alphatags Q and R

 The alphatag challenge on Chocolate Baroque is definitely getting harder now - not so much having the idea to go with the letters, but having stamps that fit the ideas!
I did have several options for R  and eventually decided to use this image of a roman from a very old discontinued plate - don't know which one, as I got it as part of a grab bag of stamps about 2 years ago. The small floorplan stamp in the background also came from the same grab bag. The tag was inked with distress inks after stamping the small stamp to form a background using versamark and clear EP as a resist. After the first couple of layers of ink I ironed the EP off and added more DI, but quite a bit of the resist effect still remained, rather more than I had hoped for to be truthful. The Roman was stamped and embossed in black onto white card and coloured with DI again before cutting out and adding to the tag - tag edges were distressed and inked with vintage photo and black soot.
The Q tag was far harder - I had thought of using a stamp from the peacock lady series as a queen, but ran out of time. In desperation I used the proverb stamp from one of the bird plates, embossed it in black EP, tore it out, added some quick sponging of distress inks, mounted it on a piece of paper from the echoes of italy paper pack (real desperation there, as that pad usually just gets stroked!).
Hopefully I will be more aware of the time next month - amazingly I wasn't the last to post my tags- all I need to do is find the stamps, which will involve a major clear-up operation. Not all my fault, I hasten to add - after several on-going computer problems, ending up with bits of 3 computers spread around the room, my son snapped and bought me a new computer - quite a culture shock from the rebuilt collection of hand-me-downs I am used to! - said he needed to do it to save his sanity! I do have the room to tidy up though...........which will not do wonders for my sanity..................
The last pic is of the two tags I received last month - the colour combination certainly woke me up when I opened the envelope! OMG! orange overload came from Joan Carnell and the peacock from Lavinia Tuck - 2 more gorgeous tags formy collection, thanks ladies.

alphatags O and P

 why does Blogger suddenly decide that all text has to be in blue and underlined?  It has taken me ages to get it back to normal, and I thought I was having trouble getting photos from Photobucket!!!!These are belated O and P tags for the Chocolate Baroque alphatag swap - I ended up doing them in such a rush that I dumped them in the post without taking any photos . Fortunately Margaret our swap organiser takes photos of all of them to add to the Ning site -only snag was she uses Photobucket, upside is that I could grab the pics from there to add here (eventually)I cheated with the owl tag - the background was a spare tag I didn't use for  N, with the owl added. Owl was stamped and embossed with detail silver EP and coloured with DIs in various blues, cut out and stuck on with glue gel.The poppy was the one I started out doing  - the poppy was stamped in versafine and coloured with pencils. then coloured over with a versamark pen and clear embossed. Post-it notes were stuck round to make a rough square shape which was sponged with DI to create a background - I used 2 greens and 2 blues, but can't remember which ones now. I just moved the postits about to make the patchwork effect, and stamped a couple of small stamps randomly into the other squares, if that makes sense. The stitches were roughly scribbled in with a fine line pen.

Have now managed to add the  previous  swap tags I received  - N for nature from Sheila and M for masquerade from Margaret - sorry, ladies, the pic doesn't do the glittery dimensional masks justice or the muted colours of the nature tag either.