Sundry Wars & Alliances

Here is my entry for Belinda Schnieder’s Gothic Arch Challenge.  This is the first one of them, & the topic is school days.  I am hoping to make a little deco out of them creating covers & using rings to keep them together (that way, if the project goes on for awhile, I can just get bigger rings!)

For me, among other things, school days were filled with rivalries & cliques… little bands of students that had loyalties to particular interests or genre’s…….there were the ‘sport nuts’; the ‘typists’; ‘the photography kids’; ‘the smokers’ –  this became more apparent particularly as groups of teenage girls got older & more (but in reality – less) worldly wise, with varying reputations, people aspired to be a part of one group or another.  The background for the front of the arch was made from an old school gazette Jen Crossley shared with me last time she was down. (Thanks Jenny) Although I would usually cover more of it with other collage elements & more colour, I actually wanted to be able to read the text, that it was from Melbourne, Victoria.  It is dated 1891.   I have stamped it with one of Michelle Ward alphabet stamps from her architectural sheet in Stazon Timber Brown.  The back is painted with Golden Violet Oxide & stamped with a Stamper’s Annoymous collage stamp.  The blue is a spirit soluable dye in Methylene Blue.  I used this because I love the strength of colour achieved with complete transparency…….it is actually used for staining timber……..BE CAREFUL if you are using this…….A LITTLE goes a long way!