Doors ATCs

The theme for my monthly ATC swap was "doors and what's behind them."

Here is the front of the ATC I created:

The front of the ATC, the door itself, is made from scraps and odds and ends of sticks of friendly plastic.  I just cut all my scraps into smallish pieces and laid them all out onto a craft sheet, as close together as I could get them. I took another craft sheet and laid it on top, and ironed them until they melted together into a an A4 sheet approximately half the thickness of a friendly plastic stick .  I guess you could use a skillet for this if you have one, but your sheet would be thicker.  There were small gaps, so I added some more pieces of friendy plastic and ironed again. 

I then used a Spellbinders ATC die and my Wizard to cut ATCs form the sheet of friendly plastic. I rubbed the ATCs all over with olive bronze Treasure Gold, to hide most of the mixture of colours of friendly plastic. Each ATC was then laid onto the craft sheet, heated with a heat gun, and stamped into with the diamond patterned stamp (Invoke Arts).  I allowed the friendly plastic to completely cool before removing the stamp, and added more olive bronze Treasure Gold to give good coverage, then used renaissance gold Treasure Gold to highlight some of the raised areas. I punched a hole, then added a bead cap and brad to make the door handle.

Here is the what's behind the door:

The door is hinged with organza - the friendly plastic was carefully heated down one side and the organza was pressed into the warm plastic.  I then cut pieces of very thin wood sheet (maybe this is marquetry veneer?) to size, inked them to age them, and stamped them using the same stamp as the front of the door, before sticking them to the friendly plastic with red liner tape. The other part of the organza hinge was trapped between two layers of card stuck together with red liner tape.

The backgrounds of the inside were created using the layered paint technique as detailed in a previous blog post.

I cut this background into ATC sized pieces, stamped the words onto some paper from a very old book and glued them onto the background with gel medium.

Why 'Pieces of History'? Well, all the elements of the ATC are pieces of my history.  The friendly plastic was all left over from other projects.  The layered paint technique was learnt at Art & Soul during a fantastic trip to the USA back in 2007, which is part of my history.  It was painted onto a base of cardboard bpxes which used to contain one of my favourite smoothie ice lollies, and the book pages used for the words are from an old book which I have had for a long time, again part of my history.