Gothic Arches for Linda E

My partner this month on the OhmyGothic Yahoo group is Linda Eustace, the winner of the PW Quiltie Competition (see sidebar). Her only specification for the arches were vintage, love, romance and I can certainly do that, as these are my favourite subjects too. I combined her first arch with the LostArtCreations May challenge too. Terrie from LAC provides us with a downloadable image which then use in our challenge. This month it was a lovely soft image of a mother and daughter, dressed in dreamy, pearllike clothes. I printed this out onto photo paper and glued it onto one of my fabric/paper collaged backgrounds which features roses and other romantic images in rose-like colours. I added beads to their clothing to look like pearl and added the fabric text La Alegria (Joy) from a now discontinued Artchix Studio sheet, and surrounded that with size 15 pink seed beads. At the bottom I glued on pink Dresden scrap (also from Artchix Studio) and one was also added at the top. These were also adorned with the same seed beads. The card was mounted onto felt and oilcloth and all the layers are connected with pink satin stitching.

I used the same fabric/paper collaged background for Linda's other arch and on this arch you can see I also used some stamping in the background. The Love text stamp was a free gift from the Craft Stamper magazine. To this I added a fabric image from one of my very favourite Alphastamps collage sheets, called Lovers and vintage text which reads: Do I not Love you?

The whole arch was mounted as described above and to the pink satin stitching I added size 11 pink seed beads. At the very top I added a very decorative brad (available from Alphastamps).