Bridget Larsen’s Winter Lurgie Buster

Thank you, Bridget, for sharing your recipe for this cold remedy recently.

Our neighbour has been going through a bit of a rough patch recently and I thought she needed cheering up. Last week I made her the turquoise birthday card I showed you on my blog. My hubby told me she’d got a cold on top of everything else, so I decided to make up some of Bridget’s Winter Lurgie Buster (my name for it!) and give her a jar. To make it more of an attractive gift I covered the top of the jar with some pretty fabric and made a tag for it.

To create the background for my tag, I took some pale yellow card and embossed it with a Fiskars Texture Plate (Honeycomb design). The Cuttlebug sandwich for these texture plates is as follows: A plate, texture plate (RS up), cardstock, tan embossing mat, C plate. It’s quite a tight fit but it goes through OK!

I took my Stampotique Large Bee stamp (I’d have preferred the Medium Bee but I don’t yet own this!) and stamped it using sepia archival ink, after which I fussy cut it out.

The honeycomb embossed card was inked with Spiced Marmalade distress ink and then fussy-cut around the edges, following the embossed hexagon shapes. I swiped the surface gently with a blending tool, using Vintage Photo distress ink, to define the honeycomb shapes. I also folded a small piece of card in half and inked it with the same coloured distress inks.

I cut a lemon shape from the same card, and inked it with some Wild Honey and Spiced Marmalade distress inks. Then I went on a texture hunt! I tried various things, and nothing gave me that nice dimply mottled lemony texture, until I found my garlic press in the kitchen, and thought that the hard plastic projections on the back might do the trick. With this garlic press, after pressing the garlic, you open it right back so that the plastic projections push the remaining garlic back inside the press. (Funny how much of my kitchen stuff seems to end up in my ARTHaven, isn’t it!)

Anyway, using my little hand-embossing tool, this seemed to do the trick.

Now time to make the leaf. I hand-cut a shape out of the same card and inked it using Evergreen Bough distress ink, and then hand-embossed it from the back, using my large embossing tool. Turning it over, I drew on the veins using a Ranger Cut ’n Dry nib in its holder, and Forest Moss distress ink, and embossed them from the front with a finer embossing tool. These fibre nibs are brilliant, because you can use them to draw with distress inks, and you really don’t need to buy the distress markers!

I wrote some text inside the tag, using a sepia permanent marker, and attached some baker’s twine to the top.

The finished tag. The lemon and leaf were attached with hot glue – quite a lot, to help maintain the embossed shapes. After inking it with Wild Honey distress ink, I stuck the bee down with Scotch quick dry adhesive.

The tag attached to the jar with the baker’s twine. I cut the fabric circle from some gorgeous cotton fabric in my stash, with nice small-sized sunflowers on it.

Hope it brings some comfort, physically and emotionally!