The Process:
For all 3 tags, I started by drawing rule-of-thirds guidelines on the back of the tags. For the next step, I added three distress inks from my six-ink palette (inspiration drawn from a Pinterest board). Then I laid a stencil over each of them and removed some of the ink with a baby wipe. A lot of that ended up hidden, but there are some spots on tags 2 and 3 where it still shows up pretty well. I finished the backgrounds up with a Prima stamp (music notes), a Hero Arts (harlequin) stamp, and ink splatters.
For the butterflies and dragonfly, I first cut the shapes from black cardstock using my cricut. Then I coated each shape with embossing ink, and heat embossed clear embossing powder. While the embossing powder was still hot, I dabbed it in more embossing powder and melted it again. I repeated that step one more time until my shapes had been triple-embossed with clear powder. I counted to ten-ish, and pressed a red rubber stamp into the still-cooling embossing material. (Note: I'm pretty sure you can ruin a clear stamp very quickly if you try to stamp it into hot plastic, but red rubber survived just fine if you let the plastic cool for a few seconds). After it had cooled to the touch, I brushed a Ranger Perfect Medium pad over the shape, and blended in several different colors of Perfect Pearls for an iridescent look. The flowers are all hand-drawn and cut. I cut the petals first, and painted them. As the paint was drying, I cut the center parts using a 1.5” and a 1” hole punch, and painted those. The little veins in the petals are drawn on with Staedtler markers. I finished the flowers off with Ranger Glossy Accents on the Indian Blanket, and Wink of Stella on the other two (which is not showing up in the photos).
I adhered the completed tag to a blank tag, and distressed the edges.
Why this motif?
The area around my house turns into a wildflower riot every March and April. One of these tags is going to become my planner bookmark for April, and I wanted to bring some of that with me into the office.
