If You Want to Fly ...

Hi everyone,

The theme over at Tag Tuesday this week is Stencils, which gives you such huge scope that I had a hard time making up my mind what to do, which is why I'm posting this just in the nick of time again!

I decided to use several different stencilling techniques to create a layered background for some pretty butterfly scraps and this wonderful quote from Toni Morrison -

"If you want to fly, you have to let go of the shit that weighs you down."

Here's how I made it ...
Working on my craft sheet (as I had a feeling this was going to get messy) I started with a blank tag shape cut from scrap, one of the Tim Holtz layering stencils, some sequin waste and a piece of card which I had cut some alphas from ...

Then I dug out some of my favourite Distress products - Stains, Inks and Paints (the pink didn't get to play in the end, just sat on the sidelines all forlorn) ...

Then I thought I'd have a go at some home-made texture paste ...

 I have seen various recipes and decided I would just throw in roughly equal amounts of talc, acrylic paint and pva, mix it up and tweak it until it seemed right. In the end I added a lot more of the talc ...

... and next time I will probably add even more, but we'll get to that in a bit. Once my texture paste was mixed ready, I started to work on my tag. Firstly, I applied Distress Paint in Picket Fence through the alphabet waste, with one of these cheapy cosmetic sponges from a 99p shop ...

It doesn't show at this stage, but creates a subtle resist effect when you add Distress Stain or Ink over the top. The Stains were dabbed onto my craft mat and spritzed with water ...

Then I spritzed the tag as well before swiping it through the Stains and then blotting with a manky rag!

You can see the subtle pattern in the background starts to be reveal, which is big fun! Then I went in with Distress Inks and used blending tools to apply them all around the edges fading in towards the centre of my tag ...

... before wiping over with a baby wipe to bring out the background texture ...

Unfortunately, this part gets pretty much lost by the end as I had to cover some booboos, but at this stage I was having a great time and it's all part of the process :o)

Next step was to use the layering stencil over the top with more Distress Inks ...

... and then it was time to try my texture paste through the sequin waste ...

It worked ok, but didn't hold its shape quite as well as the commercial ones I've tried, so I couldn't get a crisp outline or as much depth as I really wanted, but it did add a more gentle texture and it worked as a resist to the Distress Inks so that was cool ...

Now it's completely dry it's still very flexible and completely matte, so it will make a good primer for my journal pages ...

Distress Inks applied through the sequin waste added another layer of interest to the background and then I adhered the butterfly scraps using Claudine Hellmuth Multi Medium Matte ...

Next, I did some stamping with Archival Ink all around the edges to add some definition ...

... then went back in with the Distress Inks to intensify the colours and emphasise the textures ...

Then came my crafting disaster. I wrote my quote directly onto the tag and it looked awful, tried to put tiny alpha stickers over it - even worse! Eventually I had to gesso over the whole middle area, then added another layer of texture to cover it, using "real" texture paste and another TH layering stencil ...

Actually, it's quite interesting to see the two kinds of texture paste side by side for comparison. Anyway, I finally cut my quote word by word from an old book and adhered all down one side with the matte medium ...

A piece of old garden twine through the top and my tag was done!

Phew! I was probably messing about with this for two or three hours, but I did try a few things out and make a couple of discoveries along the way, and in the end I'm happy with it so that's ok :o)

Thanks very much for visiting today, see you again soon!

Annie xxx