Tag - Tea/coffee

Hello and thank you for stopping by.

I’m sharing another tag. This is my contribution to the weekly challenge that Rachel’s doing over on her blog (Artful Evidence).  The theme this week is tea/coffee and I have to admit that just by looking at my tag, it’s not readily apparent that it follows the theme. 

So let me show you the tag and explain the process and hopefully all will become clear.

To start off I used 300gsm watercolour paper cut to the size of a Ranger size 8 tag.  Using my early morning cup of tea I coloured it, gently building up the overall colour until I was happy ....then I drank the remainder of my tea!   JOKING of course!  With a Ranger Distress Sprayer I added some droplets on the tag ... it doesn’t work as well as doing this technique on Distress Ink but well enough for what I wanted.

I followed the same steps on a second scrap of watercolour paper, which I cut slightly smaller than the base tag, however this time I used my (now cold) tea to add some drippage rather than droplets to this layer. 

 I dried both layers with a heat tool before randomly stamping script (Stampers Anonymous Entomology stamp set - CMS328) over both in Tea Dye Distress Ink. My spills, stains and splotches were added using Ground Expresso Distress Ink and the Visible Image Ink Splats stamp set.

The edges of both layers were distressed with a Ranger Distress tool before being inked with Ground Expresso Distress Ink. I added a couple of black eyelets to the top layer before machine stitching a couple of lines in dark brown cotton around the edge.

The focal point on my tag is a tea bag (yes, absolutely right.... the one I used to make my early morning cuppa). I dried it out using my heat tool, a gentle 30 second blast was all it needed before undertaking a little bit of surgery; a small incision on the reverse to ease out the now dried tea leaves from the inside.  

I also tea dyed a scrap of linen from my stash before stamping it, in Ground Expresso DI, with one of the tiny flower stamps from the Stamping Up Silhouette Sentiments stamp set and machine stitching it to the tea bag.  The string from the tea bag was tied to a home-rusted safety pin I found recently. To finish off the safety pin I added a fringe using some rustic hessian teased from an old sac.  

My final embellishment was to add a Ranger Idea-ology Story Stick (Travel) to the top layer with a Ranger Hex Fastener and a touch of Glossy Accents. 

To pull everything together the tea bag was secured in place using double sided tape, as was the top layer to the base tag.  As usual, I backed my tag with black card and added a tiny date tag threaded through some co-ordinating ribbon from my stash.

I hope you’ll now agree that I followed Rachel’s theme in spirit. At least my inks, dyes and embellishments were true to it: Ground Express, Tea Dye DI, my early morning cuppa, droplets, splatters, spills and stains, a tea bag, hessian taken from an old sack (perhaps an old tea sack). My flower was to represent a tea bush. And the travel pin?  Well I’ve just come back from holiday and whilst there I visited a tea plantation which is where, bizarrely,I picked up the safety pin!  Strange how things happen.

Hope you have a lovely day crafting and please, I’d love to read any comments you want to leave.

Carol. xx