No. 214577

Gosh it's good to be back making and creating after a marathon clean-up of my craft room. Even with minor rearrangements, the room feels a bit strange and I hope I remember where I put everything!

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I made this tag to link up with Simon's Monday blog challenge. This week's theme is tickets.

Most everyone on the Design Team admitted to having lots of them in their stash and surprisingly, so did I. This tag features an Idea-ology Journal Ticket.

Nothing extraordinary here in the way of technique--just good old Distress Ink, a fussy-cut stamped flower and one of Tim's Photo Booth images along with some Remant Rubs, fabric scrap and buttons.

I love the challenge of making new things look old/vintage and this tag was all about that. I'm not afraid to use sandpaper or water on paper to get the right effect and that's just what I used to grunge up this ticket.

Reorganization

My "studio" is a very small spare bedroom and when I began paper-crafting almost eight years ago I had no idea that, eventually, my stash of products would over-run me. So, a week ago, I began to reorganize and declutter to make things more functional.

My biggest problem was my supplies were spread out everywhere. I needed to sort through it all and put my paper together in one spot, move on to tools and then finally ephemera/embellishments. What a chore this has been but I'm beginning to see real progress and expect to have things right again in a few more days.

One accomplishment has been to renovate my Distress Ink storage container to better fit my shelving. And since my original DIY post is so popular I thought you might like to see the changes I made. The original was taller with two vertical rows--the new one is shorter and has four rows.

I just cut the original in half, glued the two shorter sides together and put a new base on it. The material is easy to modify, you can make it whatever size you need and add on to it later, if need be.

I am really looking forward to creating again once my reorganization is complete and vow to use up the materials more efficiently so I'll never have to do this again! (Famous last words?)

B Original

Tim's tag for August features a die-cut mixed media background.

I attempted to mimic the effect by using his Subway stamp over a scrap from the Destinations paper stash.

I also used his vellum Ephemera--the square in the upper-right corner and the checkered board behind the photo (which is a Found Relative that I cropped and altered just a bit).

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Remnant Rubs provided the black text (except the "B") and the Mirrored Star was distressed with a copper and citris alcohol ink combo.

The oval frame is a thin textured metal scrap that I tacked to the tag with hand-stitching.

A bit of machine stitching, some stamping here and there for texture (tiny black squares and splotches) and black ink to distress the tag edges finished it off.