Tags - Jen and Tricks

First Week Done!

Righto; Week 1 of 52 over and done with. When I embarked on this project on January 1st I was honestly a bit worried that it would be another bright-idea-when-your’e-hungover-the-day-after-new-year’s-eve sort of thingy. Sure, it’s only been a week, but on the other hand I could have quit on day two…

So, the prompt for day seven: Make and use a stencil.

My first thought was that this felt very trendy. But also very retro. Making your own stencils and using them for collages or prints on textile was very popular when I was a kid. Then it sort of got a bit goofy. But now it’s trending again, and there are a lot of beautiful stencils made by popular brands today. Tim Holtz is a good example. And it’s sort of being taken to the next step.

Well, I haven’t done anything like it in a long while, and certainly not by using any cool techniques, but since one of the purposes with this 365 project is to learn a lot of new stuff, this was sort of perfect, I think.

I’ve been following Julie Balzer for a while, very talented mixed media artist with loads of great ideas and designs. She made this excellent tutorial that I found only a couple of days ago. Go check it out and don’t forget to give some thumbs up:

This was perfect for this prompt for several reasons.

I got to use up some of the plain tags from my stash, that I bought many years ago
I got to practice using my distress inks and my blender tool
I got to mess about with sprays and mists
And i now have several pretty tags to use for gifties in the future. Yay!

So, I went ahead and prepared two stencils, as prompted. I drew and cut them out by hand. The first one similar to the one in the tutorial:

I followed the tutorial as best as I could, and the result felt very rewarding. You can’t see it on the photo, but on the purple one it says “Nobody Rains on Your Parade”:

Also I made this stencil with hearts on it. It’s not long before Valentines, after all:

I tried some different inks, colours and sprays, loads of fun! You really should give it a try:

In the end I think I ended up using distress inks and stains, chalks, watercolours, mists and color wash. Oh, and some stamps and water resistant stamp pads of different varieties. I also tried using a little leafy twig as a stencil, sort of. But since the result got kind of fuzzy I drew a pattern on top with some Sakura pens. I might add some more details later, or maybe an embellishment.

And that was day 7. Out of 365. Ouff…

Stay safe everyone, thanks for stopping by!

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Personalize

Well, when Tricks gives you something she does it with a flare, even just a bottle of red will get her personal attention. Like this one, simple and beautiful. Cheers!

Who'd say no to this?

Last X-mas I gave you my tags

Tricks made a set of incredibly creative tags for her sisters x-mas tree, and posted a couple pictures a while back. Thank you, Tricks! I was so curious about those tags, you’d told me about them but i didn’t get a chance to see them before the big day. I love how you do the unexpected, how you can get cheerful clouds and pink swirls and a trumpet-playing rabbit to be so x-massy :)

I’ve made sort-of-tags for my x-mas gifts before, I rather do something hand-made (even though it looks like it was made like a 3-year-old) when I wrap my gifts. This year though, since my stash of scrapbook goodies has grown in a very satisfactory way during 2008, Tricks idea of making real tags inspired me to do some for my gifts. Some extra inspiration courtesy of Tim Holtz and his beautiful 12 tags of Christmas, although I don’t think I could ever make something remotely as pretty as his!

Aaaanyways, here are my rather blurry photos of some of my tags, enjoy!

jen_xmas08_tags

The Tags, revealed!

Christmas tags

And a closer look

Up close and personal

Christmas times

Here I am, my first try at a post! Jen is the real wiz when it comes to blogging. I just tag along and hope that I don’t mess things up. Anyway, back to topic. Yesterday was the other big family dinner day. This time at my sisters. Saturday we decorated the tree, and I just wanted to share what we did.

Christmas is a very stressful times for a lot of people, me included. Big family that is constantly craving attention and time, not to mention presents. This year to take some of the steam off and get some quality scraptime just for myself I decided to do a foldable card filled with tags for my sister. Tags are a great way to personalize your decorations in the tree! I decided to go with gold and red as a theme. The tags were really easy to make, I used some tags I have had lying about for ages, stamped a background on them and then went crazy with my rub-ons and my gold glitter embossing powder. It was incredibly stressreducing, taking that time for myelf, and it was very appreciated too! My very picky sister liked them and I was lucky enough to hit spot on with the theme shw was planning for her tree.

Now, the tags I made I just used stamps, and some stickers and rub-ons and then lots and lots of embossing powder. But a great idea would be to make tags with for example pictures of the family on. I dated all my tags and the foldable card they came in so that way if I decide to make new tags next year she can still keep them separated by year, this works especially well if you have pictures. This way the tree will actually tell your story as well as being decorative. Looking at the tree you will see how the family grows and changes. So the tree becomes something more than just a decorated tree in the livingroom, it becomes an everchanging, everevolving piece of the story that is your life and the life of your family.

Once Jen teaches me to add pics, I will make sure to add atleast one (or two) of the tags. /Tricks