The T tag was the easiest to do, as I had an old tulip stamp, which was stamped in black versafine, clear embossed then coloured with pencils before cutting out and adding glossy accents - it took longer waiting for the glossy accents to dry than anything else. Background tag was white, sponged with DIs - mostly antique lined, with bundled sage round the edges - I do like distress inks for quick backgrounds, I find them a lot easier than the pan pastels. I coloured the tulip stamp with very elderly Whispers markers and stamped three times across the tag - I was trying to get a very faded antique look for the background, and added a loop of SU crochet trim to finish it off.
The S tag used a seahorse stamp that arrived as part of a grab bag of stamps, so would be from a much more recent stamp set. background was again DIs, starting with tumbled glass, broken china, faded jeans and ending with chipped sapphire and bundled sage.I spritzed the whole tag heavily with a mix of water and shimmer paint to try to get an underwater effect. Once it was dry, I stamped the seahorse with versamark, then stamp'n'bond powder before using gilding flakes - I couldn't decide whether to use silver or a green mix of flakes, then decided on the green as I thought that the silver might not stand out enough. I'm not sure it worked too well, but black wouldn't have looked right either....I coloured the image with blue and green pencilsbefore brushing the colours together using the shimmer ink/water mix again. The ribbons came from another grab bag ages ago.
All the shimmer made it hard to photograph, and I tried using several angles before getting a couple that looked ok - at least I did take the photos this time......
Mickie Sutcliffe (Rose resist)
