Evolution of the Tim Tag 12.16

I don't really have trouble making things. I can almost always think of something to make and come up with a way to make it. BUT making Tim Tags is a challenge for me, appropriately so. It's using craft items that I am new to and using them in very different ways.

The first tag I did in January was a failure from the technique standpoint so much so that I never even entered it. I'd hardly ever stamped anything in my life at that time - this one was the embossed
powder with chalk. I got better at it and actually made tags in March and April that I liked. Then my bike trip intervened and I missed a few months, but now I am inspired. I worked really hard on this tag as you will see below when you see the many iterations I went through to come up with the tag.

I will enter this tag in 2 challenges - the December edition of tags of 2016 and in the Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge - "Let there be Snow".

1. Choosing a Theme
When making a tag, I like to have a theme. I have trouble just combining decorative elements. I have to have a story of some kind for me to choose what elements to include. This theme is based on my mother's love of tea, teapots, and snow. She loved it when it snowed here. She wasn't very mobile for many years of her life so she had to enjoy the snow from her comfortable chair in the den. She also loved tea and had a wonderful collection of teapots. That's the inspiration behind the tag.

2. Background Image
So I wanted a background with blue snowflakes, but I didn't have any blue spray stain. What to do? Why make some, of course. I put some blueprint sketch paint in a mini-mister and diluted it, then tried it, then diluted it again and again until I was able to spray it like I wanted. It worked!! I washed out the mini-mister right after I was done so it wouldn't clog up the nozzle.

Next challenge was that I didn't have any burlap. Well, I did have burlap but it is very coarse and would not work at all. I've purchased so many stamps and dies and papers recently I just didn't want to make another order before making the tag. That's why I had to come up with a different fabric.

This tag uses leftover fabric from a cotton drop cloth. My homemade stain worked beautifully. What didn't work great was that the glue I used to adhere it to cardstock bled through the fabric and looks dirty. Since the plan was to distress everything anyway, I figured it was just pre-distressed.

1. Tag stained using gauze as the fabric with mowed lawn stain 2. Gauze sprayed through the holiday green stencil, smeared red stain on it - oops. 3. Snowflake stencil with blueprint sketch spray 4. Holiday greens with mowed lawn stain on linen 5. Holiday greens with forest moss on leftover sheet fabric

When I used a paper towel to lift the stain from the stencil, I noticed that it made a beautiful negative of the stencil so I decided to use watercolor paper to absorb the excess strain for a later project.

Most of these are negatives printed from the spray on the stencil. I also wanted to make a teapot look like transferware or delft, two of those teapots samples are included. I've got one other tag in the works using the poinsetta teapot above.

Teapot variations along with embossing samples. There are more somewhere in a pile of papers. I wanted to make a brown transferware teapot with the Scribble Woodland stamp, but the proportions are too big for a tag teapot. I really like the fleur de lis gold embossing.