Taking Liberties with Steampunk

I was recently asked to make invitations for an annual event for the Young Women (Girls ages 12-18 in my local congregation).  The president had a loose idea for the theme "something about time" and had some assorted vintagey papers with roman numerals and pocket watches on them, and some clockwork-related embellishments.

Um, a project with vintage clocks and time theme--(I could make that so totally steampunk, I thought), "Yeah. . . I think I can handle it" I said.   

So I had fun making some blatantly steampunk invitations, that to the casual observer just look kind of funky and vintagey.

If you'd like to recreate something similar here's how I did it:

The steampunk font I used is Penshurst downloaded free from dafont.com.  I love, love that it comes with both a bold and a shadowed version of the font.  I find fancy fonts almost worthless if there are not options for layering the font visually on a page.  I used the shadowed and plain versions of the font for headings and text of these invitations.

The clock faces are the second one on this page of clock faces from The Graphics Fairy.   I just shrunk the image to different sizes according to the assorted sizes of the spinners. 

The game spinners mimicking clock hands are from the Idea-ology line by Tim Holtz available at Hobby Lobby, though I couldn't find the roman numeral clock face papers she gave me there when I looked later, but I assume that's where she got them.   

Finally, the really cool steampunk clockwork and gear corner graphic I downloaded from the Sum of all Crafts.  There are a ton of really cool graphics in that post--it was hard to choose which one to use for this project.  I had Jeremy take it into Adobe Illustrator to turn the graphic brown for me to not have as much visual weight as the text. 

I wish the clocks could have stood out a little more.  I needed some of those squishy foam stickers I guess to do that. (Yeah I didn't have any of those.) I also wish I had a circle cutter, because trying to cut out circles by hand created a less than satisfactory result.  But overall.  I love the project.  I had a lot of fun working on them and are pleased with how they turned out. 

I'm in charge of programs for the event too.  Hopefully they'll turn out as well..