Smell the roses pt. II

All right, my Etsy shop is back up and running again, with this sparkling little beauty up for sale. :-)

Another new fan

Here's my latest piece of work, based on the design from the most recent find in my collection of antique fans. A printed central vignette and patterns hand painted in white gouache and silver...

I must admit that the fairly sloppy painting on the original leaf was a challenge to reproduce. Modern metallic colours are generally much too thick to allow any light and carefree brushstrokes (to my great annoyance). 

Anyway, this fan is available in my Etsy shop today! More fans are in the making...  :-) 

A fan for all fans of the Queen of fashion

I just could resist the temptation of making a peachy pink Antoinette fan. Pink, black and silver sort of takes me back to the 1980s but despite being a typical colour combination of that much maligned period in fashion history, these colours really do go well together. And it's excellent for the 1780s too.

https://www.etsy.com/se-en/listing/241302619/18th-century-style-fan-antoinette

Smell the roses!

Wehey! I'm at it again... this new fan is all hand painted with a classical motif in the form of flowers (oh yes, there's always flowers: roses - pink roses, blue roses, forget-me-nots and god-knows-whats) and urns and sparkling gold sequins.

I matched the design with black wooden sticks painted with chinoiseries... While it is impossible for me to imitate elaborately carved and gilded sticks made of ivory or mother of pearl, these sticks are supposed to look exactly like what they are made of: namely black and gold painted wood.

Anyway, no matter how long you've been doing it, fan making is ALWAYS about trial and error (and inventing new combinations of ugly words), at least when you're not working full time in a fan factory in the 18th century. The thing turned out imperfect because of my experimenting with a new, super thin antique looking paper. Because of the thinness of the paper, I was determined to make a double leaf this time, which ended in a slightly wrinkled leaf... and major headaches!

I'm crazy for doing this sh**, year after year...

Anyway, this product of my enduring madness is still very pretty, and due to its imperfections you can get your hands on it for less on Etsy.
More fans (which hopefully will be perfect) are in the making... (why am I doing this?) ;-)

Dairymaid fan

Finally, there's a new fan available in my Etsy shop: yet another one of those simple but elegant 1790s style fans with a printed vignette. An original fan from my small collection provided the inspiriation as well as the print - I will show you that pretty little specimen in a later article...

Shepherdess fan

I just managed to finish yet another delightful, glittering little thing in late 1780s-1790s style (available for purchase on Etsy, as usual).

I have used a print in the vignette yet again... It's not that I'm lazy, but they used printed leaves a lot back in the days and it does save time for me. Still, this fan ended up as quite expensive because of all the work I put into the sticks, and the fabric covering on the reverse side of the leaf etc.etc.

 Oh yes, the Chinese bamboo sticks turned out to be a challenge... as is so often the case. I used "natural" (unpainted) ones this time, and in order to make them look a *little* more like real 18th century sticks I sawed off the annoying extra 2 cms of obviously-modern-Chinese fan-stick-length below the pivot... and sanded it to shape. I also had to take the whole thing apart to be able to paint the sticks in ivory colour - and put the sticks together again and replace the pivot, of course.

I do wonder why those sticks are never available in white. They are always black, unpainted or brown. Oh well...

Mint green music

All right, this is my latest fan... A print by Bartolozzi called "Music" is decoupaged onto a paper leaf in the delightful colour scheme of mint green, silver and black.

 Oh yes, it's another one of those decoupage fans... I still love lavish silk fans littered with sequins and embroidery et cetera, but unfortunately, making them is just too time consuming and unprofitable.

As a lover of music and most shades of green and silver (and black!), I might have kept it, but since I know that I can always make myself a new fan, I usually end up selling most of them off. So, the fan is available on Etsy together with a mended "Beauty&Love" from my last blog post.

Decoupage fans!

There were many kinds of decoupage fans in the 1700s, and among those, paper fans with punched holes imitating lace are common on many specimens from the mid-to-late part of the century. Fans with leaves of real lace with paper vignettes and figures decoupéed onto the leaf have also been seen, if not so frequently. (There is a common misconception claiming that lace leaves did not exist at all in the 18th century, which they did - but they were very expensive and are extremely hard to find today. See Katmax page on Livejournal for more info on the subject.) And as the 1790s approached, there were also fans with cut out prints, or engravings - often depicting classical scenes or portraits, which were sometimes hand coloured. The prints were glued onto the leaves, which could be made of paper, silk or sheer organza, and "secured" by sewn-on sequins around the edges. Sometimes the prints were cut into strips and mounted on brisée fans entirely made of intricately carved ivory or wood.

A simple and very pretty original fan found (and, alas, bought by someone else) on Ebay some months ago.

I have lately discovered that the simple decoupage fans with single, cut out prints are relatively easy for me to make, as long as I use a copy of an original 18th century print, a paper leaf and a modest amount of sequins. Moreover, the designs often match the simple wooden sticks that I have to make do with most of the time, very well.

So if you're into the fashion of the late 80's or the 90's, it is now possible to get a lovely fan for a very reasonable price, both as ready-mades and on commission - the prices for my decoupage fans start at $154 (1100 SEK), while you have to pay at least twice as much for a hand painted fan! By the way, to keep the prices at that level, they are normally delivered without boxes.

A nice cream coloured fan made by yours truly a week ago or so. The print is an engraving after Angelica Kauffman called "Love and Beauty".

The red Marie Antoinette fan below is for sale in my new Etsy shop right now (alongside the Louis XVI fan on the Ready mades/Sales page and some Gothic jewellery and related stuff).

New updates!

Anyone interested in what kind of materials / frames / lockets / fan sticks that are available at the moment? Just scroll down to the bottom of the "Portrait miniatures" or "Fans" pages. The "Prices & conditions" page is finally completed, and there is a silk fan for sale on the sales page!
:-)