12 Tags of Christmas Day 5

Tim Holtz's tag for Day 5 is gorgous (aren't they all?) This one features a metal 'lace' border, a swirled background with a stamped pine branch and 3-dimensional dangling ornaments. The ornaments are individually stamped, coloured and glittered, wrapped with metal tops and strung on real wire so they can dangle freely. His magnificent tag is on the left of this paragraph.

Here is a link to his blog entry with full details on how to make it.

And now for mine... gold lace I could manage. Mine isn't metal, it's a gold lace sticker border. I don't have any plain swirl stamps (sounds like I should get one!) but I do have a swirly snowflake, and that was quite appropriate for Christmas. I wasn't sure what my gold paint would do my stamp, so I embossed the snowflakes instead... then I stippled the background the same way Tim did.

I left the top corner of my tag plain and drew the pine branch on it by hand. It's not very hard to do some random strokes of the marker to look like pine needles! Tim used a white rubon for his greeting. I tried but it wouldn't stick to the embossing and it just made a MESS, so I cut out a stamped word and glued it over the top. There's a reason I don't like rubons very much - they're really hard to use!

And then all I had to do was to make the ornaments... which is harder than it sounds! Tim used clear plastic ornament shapes and glued the stamping on the back. That wasn't an option for me... I had a cute round christmas stamp that looked like ornaments, so I stamped it in colours and embossed it with clear embossing powder. Then I put more powder over the top immediately and re-embossed it twice more to make the ornaments look more solid. I cut them out with a little rounded tab and wrapped silver sticker scraps around the top. Then I poked a hole in them and strung them onto the wire from an extra-long twist tie (I pulled the plastic off first.) And then I strung them on the tag, added a ribbon and I was done.