PARIS IN SPRINGTIME

 Welcome to the April Linky Party

 I have been lucky enough to have gone to Paris 4 times and it is a wonderful experience in the springtime or any other. From the minute I saw this Crafty Secrets Eiffel Tower I knew I would love making it. It is easy to assemble and looks amazing. The stars kind of aligned for this project as a group I belong to decided to do a French progressive dinner and Really Reasonable Ribbon and Crafty Secrets partnered for a cross promotion this month. Our design team received this gorgeous ribbon and Crafty Secrets provided the RRR design team with some of our goodies. I used the aqua shade of the ribbon (3rd from the right) to do a black/aqua art deco colour scheme of the Eiffel Tower and placecards.

The package you see pictured below is the  April Club Assortment. It was a pleasure to work with and tied so perfectly. It would take days of shopping to find ribbon that coordinates so perfectly. You will be seeing a lot of this ribbon on my projects. I am so impressed with this company, the package you see here is a sampler package but if you fall in love with a ribbon you can buy either by the yard or the entire spool at a discount. This is perfect for hoarders like me! It nearly killed me to use every scrap of the aqua ribbon. You've got to check out the RRR site as they sell many more things than ribbon, and as a bonus they ship the same day or next day. 

The aqua shade was a perfect colour for this art deco period piece.

For my tutorial this month I would like to show you the adaptations I made to the tower and some tips for assemblage. Start by printing off four images of the tower. I maximized the paper and made my tower 12" tall so I could use it as a centre piece. The only adaptation I made was to 3D it even more by reworking the 2 decks. In the photo below you will see the image on the left has the deck cut off the sides while the image on the right has it still intact. Cut the deck off all 4 images.

Cut pieces of 2 sided tape (Sookwang) and place on all the tabs. The tower is very small at the top and it's tricky to get your fingers in the small space so attach the tabs at the top on all four images first and then work you way down the tower. It gets less fiddly as you move down the tower. I then printed off 4 towers slightly larger than the first set and cropped the two deck areas as shown below.

Cut these deck levels with tabs on the edge as shown. To make the decks score lines at the floor level of each deck then score a second line slightly below that. Mitre the edges of each piece as shown below

Now attach the four sides together so you have something which looks like this.

Now slide this onto the tower and when you have the placement correct tape it into place. Repeat this for the second deck. Now what I did is a little insane! I wanted the tower to sparkle so I took graphite coloured Stickles and traced every line on the tower. It could still use some more sparkle so I added rhinestones. Here's what I ended up with.

So now I have a gorgeous sparkly Eiffel Tower and I'm ready to decorate it with flowers, ribbon, and a banner and my husband, who likes it so much he shows it off to anyone who comes in the house says "Oh no don't mess it up with flowers". I decided to make the decorations detachable so I could change the colour scheme or downplay the "pretty" appearance for a more masculine group.

The banner starts at the top and reads "Springtime in Paris". The top spray of flowers and banner are glued to a detachable pick and it winds its way around the tower to the bottom which is also attached to a pick. 

TOP FLORAL SPRAY

MIDDLE SPRAY

BOTTOM SPRAY

I made all the flowers and fleur de lis for this project using a variety of sizzix and Memory Box dies.

When I finished the tower I thought I should also make some placecards so I printed eight much smaller Eiffel Towers and hand drew the art deco edge styled after an old menu from the era, actually a menu my Mom had saved from a steam ship my parents had travelled to England on. I fussy cut the towers and placed 3 tiny rhinestones on each one. I coloured them with H20's so there is a bit of a sparkle.

Now it's your turn to dazzle us with your creations! Please use Crafty Secret products in your project if you want to be eligible for the grand prize  and as the theme is "Anything Goes With Ribbon" use ribbon or trim. It doesn't have to be an RRR product. You can link your project up to both ours and RRR's blog. Our Linky Party's fun lasts until April 19, and RRR's fun lasts until April 11. If you don't have any Crafty Secret images we have a pretty paper and a seasonal image for you to download and use. The lucky winner of the $25 gift certificate will be announced on April 22.

Please visit the rest of the design team to see the beautiful projects they have created.

Kathy Clement, DT Leader http://www.kathybydesign.com

Darlene Pavlick, Dar’s Crafty Creations   http://darscraftycreations.blogspot.com/

Diane Hover, Nellie’s Nest  http://www.nelliesnest.blogspot.com

Ginny Nemchak, Polly’s Paper     https://pollyspaper. wordpress.com/

Gloria Stengel, Scraps of Life   http://gloriascraps.blogspot.com/

Melody Clement, Paper Melody’s   http://papermelodys.wordpress.com/

Michele Kovack, Thoughts of a Cardmaking Scrapbooker  http://chelemom.blogspot.com/

Shantaie Fowler, Inking Pink http://www.inkingpink.com/

Sheila Rumney, Sheila Rumney Design and Photography,  http://www.sheilarumney.com/

Thanks so much for visiting my blog

Cheers, 

Elizabeth