Tim Holtz's 12 Tags of 2013 - August

Hello and welcome!

Firstly a HUGE THANK YOU to Mr Holtz and his team for picking me as one of the winners for the July Tag, I was really thrilled to click on the August Tag and find li'l ol' me on the list of winners. As a relative newbie it was a massive honour and a huge shock to see my name "in lights", so please forgive me while I do a little happy dance........ there, that's done.

Secondly an equally HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who has been kind enough to leave me a comment. Thank you for your kind wishes and your interest, they are always very much appreciated.

Thirdly a HUGE Th... only kidding :0) Thirdly, to business...

Tim's August Tag (you can see it here) is on a travel theme in Tim's trademark grungy colour palette, and the technique show cased is masking and layering stamps to give the illusion of dimension.

OK, so we're back to the same old problem - the only things I had on Tim's supply list were the No.8 Manila Tag and a not complete collection of Distress Stains. Pretty poor show Mrs M! So... thinking caps on chaps!

Actually, I'm over egging the pudding here a bit... inspiration for my take on Tim's tag was pretty quick (Mr Mojo must be hanging around the Salle de Craft at the moment). I had just bought some gorgeous Hampton Arts hot air balloon stamps and had a "Round the World In 80 Days" thing going on in my head. So.....

(You can see here that my positioning was slightly off - think I'm going to invest in a stamp positioner as I always seem to have a spasm when I stamp the vital image on a piece and it's never quite where I want it to be).

If you're at all interested in the evolution of this tag please read on. If not thanks for visiting and please do leave me a comment so I know you came.

I used Bundled Sage and Faded Jeans DS for the background as I knew I wanted to use a world map stamp as my base layer image and  thought/hoped the colours would reflect the ocean/landmass colours on the map.

Next I picked out the image and text stamps I wanted to use and made a "mock-up" of my tag to work out where to position my stamping.

That done, I decided that all black stamping was going to overwhelm the tag so I decided to stamp my base layer in Faded Jeans DI.

Next step, and because I don't have any TH Masking Sheets I had to revert to the low-tech Post-it Note to create the masks for my stamps.

Finally I was ready to stamp the images on to the tag, so I positioned my masks as per my mock up and stamped over them, removing and stamping as required to complete the design.

Apart from the minor stamping spasm I'm pleased with how this has turned out, even the Philosophy Tag (my work around as I don't have any Word Bands) works really well with the rounded shapes of the compass, balloons and post mark.

Thank you for visiting.