Christmas tag

I am a big fan of Tim Holtz and have been following his blog. He is demonstrating some techniques using tags for the first 12 days of December. I finally got around to trying one of the projects. I had the most important stuff he used for this technique already and then improvised what I didn't have. So far this the only technique that I had all the important stuff for. The technique uses alcohol ink, alcohol blending solution and glossy card stock. He also used some cool stamps, beaded ribbon and Heidi Swapp ghost snowflakes. I don't have any of those so I used fiber, ribbon, brads. stickles and a piece of plastic packaging. Here is my tag, I am not fond of the stamp and I think I wish I wouldn't have used the Stickles. I don't have any of the beaded ribbon (I want some now though)so I used some fiber and ribbon to make my own trim. I ran a line of adhesive along the bottom of the tag then put three rows of fiber down and a piece of inked ribbon. Then I just added brads on top. The only choices I have for local shopping are JoAnn and Michaels. Neither have Heidi Swapp stuff. I have never seen the ghost stuff in person. But it just looked like clear plastic die cuts to me. I figured I'd try to make my own ghost snowflake. I have some grungeboard that I hadn't played with or even opened yet. The package is pretty big so I opened it, and cut off a hunk of plastic that was the size of a Sizzlet snowflake die. I used my Cuttlebug to try to cut the plastic but instead I got a nice embossed snowflake on clear plastic. I ran it through four times too. So I used my Cropadile to punch the circles, Exacto knife to cut the inside parts and scissors around the outside. It was more work that I wanted to do but I think it came out pretty good. From there I just followed what Tim did his snowflakes. I think if I had a Sizzix die I would have been able to cut the plastic. I am going tomorrow to look for one and to get more alcohol inks and some of that beaded ribbon. I had lots of fun making this tag but it took a very long time. It was the first time I had used the alcohol inks that I bought over a year ago. Now that I've done the technique, I am sure next time it will go much faster. I always do things slow the first time around. The only problem I had was when I first made the background it was too dark. I tried stamping on it with archival and Stazon inks and neither looked good so I erased it with the blending solution - how cool is that! I ended up using lots more blending solution to lighten the paper and when I tried stamping again it came out much better. That's about it for now.

Don't worry too much about what lies ahead. Go as far as you can see, and when you get there, you can see farther. Until next time, God bless.