Mixed Media Monday: Home Sweet Home

Here is my entry - albeit a few days late, for Mixed Media Monday challenge. This week's theme is "home sweet home". I recently picked up this photograph at Oakland's East Bay Depot for Creative Reuse. It was a small snapshot of a vintage white clapboard house with an inviting front porch. When i saw this week's theme - i knew this was the perfect subject for the art.

But what to do with it?

First I scanned the photo into my computer, so i could print it out on matte photo paper, in a larger format, 5" x 7". Then i sanded it a bit to rough it up and make it more vintage looking. Sadly the sanding smeared some of the black ink - but it created a cool effect - like a fading newspaper article clipping.
Now what to add to the house? A person would be perfect. I looked through my stash of vintage photographs. Not digital images, actual black and white photographs that ended up in my hands, a non-relative. Probably like all my photos will end up, seeing as i have no children to take them!

I found this little girl. Her name is Edith Blanche and she is 26 months old, according to the script on the back.

Next the photos needed some kind of base or frame. How about sheet music? I wanted to reiterate the theme of home-sweet-home. Wouldn't it be cool if i had a song with that name? Well sure enough, in my trusty 1941 song book, there it was. But it was too short - so i enlarged it on the printer and dissected it so that you can see the last line - which as you all know,Dorothy made famous, "There's no place like home".

I layered that onto some of my favorite Venetian scroll paper, and put that on top of some deep teal textured paper. I am not sure if this will end up being framed, or maybe in a shadow box - so for now it is lightly glued onto 9x12 water colour paper.

But the "zazz" on this piece comes from the 3-D window frame that i have been dying to use on a project - and on this it is just perfect! Edith fits exactly behind the frame. A cluster of vintage millinary flowers and a seam binding bow create a flower box.

I am not sure if this is "done". Maybe needs some more embellishment? like buttons or something metallic? Let me know what you think!

thanks....