Time Flies: A Steampunk Birthday Card

I love steampunk, especially all the gears and clocks and the imaginative mechanicals.  My brother-in-law also loves vintage clocks.  So for his birthday one year, I decided to make a card full of gears and a pocket watch.

I even made the gears movable.  It was a bit of a prototype for me, to see if it might actually work.  I made the gears out of cardboard, sometimes glueing multiple layers of cardboard together to make the gears thick enough that the teeth would catch each other.

The gold gear hidden under the black cardstock on the upper left side of the card was what you would spin to make the gears in the cut out move which would twist the arrow around on the pocket watch.

I used a lot of mixed media techniques with embossing powders, crackle pastes and inks.  I even let some of the original cardboard print come through on the green gear, to give it an even more distressed feel.

I also added a key that I distressed with a rotary tool and splattered with paint as well as a few metal Tim Holtz gears.  I finished it off with a banner with my saying "Time flies by..."

I love how this card turned out, even though the gears didn't always catch and turn each other.  It still looks wonderful!

Products Used
Recollections: Cardstock - black, white, kraft; Metal - keys; Brads - mini metallic, flowers  | Prima: Art Extravagance - copper crackle; Art Alchemy - metallique gold rush  | Ranger Ink: UTEE  | Tim Holtz: Distress Inks - cracked pistachio, tea dye, ground espresso, pumice stone, embossing ; Idea-ology - mini gears; Alterations: texture fade gears  |  Zing: Metallic Finish - silver  |  Other: pop dots

Happy Crafting!
Adrienne