Nature #onelittletag

I had an artful day yesterday.  I went to the City Hall to pick up some of my paintings that were on display there to take them to the OPG, where my friend Margaret and I will be displaying some of our work.  Then, I am picking up some paintings from Sunnybrook Hospital tomorrow and then taking them to the City Hall on Monday to fill in the spaces I left empty yesterday. Lots of art juggling!
So anyways, I wanted to do a quick tag yesterday because I was kind of tired by the time I got around to it.  I wanted to try out my Penny Black "Hidden Lane" stamp.  I thought I would use the watercolour markers that I have had forever, and never used, on watercolour paper.  Them just trim it up and mount it on a tag.  Is it just me, or does everyone find that things rarely go as planned?

I was using the markers directly on the stamp, spritzing with water and then stamping onto the watercolour paper.  Then I thought I better use my stamp positioner since it looked like I was going to have to do this in layers. After playing around for quite a while and not getting the result I wanted, I decided to switch to Tim Holtz distress inks.  I did the same thing, applied to stamp, spritzed and stamped on watercolour paper. Still not what I wanted, so I thought I would switch to just regular white cardstock because I wasn't liking the texture of the watercolour paper. Same technique.  Better, but still not what I wanted. So, hours later...I finally decided on the distress inks on the white cardstock, NO spritzing and just a bit of a touch-up with an aqua-brush.  Note: I did sponge some broken china distress ink into the sky before stamping with a very light hand.

So now what do I do with it? I wanted a neutral palette, so I choose a kraft cardstock, trimmed it to size, die cut a rectangular aperture to frame my image.  Then I decided to run it through my crimper to give it some texture. I printed out the word "nature" on some patterned recollections stock that I still had out from my tag the day before. I trimmed the word and mounted it inside the window.  I added some string, which I tied in a loose bow and mounted the tag to a base I trimmed out of some more stock from my stash (7 Gypsies, I believe) in a dark burlap pattern. Trimmed the corners, punched the hole and tied several strands of the same string though the hole.  Finally done, but too tired to blog.