April Tag

I finally did the April Tag techniques from Tim Holtz' blog last week. Again, I just used what I had on hand rather than buying the exact items Tim used to create his tag. The main technique this month was stamping on the embossing folder to get the effect of the stamped image appearing behind the embossed image. Tim used his own Reflections stamp, which stamps reversed text that appears correctly once you run the paper in the embossing folder through the sizzix machine. Since I didn't have any Reflections stamps, I first tried using a tiny leaf background stamp. This worked OK but the leaves were very tiny and the green leaves were hard to see against the background of blue and green distress ink I had already put on the tag. For my second attempt, I used one of my favorite background stamps, which has diamond shapes, and I chose a contrasting dark green ink to show up against a new background of pink distress inks. This worked MUCH better. The rest of the stamp featured lots of embossing powders on a grungepaper die cut. This is one of Tim Holtz' sizzix dies, although not the one he used on his tag. I like it because you can use the heart, wings, and crown separately or together. It is very versatile. I used distress embossing powder on the heart, but regular gold embossing powder on the crown and white/iridescent embossing powder on the wings. To hide the fact that the embossing folder is shorter than the tag, I glued paper with the word "gratitude" (printed from a font on my computer) on the bottom of the tag. I would like to play around some more with the technique of stamping on embossing folders. It does create a very nice effect.

Space Shuttle Discovery

I went down to Old Town Alexandria VA this morning to see the flyby of the space shuttle Discovery on its way to Dulles airport and the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum annex. I chose this location because I knew there was lots of parking down there. Plenty of people showed up and we were treated to two passes. The first was downriver (north to south) and surprised most of us; we were expecting the shuttle to come upriver since it was coming from Florida. The second pass was upriver (south to north). We could also see the passes around the national mall area, to the north of our location, although these were much too far away for me to even attempt a photo.

Needless to say, with my little point-and-shoot camera, my photos were not very good, but I did have a good time and another uniquely Washington DC experience.

March Tag

Late last month, Tim Holtz announce that he was switching from the Twelve Tags of Christmas (12 tags in 12 days) to twelve tags a year, one per month. I didn't have time to do last month's tag, but here is my version of his March tag.

The mosaic technique featured in Tim's March tag was fun. When I didn't have exactly what Tim, used, I substituted what I did have. I used the flowers sizzix die from Tim's sizzix line. The concrete Antiquities embossing powder really makes a nice grout and the Glossy Accents really makes the fake paper tiles shine and elevates the whole mosaic effect. I didn't have a woodgrain rubber stamp for the background, so I used various swirl stamps that I had. I sponged bundled sage distress inks on the tag and spritzed with water to mellow them. Then I stamped the swirls with more bundled sage ink. The sentiment was stamped with walnut stain distress ink. Tim added some metal flowers to the bottom of his tag, but I didn't have any and didn't feel anything further was needed to jazz up the bottom of my tag.

All in all, I am happy with the effect and love the mosaic technique.