A Little Journey

I'm going to take you on a little journey.....this was an idea I had during my Journaling class last week. I had been using one of Tim Holtz dies, the "Journey" Movers & Shapers die as a stencil. I had cut it out of acetate and sponged Pan Pastels through it and then my little mind starts on a journey!!! Wonder what this would look like in shrink plastic???? Pretty good in my head but it turned out more than pretty good...I LOVE IT!!!!

So here's a quick run through of how this tag came together. First of all I covered the whole tag with Wild Honey Distress Ink, then used Forest Moss to stamp some background images. Now I kinda like using just parts of a stamp and to do this I use the stamp without an acrylic block. That way you can bend the stamp and just prints bits of an image....tis fun......give it a whirl....you'll love it!!

Hopefully from this picture, you can see how I bend the stamp.

 

 

 

 

Blogger is now officially driving me completely round the hat rack, if I managed to finish this post before screaming, it will be a miracle!! It is changing my font, it's putting my photographs in places that I don't want them, it will not let me insert text where I want it so fingers crossed you guys will be able to make sense of the rest!! What I was trying to tell you is that I cut out some tickets from Tim's Tissue Tape, tinted them with some Distress ink before adding them to my background. Now for the shrink plastic........I am sorry that this is one giant paragraph, but blogger seems to think that if you hit carriage return, it means jumping up two lines.....what's going on?????? Anyway........as I was saying.......you need a Sizzix base tray, your die and some shrink plastic, I've got translucent shrink here.

     

 

 

Place your magnetic die on the base tray, pop on the shrink plastic, sandwich the whole thing between the two acrylic plates and put through your die cutting machine. I like to leave a nice size border at this stage, so that I can trim it more accurately once it has been die cut.

Now for the shrinking. I like to use something made of wood to stop the shrink plastic flying off the desk, shrink plastic usually shrinks down to about a quarter of it's original size and also becomes thicker once it has been shrunk.

Whilst the shrink plastic was still WARM not HOT.....please be careful if you do this....I know I have asbestos fingers....the shrink can stay HOT for some time.....you can manipulate its shape

You can colour it beautifully with Alcohol Ink. I started out by using Pesto and Caramel but by the time I had finished, it was the same colour as my tag and sort of disappeared so I added some Silver Mixative and Black Alcohol Ink after I had taken my photos.....much better!!!

So here is the finished tag

How much mess can a girl make......I only made a tag!!!

As the theme was journey, I decided that Tim's aeroplane would be quite fitting for this tag

I added a bottlecap with a Paris sticker....still trying to stick to the theme! Some Ideaology finished it off a treat.

So now I'm going back to the journaling class where I first started this journey and you can see that I used a shrunken journey as a stencil in my journal page, so it has a lot of uses.

Hope you managed to follow my drift and enjoyed what turned out to be an epic journey instead of a little trip and let's hope that blogger is in a better mood next time.