Bizantine Art Inspired Christmas Ornaments

Merry Christmas my dear friends!  

Well, that special time of the year full of love, joy and hope has arrived.  It's a season of celebrations, tasting delicious traditional meals and beautifully decorating our houses.   I particularly enjoy the last two very much.    Decorating home is my thing and mostly always with a vintage style.  

Today I share a simple but beautiful project:  Bizantine Inspired Christmas Ornaments.  

Besides the Bizantine and Orthodox Images, I took inspiration in their church domes shapes, and I thought it would be nice to combine both and create special and beautiful ornaments either to decorate the door as I did in my building, or to hang in the Christmas Tree.

Vintage Decor: Animal Drawings Canvas

Hello my friends! For today's project I must admit that I do not know much about hand drawing, I actually am very bad at it, like if I want to draw an elephant, a cow looking animal would probably come out of my attempt.  So I must help myself with already beautiful drawings that I can find in old books.

This time I wanted some animal drawings on a rustic canvas to decorate my wall.  Horses and Dogs are my favorite animals so I found in my Dover Publication Books collection two beautiful images that I could definitely use on this project: 

Two small canvas wall art using the transfer technique.  

 

And arranged on a dresser with few other decoration pieces, it gives a new life to a boring corner.

The process is really simple, here is what you'll need:

Vintage Halloween Cupcake Flags

Halloween is really around the corner this next weekend, but No Panic!!, there is still time to easily print out some creepy flags to decorate your cupcakes:

Easy peasy!! I made these cupcake flag graphics using old black and white book illustrations on an orange grave's headstone shape.   The rest is just a nice setting of the table with halloween items that I already had around the house.

Vintage Library Look Dresser

Wherever I go, my eyes are looking for vintage items, or vintage "looking" items, and I saw this beautiful Library Look dresser in a local store at Multicentro Mall in Panama city.  

It was the last piece in the store, so I begged for a discount to take it home, it really got me crazy, so finally I brought it home with me to my room:

I love the library style it has, very unique with a nice vintage look.   I put all my decoration books inside.

Have a nice week,

Erika E. 

Vintage Men's Hat Sign

Good monday friends,

Walking around our old quartier in Panama City (Casco Antiguo), I saw this nice vintage sign for a Hat's Shop.   A nice example on how to use vintage graphics, I loved it, a very creative sign.  

Happy Crafting!

Erika E. 

Decor Accents for a small living room

My dear friends and readers, it's been a long long time since last I posted.  There has been ups and downs along the way that did not allowed us to continue creating.  However here we are once again with all our best intentions and positive vibes to return with more decor ideas, crafts & more.  We will be posting regularly as we get the new creations done.

We have also started already posting new free vintage & retro graphics and images in our blog: Retro Scrap Freebies for all your crafts and inspirations.

Today, I will share some pictures of my small living room, which I have decorated with some retro accents combined with some modern pieces:

A vintage lamp that I rescued from my aunt's house, some modern pillows from a local store, one vintage frame I got in Moscow and a Tuscan small landscape.

I had available also a small old chest, that I filled with pine cones and vintage birds, and next to it I added some beautiful plants with flowers. 

Finally one vintage style clock and few other decoration items.

In all few accents here and there, a fresh paint in light blue and gray colors made the difference.

Have a nice weekend & enjoy crafting,

ErikaE. 

Downtown Antique Paris

My dear friends & readers, here we are back on track sharing new projects & new images in our blogs Boulevard de L'antique:  Crafts & Decor and Retro Scrap Freebies.  We have been working on new ideas that we will be posting very soon.  

If you follow our blog you will know that we like to create “decoupage scenes” in many of my vintage boxes, scenes that might tell a story or picture a landscape.  This time my mind flew to the streets of Paris back in the 1800’s, and this is what I imagined "Beautiful ladies walking on Saturday evening on a street by a hill from which you can see in the distance the Eiffel Tower and even a zeppelin across the sky"

For this project I wanted to combine the techniques of Decoupage and Image Transfer, so the background buildings, the Eiffel Tower and zeppelin are done by transferring the images and the ladies with decoupage.

I kept the inside of the box very simple, just stamped some vintage graphics related to Paris in black ink.

Vintage Typography Dairy Sign

I love Vintage Typography and all the creative projects that can be done with it.  Angie from Knick of Time did a wonderful job by making this beautiful Mini Sign using my Dairy Business Card from our Retro Scraps blog.

I am so excited to share with you this project she has created.  The Dairy Business Card she used is one of two we have posted in november last year and you can find them HERE, and to check Angie's Post visit her blog: Knick of Time.  

Enjoy your weekend,

Erika

Retro Fashion Bookmarks

As we have mentioned before, in our workshop we also like to dabble with vintage graphics and create digital compositions and collages with different graphic elements that we have available in our collection.  Keep in mind is not on a professional level but just for fun.  We have designed some nice Retro Fashion Bookmarks.     To download the Digital Designs, visit our Retro Scraps Freebies blog or Click Here for the direct link.

Once you have saved the bookmarks in your computer, print them on thick paper or cardboard and protect the print a little bit with an ink fixative in spray.

Proceed to cut them with the scissors.

Then punch the top of the bookmark where you want the thread or lace to go and voilà! Easy work, you are done!! 

In few steps you get unique RetroFashion Bookmarks or Tags that you can use in your projects.

I hope you liked this project, thank you very much for following us and being part of our fans, we really appreciate it.

Have a wonderful week,

Erika