Smile!

I am not the world's greatest photographer, I do have a decent camera but it is always set on automatic. These days most of my snaps are taken using my phone and some of them are great. Its so important to compose your shot and get the light right  because without those two things being in place all the fancy equipment and Photoshop trickery is a waste of time.

Having said all that, I do love old cameras from the fifties and sixties. It's a time when photography was becoming accessible to all and companies were fighting for a share of the 'cheap and cheerful' market with ever more colourful plastic creations. 

Some of those cameras look fabulous today, I even have a private Pintrest board dedicated to 1950's consumer goods featuring many such cameras. It makes me smile!

And so to today's blog, Sizzix have just released a new collection of Bigz dies designed by the good people of Echo Park. I had so much fun with these big, bold shapes while making projects for our trade shows and they are perfect for appliqué too. But today is all about the camera die.

Today I have used the Bigz camera die, the Thinlits alphabet set Alphanumeric and the Textured Impressions Butterfly Lattice set. Click on the highlighted text to see the individual products.

I started by die-cutting all the elements to make up my camera, the main body and the focus ring are backed with mount board to add a little depth to the shapes. I love this dusty pink, it's one of those classic American 1950's colours which I love so much so I used it for the body of my camera. as you can see, I embossed the pale metallic gold card with my lattice folder, it gives the perfect gold anodised look so popular at the time.

I trimmed about 5mm from the top of the embossed rectangle and mounted it onto the brown rectangle before attaching to the main body of the camera.

Next, I added the other elements. I used a hole punch to pop out a tiny pink circle which I added to the lens to create a highlight effect. 

While I was taking the individual letters from the Alphanumeric die set I had a revelation! I saw a word within a word which changed my approach to the whole card. I cut a rectangle of the lovely retro green/blue card and rounded off the bottom corners with a punch before placing all the letter dies across the base spelling the word 'SMILE' before removing the letter 'M' and 'E' and passing it through my Big Shot machine.

I die-cut the letters 'M' and 'E' from the pink card and attached them to the rectangle using thin strips of adhesive foam to add dimension. Next, I used my trusty Dymo machine to print out the legend 'YOU MAKE...'  above the word 'SMILE'; the 'ME' of course is part of the word. 

Here's the finished card, I think the Dymo strip adds to the retro vibe? 

it makes me smile anyway!