12 Tags of Christmas

I'm back from a weekend "do your own thing" retreat - left Thursday morning and returned last night. The retreat was under three hours from my home so the travel to and from wasn't too bad and a good friend went with me so we had a great time catching up with each other during our road trip. The house is a Frank Lloyd Wright house built in the 60's and was fantastic - almost everything inside was original to that period - and the setting was out in the country - peaceful and relaxing.


There were 15 ladies there and everyone brought projects to work on. Several ladies wanted to work on the "12 Tags of Christmas" that Tim Holtz posted on his blog last December. So seven of us worked on them off and on during the four days and finished all except the eleventh tag. We did not have the supplies or stamps required for that one. In fact, we improvised on some of the other tags as well, mainly with different embellishments, but they came out well and it was fun trying all the different techniques and products.


I won't go into the how-tos for the tags here, as Tim's instructions and photo tutorials are excellent. If you want to know more, go to his blog and check them out. Here are the ones I made (in numerical order):
Tim also has a technique posted for every month during 2008 and we worked on the March technique. These are the two tags I made:

I really liked this technique. These colors and stamps see fitting for spooky Halloween projects. Basically you sponge several different Distress Inks directly on the manila tag. These are some of the brighter colors, like Spiced Marmalade, Fired Brick, Broken China etc. The lower left on each of these tags was Black Soot. At that point it looks pretty garish and colorful. Then you sponge Vintage Photo over the entire tag which adds a yellow tinge to all the colors. After that, you sponge Walnut Stain over all until you get the blended look you want - this step darkens everything. The birds and tree are stamps from Stampers Anonymous and are stamped in black Archival ink which is permanent. I liked the colors of the tag on the left best but there was a smudge of black ink from the stamp in the lower right, so I stamped the Halloween stamp to cover it up. The tag on the right needs something else stamped at the bottom. Again, if you want to know more about these tags, be sure to go to Tim's blog and check out all the techniques.

I have more projects to post, but am still catching up on things since I returned, so will try to post them tomorrow.