March Make it Crafty~ CT Anne "Tin Can Alley"

I live in a city where metals tarnish and rust very quickly due to the high sulphur content in the air (remember the Clown's holiday in boiling mud pools?  They're only 30 metres from the building I work in).  So spotting this Rusty Can House  in the Make It Crafty website, I just "had" to have it.
You won't believe it from the picture, but I actually printed it on cream-buff card!  Such are my camera & lighting skills :(

But of course it looked so bland a background, I stencilled a coggy-cloudy background, dabbing ink from dye ink pads in a range of rusty colours.  THEN I needed a frame.  Well, I'd already thought about that before deciding how large my digi was getting printed out.  I would want heaps more rusty stuff around it, so another 8"x10" box canvas would do marvellously.  I painted it black before putting a layer of Viva Decor's copper crackle over it.  It crackled wonderfully, so I used Liquetex Pouring medium as a finishing coat in case some of the crackle wanted to crack right off.

Later on I added all the gold chain - after using it to "mop up" some drops of alcohol ink from my craft sheet - Jacquard's Pinata inks, in burro brown, mantilla black, and Passion Purple.

Someone had recently posted about bead wrapping in a way that inspired me to do my own take on "Mary Mary quite contrary" 's garden - instead of silver bells & cockle shells...

Those are split pins (or cotter pins) instead of a head pin.  Gives them legs instead of a stem :)  The skulls also glow in the dark.
Other corners of the frame needed creeping up (sorry, shouldn't that be "dressing"???)

Die cuts, bits of diecuts, the lid off a self-opening can, the spring off a broken clothes peg, some rusty wire mesh, all layered  just the way Finnabair taught us!  Well, sortof.  Just the sort of junk you'd expect to find round such a ramshackle house.  The other corner got a bit more "lethal" (And now the photo is here, I can see something else is needed where the mesh is glued down... learn from my mistakes, please!

Glow-in-the-dark snake is carrying his larder round on the OUTside, instead of inside, though it must have eaten one for a skull to be coming out its rear end!  The diecut cog was cut from a beer coaster promoting non-smoking - you can just about pick out the work "cough".  More rusty wire mesh can be folded into a more "floral" shape, and the people are tied on with rust-coloured crinkle wire - all 3 are courtesy of my shopping cart at http://silvercrowcreations.com/

And a hearty thanks to http://www.makeitcrafty.com/ for providing the inspiration for the project.

(Yep, the parent's front steps have monarch butterfly caterpillars crawling over to check it out!!)