My Inner Crow

Well, after all this green and red, my inner crow cried out for something shiny.  I love the traditional seasonal colors, but wow - enough already, and for some reason, I've not ventured into the alternative blue yet. So shiny it is!  I already have something in mind for Linda's Tag 10 using gold and silver, so I turned to another favorite metal color - copper.  Not exactly seasonal, I know, I know!  But worth a try anyway.  And I've been wanting to use the new Woodland dies from Linda's shop - so thought I would try something a little different. This is my take on Linda's Tag Number Eight..... where my inspiration stems from those trees, and that sort of copper color in her luscious background.  And as a reminder, Linda is sponsoring this fab challenge via her incredible store - the Funkie Junkie Boutique!

The background of my first photo looks a bit like a clean craft sheet (ha!) but actually it is a piece of cardstock painted very thinly with a Ranger Dabber copper paint over a coat of Antiqued Bronze Distress Paint, which is the closest shade to copper in the Distress Paint line.  As it is bronze, it does turn out on the yellow end of things, and thus I looked for another paint to give me the copper color.

Here you can see another sheet of paper I colored with the Antiqued Bronze paint..... and this time I left it as is, because I wanted to apply some deep copper embossing powder from Lindy's Stamp Gang over a pattern created by this funky roller wheel I picked up as part of a wonderful, modestly priced collection on eBay last year.  I love the pattern because it reminds me of the veining in stone, one of my very favorite natural materials.






After heat embossing this, it looked like this - my phone camera does not capture the wonderous gleam of this Midnight Copper embossing powder.

So, easy enough - I cut the two trees from the Woodland set out of the paper you see above, and placed them on the copper paper, from which I cut a tag from (yes, again!) the Stephanie Ackerman Sizzix die.  One of my goals in the coming year will certainly be to learn how to work on a smaller canvas, lol!  But I will not lose my affection for this die, I am sure....

Now, to the sentiment.... I saw a cool idea this morning from Anita Houston, about coloring the new Deco Sheets from Tim Holtz with Wendy Vecchi's archival inks.... so I applied quite a bit of the Potting Soil ink to a piece of the gold Deco Sheet.  I had applied this sheet first to a piece of card, having read Linda's advice about this.  Then I cut out my words (again from Tim Holtz).






Because I had already used the adhesive from the Deco Sheet on a piece of cardstock prior to cutting the words, I had to apply them now with tiny drops of matte medium..... and they got a bit wonky.  But it is a wonky script, so what the heck.  You'll notice I cut off the "s" from "holidays" to make this sentiment work.

I added four strings of copper braid from my stash, and here is the final product, such as it is -minimalist shall we say?  And inner crow satisfied, we can now move on to the remaining tags, lol!

Thanks so much for stopping by, and if you've time, please do leave a comment - I appreciate every one and always love to hear from you!
xxx Lynn