I have wanted to display some scrapbooked elements in my Tearooms for some time as I thought it would be nice to embellish the place with some hand made decoration.

Obviously I want to stay within the theme of all things tea related and/orVictorian (as it has a Victorian Theme to the tearooms), and so I made this layout to reflect a bit of both.

I took the photograph the summer we opened (2010) of a tower of mixed teacups that we have here and have kept things very simple in design with the emphasis on the photo and the collection of embellishments to add colour and texture.

The patterned paper (from My Minds Eye) is ‘doing the rest of the work’ in the background.  The extended mat for the photograph has been distressed around the edges and lightly inked, a fave technique of mine and includes feint pictures of Victorian ladies to add to the vintage feel. That was from a 6×6″ collection pad called ‘5th Avenue’ by Melissa Frances.

The title has been printed onto a piece of scrap coloured paper. Here is an article on how to do this at Triple The Scraps Blog.

Here is a closeup of the butterfly…

You may notice that it’s glossy… yes I have had the Glossy Accents out!  I cut the butterfly from another piece of paper from the same collection as the background paper and covered most of it in Glossy Accents.  I only ’striped’ the liquid on the wings from centre to outer edge to give some difference in texture, and I wasn’t sure if the fairly thin paper would take a complete covering of the stuff anyway!

Also the Gloss finish has deepened the colour of the butterfly, as it always does, so that’s a bonus.

You can just about see on the main picture, that on the bottom left of the embellishments I have included a teeny cup and saucer.  This I stamped onto shrink plastic and after heating has shrunk to a cute little embellishment.  I stamped quite a few of them actually and have added them to beads to make bag and phone charms which I sell here in the tearooms.  There is a little bit of Glossy Accents on those too, just to seal in and intensify the colour.

I’m currently in the process of  ’fiddling’ with a deep frame to put this layout into so that it can be hung on the wall.  I will tell you how I managed it using an ordinary frame (ie not one bought as a box frame thereby a lot cheaper, even more so if you buy a ’seconds’ frame!).