April tags

 The Chocolate Baroque technique tag challenge for April was to use stencils, and these are the two I finally decided on.
The first one was a variation of the tag I did for the Chocolate Baroque birthday colour challenge. This one had a base of distress inks  - wild honey and spiced marmalade - stamped with stamps from wild meadow in the marmalade and tea dye inks. I sponged the edges with vintage photo, then sponged versamark  through the sweet poppy stencil before embossing with a copper EP. The small flowers on the cow parsley stamp were coloured with a white gel pen.
I have loads of various masks, but none that seemed to fit a tag, so resorted to the Clarity tree stencil. The tag was coloured with distress inks again, this time using the ink stamped onto a craft mat, spraying with water and mopping up the ink with the tag - this particular one was done some time ago, and I can't remember which inks I used now. The stencil was the wrong way round for the effect I wanted, and I didn't fancy sponging versamark through the stencil, so decided to try a technique I saw Sheena Douglas using on tv recently.
I brushed the glycerine over the stencil, then added clear embossing powder, heated it while keeping two fingers firmly crossed -and it worked, although the glycerine did creep until the stencil round the edges. I sponged chipped sapphire over the tag to darken the trees then wiped it off the embossing, so I got my darker trees against a sky. The wise  owl was stamped over another inked tag with versamark and embossing with lava black EP , cut out and sat onto punched branches.