Alphatags O and P

Time once again to show you my tags for the Chocolate Baroque Alphatag swap. The letters O and P were much easier for me this month as I am a literal thinker rather than a lateral one so I like doing the letters that easily lead the thoughts to a specific subject.


O is for Owl


It wasn't hard for me to choose owl because it gave me the chance to use this lovely Crafty Individuals stamp. I stamped him twice with black ink and coloured one image with coloursoft pencils and cut out the owl and his perch. The other one was coloured around the owl with distress inks, in antique linen and various browns, I'm not certain which ones now.The backing paper I found  in the bottom of one of my odds and ends boxes while looking for something else, and is the result of a long ago play session with some Starburst Stains. I don't think the shimmer shows on this photo but it is a coppery brown colour and had a textured look to it that I believe I had made with cling film. As soon as it caught my eye I thought tree trunk, perfect background for my owl.I cut a piece of this paper to make the tag and used a Tim Holtz wood grain embossing folder to add more texture.The leaves were cut from some patterned paper with a Sissix die and then I used some rub on coppery gold to enhance some of the leaves and fixed them to the tag with a large brad. Unfortunately I made a proper bish of it and had to start again which is why this one has a narrow border of card showing as my nice shimmery background paper wasn't quite big enough to cut another tag. The owl image was fixed to the tag with DS tape, the word owl was cut out from the second image and mounted to match the tag and fixed in place with foam pads. The coloured owl was mounted over the image with silicon glue and I also added some glue under some of the leaves to secure them.

P is for Poppy


Poppy wasn't first on my mind for P, but just when I was deciding, Chocolate Baroque released this lovely set of stamps called Pretty Poppies. My regular readers will know that I was singing the praises of this stamp set in my last post.
This is is the other main image in the set, there is also another flower stamp and some sentiments too. Anyway this time I decided to colour them differently and chose this mauve because every year I have lots of poppies this colour growing in my garden. They are only annual plants but I love them so much and they produce so many seeds that I just sprinkle them around all over the place, so that there will be plenty the following year. These were stamped with Memento black ink onto the tag and coloured with Distress Markers and a waterbrush. I then stamped again onto thin copy paper and cut out to make a mask to cover the poppies while I stamped my favourite Crafty Individual crackle background stamp randomly all over the tag with antique linen Distress ink.The shading round the edge was done with dusty concord. The letters were cut from mauve pearlised card using x-cut dies.
Now I am waiting to see what the postman delivers at the end of the month when the tags are swapped and sent out. You can see collage photos of all the tags so far here.

I am going to enter the poppy one at Penny Black and More @ Allsorts; Summer Blooms,
and at Make It Monday; anything Goes.

Thank you to every one who takes the time look and for your lovely comments.