Compendium of Curiosities 3 - Challenge #17

Linda Ledbetter of Studio L3 and her design team have posed Challenge 17 is all about altering Tim's "Woodland Trees" and/or holiday tinsel twine as shown on Page 60 of Compendium of Curiosities 3 (If you buy this book, you can see Tim Holtz's approach yourself.). This challenge is sponsored by Inspiration Emporium, who, along with TIm Holtz and Mario Rossi, are offering prizes to winners of this challenge. But even if one doesn't win a prize, one wins anyway just by entering: using Tim Holtz's prompts and ideas is a way to unleash one's curiosity and creativity! I'm loving this series of challenges!

(Apologies: This posts is rather picture heavy)

I opted to alter trees as I had a few of the larger ones in my stash and tinsel twine doesn't fit with my final design concept (pretty high-falutin' way of describing how my brain works!). I dabbled around with several ideas, including frames, before I settled on a diorama base that could work within an existing "Christmas Village" set up that I have had since we lived in Houston, TX! Basically, the village was a collection of small white porcelain ornaments in the shape of various styles of houses, including a castle, a church and even a barn! I bought every one of the little houses I could find back in the 80s and removed their gold cord hangers (unfortunately that left holes in the roofs but, so far, the "residents" haven't complained!). I then arranged them on some quilt batting and scattered glitter, silver beads and even a few clear crystals around to give a wintery look (Once I even used spray snow but it didn't "work") . When we moved to Ohio a decade later, I found three little copper wire trees just the right size for my village at a jewelry consignment and snapped them up too. A study in white with a little bling:

It seemed to me that Tim's trees would fit right in and my goal was to create a "platform" so I could raise some of the buildings above the others, giving the landscape more "texture" as it were. So I dispatched my husband to find wooden plaques about the size of a saucer; he came home with a selection of different shapes and sizes. I had planned to use these two:

putting snowflake-patterned paper (Hot off the Press' Paper Pizazz HOTP-20026 "Snowflakes") on the flat side of one:

and glue and screw it to the back of the other, sort of like a bookend. But after consulting with my husband again (he's the son of a contractor and handier with tools than I), he suggested using an oval plaque:

instead of the rectangular ones and using heavy cardstock that could wrap around the base and could be glued and tacked down without having to trim the base. So the rectangular plaques went back into my stash and the last of the snowflake paper (I was lucky there - it was my last sheet of 12 x 12 snowflakes!!!) was glued (with Matte Medium) to a piece of heavy dark navy cardstock and trimmed to fit the back "half" of the oval plaque.

After several attempts with different types of finishing nails (the paper kept tearing), we settled on thumbtacks:

and finished the job with a healthy dose of white glue:

The result, an oval plaque with a snowflake "sky" behind it:

Next came the woodland trees. In these challenges, we don't tell how we do the techniques in TIm's book; you need to acquire a copy if you want to see the details. But I can say I used three colors of Distress Spray (Peeled Paint, followed by Stormy Sky and then a light application of Brushed Pewter). I think it gave my trees a little variation in color like a real tree would have, as well as a faint shimmer, especially on the tips of the branches:

A little Glossy Accents and a healthy application of Stampendous Fran-tage glass glitter (silver) and I have three blue spruce with a fall of icy snow (a fall that has permeated my work space as well! Glitter seems to hate me!)!

Another application of Glossy Accents (I LOVE, love, love that stuff!) to the bases of the three trees and the plaque, and the trees were installed with quilt batting tucked in around them:

(I left the batting untrimmed in font so it could melt in with the batting for the rest of the village scene, but I did trim the snowflake backing to get rid of the hard corners)

We (husband and I) auditioned the church, the farm buildings and a castle and finally settled on the castle (they are always above villages, right? At least they were in Germany and Hungary and...).

Now, for the set-up. I cleared the glass shelf in the nook at the head of the stairs on the second floor and searched out a couple of small boxes to perch the plaque on (settled on an Avon gift box with a checkbook box in front of it to give a stair-step effect). Once placed on top of the Avon box, the apron of batting that I left untrimmed covered both boxes, allowing the castle and its gates to be placed, as well as some of those "crystals" to simulate the icy boulders strewn about the cliff face create by that now invisible Avon and checkbook box system!):

The the city streets were arranged on the left foreground with a holiday tree in the city plaza:

the church and village cottages, and another holiday tree created a village green scene in the middle:

and the farm house, the barn and the old mill joined the third holiday tree (definitely a candidate for a smaller woodland tree)  on the far right:

(Husband says it needs more trees but I was never able to find smaller trees when we lived in Houston and I think the woodland trees are a tad tall for those tiny village houses; he says he will look for some smaller trees at hobby stores where model railroaders go)

I then rearranged my Romanian folk musicians (and their Hungarian guard) on the shelf above and taped one of my Hawaiian souvenir woven wire stars to the shelf so it hung over the scene. (A silk Poinsettia arrangement, some ceramic figurines and my camel collection remained on the shelf below...)

So there you go --- a wintery "village" which has been tweaked, added to (from our travels) and upgraded with a Oompendium of Curiosities Challenge!