June Tag - Tim's 2015 Tag Challenge.

Hellooooo again,

When I saw Tim’s tag this month I had a little chuckle because I’m a coffee fan too….  a Costa gal myself ….. and whilst I try to keep them to minimum and only have the odd skinny cappuccino as a treat, my head immediately went into, “well, I’ll need to do some research, won’t I? ” mode.

Then I thought about my ever increasing waistline and pondered about doing tea (English Breakfast tea) instead.  Plus too it would give me an excuse to make a darling little teabag for my tag.  But then (quite unbidden) wine came into my head!  We all have our favourite tipples and a little of what you fancy does you good.  Don't know about you, but a glass of vino certainly does me good …… so once decided this is the tag I ended up making as my entry for this month.

Unbeknown to me my nearest and dearest had a Custom Blend Distress Ink pad tucked away for me for Christmas and promptly produced it as soon as we read the technique for this month’s tag…. how spoilt an I !

My chosen colours were Pumice Stone, Tumbled Glass and Fossilised Amber (basically the only re-inkers I had).  I went slightly further than inking up the label on the Custom Blend pad and labelled the bottom of the pad with my Brother P-touch 90 labeller (fantastic for all sorts) detailing the inks I’d chosen for my pad. 

My usual home-made watercolour card tag didn’t react well to the technique as you can see in the above picture… it just soaked  up too much liquid…. so I resorted to the Ranger Manilla tags and after three attempts had the basic background I was happy with (why is it you can never get it first time?). For this I used Frayed Burlap Distress Stain with a little added water in a Mini Mister.

I love the technique Tim used of inking the stencil and will definitely be doing this again. 

Because I wanted to add a little simmer with a spritz of Briscotti Perfect Pearls Mist,  I gave the new Distress Glaze a test run to seal the Distress Stain on my tag and stop it reacting with the Briscotti mist. The result was amazing. Tiny droplets of simmer mist formed on the surface of the tag because it was non-porous and left over night to dry it formed tiny shimmery texture to the surface…Fantastic.

Hope you can pick out the texture from the dried Briscotti Perfect Pearls mist...It looks like tiny white dots on the photograph but they have a wonderful shimmer to them as well as giving a gentle texture to the surface. 

For my wine glass I hand-drew a glass of wine on white card-stock and cut it out. Before colouring it I used it first as a template to cut it out the shape again but this time in acetate.  I coloured the wine in the glass and touches on the glass stem and the base using a SU Marker (Cherry Cobbler) The portion of the glass above the wine I cut off. Then I gently covered the remaining wine glass with glossy accents and left to dry. 

I very gently traced the outline of the glass in position on the tag with a pencil.  The portion of the glass above the wine I washed lightly with Picket Fence Distress Distress Stain, to make the  background showing through the glass slightly lighter. 

Using a Faber Castell Pitt Artist Pen (big brush - Warm Grey 111) I traced round the outside of the pencil outline to provide some depth and shadow to my glass.

The card-stock glass was secured to the tag with glossy accents and then same again for the acetate glass, which went on top.

To echo Tim’s tag I added a little calico from my stash and made a fishtail label for on top (in hindsight I should have inked the edges of the label with Vintage Photo Distress Ink like the tag as it looks a little too "clean" but C’est la Vie! ).  The little glass charm was a bead from my stash secured with an Idea-ology Jump ring. 

I trimmed up another piece of calico for my rustic ribbon but tied it with a snippet of thin claret coloured ribbon from my stash, again to try to echo the colours used on the tag. An Idea-ology type charm finished off the tag…. V for Vino.

As always it was brilliant fun to play along with Tim again this month and learn yet another new technique or two…. Thanks Tim.  I was really happy with the depth I managed to get by using both the glossy accents and the acetate for my wine glass.... just wished I'd inked the edges of my label. Think it'll have to come off and be re-done.  Roll on July.... Yea!!!!!

Happy Crafting all,

Carol. x