks so that you can customize your every quasar. All this to say is that I ain't bright 'nuff to figger the durn thing out.

Thanks for stopping by! I have several more arches :-)

Check out the challenge, and maybe try it out yourself! Warning: you will get hooked :-)