November tags

The technique for this month over at Chocolate Baroque was to use a distress ink background. My bright (?) idea was to try to create a poppy field background - I eventually gave up after almost running out of time and settled for the nearest sort-of ok tags. (Thanks Margaret for waiting for me, and apologies to everyone else that I've held up!)
I used the first poppy stamp without a butterfly that I came across, from poppy meadow, coloured with watercolour pencils
                                                                                                                                                                 





The other tag was my entry for the Hobby Art
November blog challenge -actually, it is the first one they have run - where the theme was remembrance. I did actually finish this a bit ago,  using one of the distress ink backgrounds, but the scanner was playing up, and the broadband has just come back after being out for most of the day.

zentangle tags

The challenge for October for the Chocolate Baroque technique tags was to use zentangling - this was definitely not one I looked forward to!
 I can admire the work that many people do - indeed I own a beautiful tangled birthday card, and am totally awed by the skill of Paula - but it is not something that I would in any way describe as relaxing.
I dug out an ancient Elusive Images mandala stamp, (sadly no longer available, they were great fun to do), stamped it in black versafine onto white card and added stripes and dots in black marker pen, and some solid black areas too.
Once all filled in, I cut it out and glued it onto a red tag - first one done!
I did think about just repeating it for the second tag, but decided to try using a newer stamp, the clear peony, which hadn't seen a great deal of use.
Again black versafine on white card, and more marker pen, this time mostly just stripes, with circles where the stamens were in the centre. A quick whip through the big shot with a spellbinders die, glued onto another red tag, and that was it.
The tags went into the post very quickly before I had any second thoughts, working on the principle that almost any swap tag was better than none...............

August tags

 The challenge this month at Chocolate Baroque was to use an acrylic background using 2 different colours, while the second layer is wet, remove some of it using a stamp, scrunched paper etc. I tried various methods, but ended up using stamps from the new harlequin fragments set, and the page I actually used for the tags was this one. I used some yellow card as a background - one I didn't like, and it saved on paint too, as I only had the remnants of a cheap kiddy set of paints from Wilko to play with- and splodged a mix of white and brown paint across it, then stamped into the wet paint with the harlequin stamp sprayed with water.

 I stamped the image from the poppy butterfly set onto white card and coloured with watercolour pencils, background sponged with distress inks, then fussy cut it out and added to the tag.
Did these early, so can't now remember which inks I used - but at least I did remember to scan the tags before I sent them!
Have several options in mind for September tags, but am not looking forward to October, which involves zentangling - definitely not my favourite technique, though I am always impressed by the results some very clever people get, to say nothing of their incredible patience

July technique tags

 The theme for the Chocolate Baroque technique tag challenge for July was to use triple (tiered )stamping - pile up 3 or more pieces of card of decreasing sizes and stamp over the whole lot at one go (it does help to use repositionable glue to hold the layers together before stamping): once these are layered onto matching mats and stuck together, you get a decoupage effect, and the mats hide any missed bits of stamping. It's a simple and effective technique that I have used for cards in the past, so I rashly thought this month's tags would be a doddle.........................

it wasn't, so I will  show some of the discarded efforts as well as the final tags!
 I started by using spellbinder dies to cut out the label shape, and stamped the cottage from patchwork landscapes - so far, ok. You need to colour the layers separately, which was when I coloured some sky as trees having assumed it was a wonky bit of stamping, then I found that the next size up of the dies was way too large, and drawing round the edges of the dies I first used and cutting out the shape was way too fiddly.
Next idea was to use some Sizzix circle dies - and yes, I did check the sizes first this time! I used a stamp from the poppy meadow set of stamps, which was both large enough and easier to colour - snag this time was trying to get a poppy head in the centre of the smallest circle - these were the nearest I got, so a different die shape for the next version. This was a square label by x-cut, which also has to be handcut for the layers, but was a simpler shape to cut, it was also far easier to get the poppy in the centre of the smallest shape.
Snag this time was trying to line up the layers with the base image on the tag - after several botched versions, I had the bright idea of  stamping the base image onto a larger piece of card and cutting it to match the layers - as you can see, it didn't work very well either!
This was when I gave up on the arty versions and went for bog standard simple! Just cut 3 sizes of rectangle in white using a guillotine and 3 matching in blue slightly larger - even with measuring it was far quicker than using dies!
 I layered up one set centrally and the other to one side, stamped in chipped sapphire distress ink and coloured in with a water brush. Layered everything up onto a matching dark blue tag - just need to find a bit of ribbon now before they go in the post.
Was really glad I made an early start this time  - am usually fairly late starting - have even started on the August tags too!

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.

faux leather tags

 The March challenge for the Chocolate Baroque tag swap is to use a faux leather technique, and Margaret supplied us with instructions for two different ways.
The first tag uses a masking tape technique, where you cover a tag randomly with torn pieces of masking tape, make sure they are well stuck down , then sponge with  ink - the edges of the tape pick up more of the ink, and you end up with a patchwork effect. Once it is inked to your taste, cover the whole tag with versamark and clear emboss. This was very easy to do - I did have to buy some more masking tape, as my very elderly reel was definitely non-stick, and I got some strange looks sitting  at market ripping masking tape - and they didn't get any less strange when I had explained what I was doing!
The second technique was one I saw demoed on tv by Sheena Douglas, but hadn't got round to actually trying it, or even printing out the instructions...........this one was dead easy, and gave a great suede-like effect. Basically, you spray a sheet of card with a mix of water and glycerine, rub it in, then repeat on the other side, the crumple it all up and squeeze out any excess liquid - if your card was like mine, there won't be any. Repeat the process, then leave to dry. Once dry, cut out the tag shape, run through an embossing folder, ink as desired and decorate if wished.
I had used odd sheets of card in colours I didn't like to try this out, two being yellow and orange, which gave me the idea of trying to make flowers out of the resulting leather-look card, especially as I had used an old cuttlebug folder with a leafy branch design. I used the Tim Holtz tattered florals and tattered leaves dies, and ran the flower shapes through different folders before inking with distress inks. The one that ended up on the first tag began life as yellow, embossed with a cuttlebug flowery folder, inked with spiced marmalade and vintage photo. The second version waas orange, with a Tim Holtz music design folder,  inked with spiced marmalade and rusty hinge inks. the green leaves were left crumnpled, and inked with peeled paint  and bundled sage.

vaseline resist

I meant to add these to the last post, but blogger wouldn't let me add more photos to the first post.......
The vaseline resist was far easier than the crackle, and so far these are the samples. Very layered colours in the background, as the first efforts didn't work - not enough vaseline and too thin paint, and I was too impatient and wiped it all off before the paint had dried...............
With more layers of vaseline and thicker paint, and far less impatience, it worked fine and I stamped and embossed the words with versamark and white EP.

**!!/ 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

technique tags- relief stamping

This year we have a new swap theme at Chocolate Baroque - back to tags, with a different technique featured each month. Relief stamping is the first theme, and I thought it would be a doddle - I remembered doing this many years ago, using versamark as a resist on glossy card, and  it always seemed to work fine................sadly, it didn't this year! I rapidly cam to the conclusion that the glossy card I had was definitely not the same, as the inks wiped off almost completely, leaving a VERY faint watermark image behind.
So I had to resort to the second way of doing this - versamark again, but clear embossing before adding the ink. I ended up with quite a collection of tags, and these two are the ones that are going in the post tomorrow. I cheated and scanned them together, apologies to anyone who wants to check up close for the mistakes!
Top tag uses my current favourite stamp set, tranquillity - well, it is my newest one!- and I stretched the relief theme a bit here. I stamped the buddha image using black versafine ink, then coloured it with promarkers. I then stamped the iris image using versamark, and went over the buddha with a versamark pen before dunking the whole tag in clear embossing powder and heating it. I then added the background using distress inks and brushes, and the wisteria stamp along the top in 3 different greens.
The second tag uses a very old  Elusive Images stamp of the lady together with an appropriate quote from artistic affirmations. I used the relief technique for the words, stamped the lady using baked brown sugar ink
 from Stampin up, then sponged the background with distress inks in scattered straw, tea dye, vintage photo  and black soot.
 It will be very interesting to see what everyone else comes up with ! Next month is crackle, which I haven't tried before.......................