Flourishes Gothic Arch

A new theme this week on the Gothic Arches Challenge site, set by Kelly Burton and it is Flourishes. As you know I was the hostess last week and had the hard task of selecting my favourites among the Vive la France arches. It was so difficult as there were really beautiful arches to choose from and I finally settled for my favourite 10. I just could not whittle it down even more!

Flourishes set me thinking and I combined it with my new Alphastamps kit (I'm a member of the Alphastamps Design Team!) which featured a lot of images of my very favourite fairytale Sleeping Beauty, also called Briar Rose and in Dutch Doornroosje which I feel is a much more descriptive title than Sleeping Beauty. It signifies that there are no roses without thorns and harks back to a much darker interpretation. Most fairy tales started their life that way and were sanitized over the years and are still being changed even more in these politically correct times, taken most of the fun and the scare out of these tales which are part of our social heritage. If you go to the relevant Alphastamps page you will find recommended books at the right hand side. Click on them and you get taken to Amazon! I find it hard to resist and have ended up with most of these recommendations and haven't regretted it yet!

On to the arch! The background started life as a fabric/paper collage. I started off with a piece of calico (muslin in US speak) which I pre-stamped with a selection of Alphastamps stamps, among them the Architecture Clear Stamp which you can just see peeking through! The collage was cut to the arch shape and stitched onto felt. I added paper images from Alphastamps Sleeping Beauty #1 collage sheet. Both are from the same image but I've cut them apart to arrange them better on my background. Sleeping Beauty and her prince were surrounded by felt self-adhesive flourishes (also available from Alphastamps). I added size 15 and 8 seed beads to the figures.

I looked up Flourish in my books of quotations and was very happy to find: And all things flourish, where you turn your eyes. It seemed suitable both for the flourishes theme as well as the fairytale. Finally I stitched the arch onto watercolour paper with gold thread and added a gold border to the arch with a Krylon pen.