#Cre8time brings Flight to a Vintage Illustration... by Isabel Villarreal

Hi there crafters! This is Isabel with my latest artistic endeavor. And trust me when I tell you that this project was long overdue! This is packed with lots of pictures to show you how a little fabric, some clay and nail polish can help breathe new life into an old papyrus illustration. You can do this with any unframed piece of art or even precious photos.

An Egyptian Winged Scarab brings
new life to an old papyrus illustration.

In 1987, my older brother was fresh out of basic training with the US Navy and headed to Egypt for his first assignment. Lucky for me, he was able to get some tourism in while he was stationed there, and, knowing of my love for anything Egyptian, he returned with this papyrus drawing along with some other items. Since then, this papyrus has been stored by my parents and then moved to various states with me before finally being rediscovered about 8 months ago in a box of random items during my latest move. I found it in it's original plastic sheath, thankfully undamaged, though the plastic was now dull, shredded and pretty much falling apart. Yes, after 27 years of being shuffled around and put into various boxes, it's definitely time to dust it off and get this illustration properly displayed on my wall.

I really like to use fabric in my projects as often as I can, so I went over to my trusty fabric stash and after some searching, found these 2 pieces that I think work well together and with the papyrus theme and colors. I chose a black woven fabric with gold dots and a Batik print that reminded me of lotus flowers. 

Afterward, I went through my art supplies and found this piece of foam core that was the perfect size for a background. I won't be using the foam core for this project, I'm just using it for the size. It will work as my template when I'm cutting the fabric pieces for the background later. Once I had my size and fabrics selected, I put the fabric and foam core aside while I worked on other parts of this project.

In order to add a little "something" to this piece I made this open winged scarab, representing rebirth and renewal, to use as a decoration. I thought the symbolism was appropriate for this project. The scarab and wings were made using sculpey clay. I just rolled it out flat and, using the point of a sewing machine needle, I etched the clay surface, cut out the shapes with an exacto and baked them for about 7 minutes in a toaster oven. I really fell in love with this and immediately thought of some other projects I could use the scarab in so I didn't want to use it and then not have it for other things.

This is when Amazing Mold Rubber really comes in handy. I can use Amazing Mold Rubber to make as many duplicates as I want so I don't have to make a new scarab set for every project. I found a box, lined it with clear packing tape to make final removal easy, and used hot glue to hold the 3 pieces in place. After mixing up some Amazing Mold Rubber, I poured it into my lined container and left it to set while I went back to play with the fabric. Please CLICK HERE to view mixing/preparation.

I started with the Black woven fabric. Turning the fabric face down, I placed the foam sheet on the fabric and cut it slightly larger than the piece of foam. I cut it a little larger so that I would have spare fabric to fold over along the 2 longer sides of the fabric, leaving a raw edge at what would be the top and bottom of the fabric frame. After folding and pinning the sides, I placed it on the Batik print and cut a piece to the exact size of the folded Black fabric. The Batik fabric will also be folded and pinned along the 2 longer sides. These 2 pieces of fabric will be layered and act as the background on which the drawing will be mounted.

Next I cut a second piece from the Black woven. I turned the fabric face down and placed the papyrus drawing on top, this time cutting the fabric slightly larger than the papyrus. This fabric piece will be used as a frame to hold the papyrus in place on the background fabric. When the papyrus was positioned exactly the way I wanted it on the fabric, I used pins to mark the corners and edges of the piece, then drew lines about 3/4" smaller than the marked edges.

Once the lines were drawn, I carefully cut along the lines and flipped it over. When I placed it over the papyrus- VOILA! A fabric frame! I love it when things work out as I planned. The frame overlaps the illustration about 3/4" all around and will hold it in place on the background, without using adhesives or damaging the papyrus in any way.

Now pin the 3 layers of fabric together making sure they lay nice and flat...and sew! The finished product should look like the image on the right after you finish sewing. The illustration will be inserted in the center Black frame. I'm showing it here without the papyrus illustration.

During the sewing part of my adventure, the Amazing Mold Rubber cured, YAY!!! The sculpey pieces came away with the rubber when I removed it from the container, but that's okay since it will only make it easier for me since I don't have to scrape the original pieces off the bottom of the box. I was a little worried that some of the finer details would be lost, but Amazing Mold Rubber captured every intricate detail of the wings!

Here I used a small soft brush to coat the mold with Alumilite Gold Metallic powder. You can really see all the beautiful detail I was able to capture with Amazing Mold Rubber! At the last minute I decided to also use part of a mold I made for a previous project-a trinket box with a scarab on top...for this papyrus project I only wanted the scarab, so I made sure to coat only the part of the mold that I would be using.

Time to break out the Amazing Clear Cast Resin. This is a 2 part resin that is mixed using equal parts {click here to view mixing/preparation}. Once the 2 parts are combined, the mixture will be a little foggy. Just stir slowly for about a minute or until the mixture is clear. Once it was properly mixed, I put a couple of drops of Alumilite Black Dye (literally! A couple drops of this dye goes a long way) into the mixture then poured it into my molds and left them to dry. The black dye is to give the castings a little opacity. If the resin is left clear, the metallic looks a little translucent and that is not the effect I was going for. I wanted these to look like carvings with gold leafing.

The next morning I removed the cured resin from the molds. They look great, but I really want to make this scarab pop. Nail polish to the rescue! I picked out some vibrant jewel tones and went to work using a small brush to apply the nail polish to my resin castings. Gorgeous!!

Finally, I folded the top and bottom about an inch and sewed it, leaving the sides open then slid a dowel through each opening. My open winged scarab was attached to the fabric above the papyrus illustration and my last-minute scarabs were added to the bottom dowels using E6000® adhesive. This is now ready to put into a shadow box on the wall.

My favorite part of this project was the challenge of coming up with a way to frame the papyrus in a non-traditional way and, I have to say using Amazing Mold Rubber made it easy for me to create the eye catching scarab details I needed to make this fabric frame different and AMAZING!!

What AMAZING things will you make
with Amazing Mold Rubber?

I'd love to see what you create! Please upload and share your creations to the

User GALLERY on the Amazing Mold Putty Website for all the world to see.

~ Isabel Villarreal

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