Naughty or Nice - A Christmas Gift Tag

Afternoon Everyone,

I hope you are all well and keeping up with all the necessary preparations for the holiday season.

Yesterday, we went off to Tesco's to get some photographs printed. A simple enough exercise you  would think but, no! We only picked the machine that decided it was going on strike ... half way through the process. After endless head-scratching from a couple of Tesco's staff, the problem was eventually sorted and the photos appeared. Phew!!!

After all that excitement we trotted off up to the cafeteria for a recuperative cuppa and were entertained to find a chaffinch swooping up in the roof space. Apparently, it's not unusual for one to fly in through the front doors which are always open. Goodness knows what elf and safety would say about it but we were delighted :))

Home again and I decided to try, once again, using up some of the bits of leftover ribbon, lace and trimmings that have accumulated in the craft space by making a small gift tag.

There's nothing much to it. The label is just a bog-standard luggage label bought at WH Smith - this is a manila one. It's the largest size I could find in the shop, but is still nowhere near as big as those used by Tim Holtz, Hels, etc.

I did stamp it all over with red polka dots but once the topper was added hardly any can be seen. The topper is matted on to a snippet of the card I decorated with inks, stamping and mica powders - made like this:

Starting with A4 sheets of smooth white card, several ink pads in a variety of colours and several ink brushes, blend the inks in a fairly random fashion until happy with the result. For some reason my camera finds it hard to focus on the result, but hopefully you get the general idea.

The next stage is to stamp all over the card, for this I chose two leafy Penny Black stamps, then brush with various shades of mica. Now my camera does like this a lot better :) Here's a close-up of the detail.

Lovely, isn't it? 

Here's another shot of the tag taken from another angle - you can see the stamped polka dots on this one.

Materials: a manila label; stamp -  Stampin' Up's Dots, Dots, Dots; Tim Holtz Festive Berries distress ink; small piece of the hand decorated paper for matting; card topper from Cardmaker's Delights; iridescent glitter; gold Liquid Pearls; twine, cotton lace, gingham ribbon; red buttons & green gems from stash.

Using snippets means only one thing here in blogland ... a trip over to Pixie's Crafty Snippet Challenge #50 ... #50, another two weeks and it's Di's first snippet anniversary!!!

It took me a lot longer to locate the shots of the paper on my PC than I expected ... I had a senior moment and couldn't remember where I'd filed them :)

I'm off now to calm down with a bit of therapeutic crafting :))

Take care and remember to relax occasionally, if you can, during this busy period.

Oh, and Happy Crafting :)