Indigoblu tag (DT post Jb Crafting Supplies)

We are coming to the end of the month folks and let me just tell you, it couldn't have gone any slower for me! I wont go into detail but lets just say the process of this tag pretty much sums up my month.

As you know if you have been following, I received a lovely set of goodies from JB Crafting Supplies at the beginning of the month which included the fun stamp set from Indigo Blu called 'Take the time'. In it there was this eye stamp which I had seen on several different sets but always not a clue on how to use it.

This time, however, I came up with an idea right away to try and use it layered with several fades of black. Ive only ever done this with leaves so it was a really new thing for me. I had the idea that I would stamp on my tag multiple times without re-inking every time. The plan was to stamp the eye again on a piece of vellum and layer it on top.

So that's how this tag started out. I stamped my eyes, (<-lol) and surprisingly the layout turned out well. The I took a few colours of distress inks and inked around the tag. Unfortunately once I had blended them on they lost a bit of their vibrancy and the tag wasn't quite as bright as I would have liked it to be. Anyway, I left it as is and continued with the tag. I tried to bring a bit of colour back into it with a couple of drops of dylusions and then also spattered it with some picket fence distress paint.

Once I had (supposedly) finished the base tag, I cut a tag from a piece of vellum and started working on that. I stamped my eye stamp onto the front and inked the vellum to try and bring a bit more colour to the tag. The stamp was not popping out as much as I wanted so I painted the back of it with white.  I then tried to adhere the vellum tag to the front of my base tag as it wasn't showing as much of the background so I wanted it pressed right up against the base. In the end I was very unhappy with the finished result so I pulled off the vellum tag and scraped that.

Now to try and salvage the base tag! A few parts of the tag had been pulled off when I removed the vellum piece so I just covered those over again with a bit of distress ink and it was completely gone.  The eyes were blending too much into each other so I chose to use a bit of white gel pen to fill in a few of them. I filled in the whites of the eyes on some and then just the reflection on others.

By this point I was beginning to be a little happier with how it was going. However, it was not to last.

Let me give you crafters a small piece of advice.... NEVER PUT ANYTHING DOWN!......EVER.

Im sure some of you have experienced this before, especially if your craft desk looks anything like mine but I have had several things go missing this month! And the very annoying this is, it goes missing right after Ive just had it in my hand! I put it down and *POOF* its gone! So remember when I said I have been working on this since the beginning of the month? Well its because I had misplaced my white embossing powder. I had a plan, and then the white embossing powder was gone.

So I tried to improvise. I tried using a coloured embossing powder. I thought maybe a reddish orange would go with this. Well I was wrong. In the process I also didn't stamp correctly. So I had a very not pretty slightly hidden in the background, orange sentiment. Go me. :/ Well I tried to fix it with my white gel pen. I outlined the sentiment. Another big mistake! So now I had royally screwed up my tag. It looked horrible. By this point I had had enough and set it aside until this past weekend when lo and behold, I FOUND MY WHITE EMBOSSING POWDER!

Now I have the task of figuring out how Im going to salvage this tag! So I thought I would try and remove some of the embossing powder. I used my heat tool and a sheet of paper to try and melt off what was there. This really didn't work and mostly smeared the white gel pen. then I thought I would try and blend some black onto the tag in that area and emboss over it with the white. However, as I should have known, the embossing and the white gel resisted and it looked horrible. So I tried using some archival ink over the area and then blending with the black distress ink... Nope. The embossing took the archival ink but it just made the sentiment look shiny. Until I used the distress ink, then it just wiped it off.

After all of this I gave in and decided to use the traditional method of covering a mistake... Just cut a a bit of card, inked it up with black soot distress ink (I pressed it directly into the pad which left white bits and then I blended some over it to give it the grungy look) and white embossed the sentiment onto that. I mounted that onto a slightly larger piece of white card, and stuck this on top of the damaged area of the tag. To tie it into the rest of the tag even more, I splattered a bit more white distress paint over it and inked the edges of the tag with black soot distress ink.

My tag is finally done! Just like this month. Honestly I actually like the end result. Lesson to be learned here|: Don't always give up in the first round! The possibility to get better only ends when you give up.

Hope very much that your month was a good one and fingers crossed for me that next month is even better!



Sam.