Buried Treasure

Seth Apter hosts an annual look for buried treasure in our own blogs. I looked and debated and in the end I decided to go back to the beginning...Tim Holtz and his 12 Days of Christmas tags were the reason I started a blog. Little did I know what I was getting in to! So glad I did though. Although I've explored other mediums and media and love to experiment, there is still something appealing about tags. So my buried treasure from 12/4/11 was called:

Day 2 - Tim Holtz's 12 Days of Christmas

I was really excited to see the tags that Tim made with the Christmas Kraft Resist....since I had quite a few tags ready to decorate.  One day I was upstairs in the "fun room" and pulled the 12 x 12 sheet out with all the words on it. I started with Picket Fence Stain as the first coat and then used all the pretty colors of the distress stains to color each word. It's all about color for me.....and lately texture, but that's another story.

So if one is good, four are certainly better....and here's what I ended up with:

I like the Snow Man the best. I like the other ones too, but he's so simple and clean....

I don't always pay attention to what side is which at the die cut machine, hence why my dear is looking right....I really enjoyed working on the canvas. It's great with the stains.

And just to round out the group, here's a picture of the tree. The perfect pearls snowflakes make the pictures a bit tough to take, but add a glimmer to the card that is just one more layer of interest.

I learned a lot with this tag and can't wait until I have more time up in the Fun Room.

Old, Cool, Patina-ed, Pasadena Stuff

On my last little adventure I took a mobile workshop through Old Pasadena, a part of Los Angeles, California. In the Planning World (my day job) convention mobile workshops take you to parts of the host city, with tour guides no less, to tell you all the innovative and good work they are doing. Mobile workshops are the bomb, and quite a bit different than staffing public meetings.

Old Pasadena is a 22 block National Historic District run by a non-profit organization that manages the District. It was beautiful. Lots of bricks, beautiful alleys, re-furbished buildings, etc. I ended up with a couple really cool pictures that I want to put in an album, so I thought Linda Ledbetter's Compendium of Curiosities 2 Challenge featuring Mr. Holtz's Faux Patina method (succinctly described on page 58) was the perfect match up. I've done this before, but for some reason liked the result better this time. More layers this time I think.

(Quick edit the next day: something kept nagging at me last night, and it was the fact it looked too sterile. This morning I added some Black Soot Distress ink to the ticket edges and the bricks and am much happier).

I want to mention two bloggers who were quite inspirational this week. Candy Colwell, over at Simon Says Stamp made the coolest frame for their word challenge this week. She made filmstrip reels out of of gears and dowels, which just blew me away. So I know that's why I started thinking filmstrip for this piece. And Margie Kempler's piece for this week's CCC2 is fabulous...the colors, and the little ticket she included. Do go check out her blog, because it will take you some pretty fun, interesting, and beautiful places.

To get back to my piece, I used Distress paper and embossed it with the brick embossing folder, sanded it and then applied a bit of Aged Mahogany Distress Ink here and there. From more distress paper, I die cut the film strip, sanded that and added some Pumice Stone Distress Ink to take away all the "whiteness". I had printed some pictures the other day in the contact sheet mode of my Power Point program, so I just trimmed those down and adhered them, very carefully to the back of the filmstrip.

Originally I had thought to run the film strip horizontally and make a representation of the brick clock tower in Pasadena. I started with a piece of grunge board, painted two coats of Juniper dabber on it, sanded it, and then used Walnut Stain, Aged Mahogany, Broken China, Gathered Twigs, and Pine Needles Distress Stain. What can I say? It took a while to get the right color. At first it was way to yellow-green. Yikes. Anyway. Tim used a really similar process in last year's tag 12 of the 12 Tags of Christmas...I just didn't need any snow.

In the end, I thought my original idea looked kinda silly, so I fitzed and fudged and ended up with a title bar. Who knew? Out came the trusty dynamo and I even had a title.

For the clock and hands, I used Stream, Juniper, Bottle alcohol inks with the snow-cap mixitive. I finally got tired of shaking the snow-cap; never did hear the silly little ball bounce around, but it worked none the less so guess that's okay.

I used the same colors of distress inks on the back of an adage tag I had covered with picket fence stain, and then stamped it with one of may favorite sayings....it's all about the journey...not quite the cool ticket that Marjie came up with, but by then I was kinda tired. And one last thing (it's always one last thing with me) the memo tag with TIME covered in black paint, and wiped clean. Time, history, preservation. All good things.

Enjoy.