Guild card

After much mucking about with 'clever' ideas that weren't- and a heap of scrap in the bin - I decided to stay simple for the card to send to a fellow -member of the Graphicus Guild

in what is becoming an annual swop, thanks to Moira's organizing abilities.

Having devotedly followed the 12 tags of Christmas on Tim Holtz' blog, I felt that a tag had less opportunity for being ruined, and the tags featured seemed to have the blessed ability for a rescue job at several stages! So I dug out my last few remaining tags from the stash I bought when Woollies closed last year, my new distress ink pads and the cut'n'dry foam, and proceeded to get inky.

Following Sir Tim's instructions, the tags were first inked with a base of old paper, then with splodges of peeled paint and fired brick inks. It looked a bit messy, but a lot better after overstamping with the pine needles from the retro holidays set by Sir Tim in vintage photo ink - somehow this sort-of merged into the background and muted the colours nicely - I then inked the edges of the tags with black soot ink. Until reading the blog I hadn't realised that the distress inks could be embossed - I did heat dry the first two, but the ink was still wet enough to pick up the embossing powder, although they felt dry. The next two sat on a storage heater for the afternoon, and were much better, although there were still some stray specks of powder that I didn't notice until it was too late!

The tree stamp was a Graphicus Guild one, and embossed with white detail powder, and the sentiment was by Elusive Images. The tags were finished with a scrap of gold ribbon, mounted on a piece of paper printed from the Artylicious Seasons greetings cd (the lovely smudgy holly set) mounted on a gold card - the pattern down the side of the card usd the pine needles stamp again, this time using brilliance black ink.