The Altered Alice CHAPTER 1 - Week 4: Too Tall or Too Small!

We are in the final week of the February challenge at The Altered Alice, so be sure to submit your projects before 8:00 p.m. EST (GMT -5:00).  I will announce the winner of the drawing for a $30 gift certificate from Stampotique Originals, our generous sponsor! While it is not required that your creation use Alice in Wonderland, we do encourage it! Entries that feature some aspect of Wonderland will have their name put into the drawing twice.

Carol of Stampotique very kindly supplied the design team with some free stamps to show off! I chose mushrooms and my friend and fellow design team member, Terri DeVine, chose Jasmin. I love the Jasmin character and thought she would make an awesome modern day Alice, so I used Terri's stamp at our weekly stamping get together!  Actually the first thing I thought was "check out those SHOES!!!"  I thought it would be a lot of fun to make one scene with the mushrooms where the Jasmin Alice was so small that she was lounging in the shade of a mushroom, and another with those fab shoes at a large scale so you would know she was now huge! I love to draw, so I drew some shoes and legs!

I made the "Too Small" version first. Take a look:

On white card stock, I stamped the Giant Shroom with brown Memento ink and Jasmin in black. Both were colored with Copics, and the polka dots on her dress were made with the colorless blender. I used a Copic Mulitliner to add a hair ribbon to make her a bit more Alice-y! I wanted to create a sense of depth, so I made the background more muted by stamping the Mushroom group onto kraft card stock. They were  colored with Copics and the grass was created with flicking motions of the marker. The Giant Mushroom and Jasmin were mounted with foam tape to give some dimension. I love how they look closer because they were stamped on white, so the colors are much clearer and stronger.  I distressed the edges with my newest toy, the Zutter Distrezz-It-All! I love how easy it is to tatter the edges, which I then sponged with ink.



Now, aren't those insanely high-heeled boots even more fun when they are big? I drew the boots and stockings with a black Copic Multiliner pen and colored them in with Copics, using my favority "shiny shoes" shading technique, and cut them out. When I mounted them on the kraft background, it did not look right having the legs showing all the way to the top of the panel, so I drew a skirt. I colored it with Copics and used the colorless blender to move the ink to make polka dots, making sure to make the dots themselves much larger in scale than the "too small" version. I put foam tape in the center of the skirt to pop it out more over the legs, but glued down the top and left and right edges of the skirt flush with the page, which looks so neat as the skirt bells out over the legs!

I decided a little tabletop bi-fold would be a fun way to present these. I had orginally thought to make them into two separate cards but they really belong together! I cut the second from the largest Grand Label Four nestie on my Cuttlebug using black card stock, trimming the lower point off to make a straight bottom edge. I purchased the extended 13-inch long plates online when they were on sale, so I can cut all but the largest die in this set on my Cuttlebug. I don't have the Grand Calibur. I have been longing for an electric Vagabond die cutting machine, but then they came out with the oversized Grand Calibur and I love that large platform.  So now my dream machine would be a Grand Vagabond!!!  The Grand Calibur fits the new Grand nesties but it will not accomodate the Sizzix Bigz dies. The Vagabond fits the Bigz but it won't cut a Grand nestie larger than what I can already do with my Cuttlebug! What to do? I can't afford both, nor do I have the space for two machines!

I wanted some labels saying "Too Tall" and "Too Small" so I adhered aluminum HVAC tape to card stock and used a Karen Foster Click-It tool with the add on Alphabet dies. I colored in the depression of each letter with a blue Copic marker and trimmed them out by hand. They were mounted with foam tape over a ribbon I had glued to the black base. The kraft panel was glued on, and the panels were hinged together with strips of gingham ribbon and more glue. It still needed something, so I stamped the "Alice" at the top of each panel with white pigment ink and embossed it with clear powder. This worked out just as I had hoped - the clear powder softened the bright white of the pigment so it is there, but not attention stealing. A bow was glued on to match the brown and white gingham at the bottom; both were colored with a blue Copic marker to change the color.

I hope you enjoyed my funny bi-fold display!  Please leave a comment, I love hearing from you and your comments make it all worthwhile. Go to this post to see the amazing creations from the rest of the design team during the final week of the February challenge, and be sure to get your own creations linked by Friday!