**!!/ crackle!

 February's technique tags are more variations on the resist theme, with crackle effect and vaseline resist being the chosen variations.
The crackle recipe involved painting the tag with dilute PVA, overpainting with acrylic paint and blasting with a heat gun.
Now Margaret had some lovely crackly samples she sent with the instructions - did I get artistic crackles? NO - what I got looked like the tags had some dread alien disease! The top 3 scans are the best of them, full of bubbles and blotches, but I think they may possibly be rescuable eventually with an image glued on top.............

Number 4 worked beautifully, much to my amazement - then I ruined it by not checking the embossing powder carefully. I found that it was possible to stamp with versamark over the acrylic and emboss, but you needed a very heavy hand with the anti-static powder first. I used an ivy stamp from the christmas foliage plate, embossed first in distress EP weathered wood, then in an anonymous green EP from a box of donated EPs. That was fine so far, but the ivy didn't really show up, so I decided to fill-in the design with a versamark pen and add gold - only snag was I chose a cosmic shimmer from the same box , which turned out be very pale and practically invisible - that'll teach me to test strange EPs first on something else!
 I then risked using one of the better failures , and found that the bubbles didn't like being stamped over, although using the more solid version of the ivy stamp worked better, and the word stamp embossed well with a 'known' pirate gold EP.
 The final version was stamped using green stazon, which gave a much better effect, although the crackle isn't as good on this tag