Floral Tag

Today I made a tag. I have been told by the hospital to put a label on my wheelchair with my name on it, so that it will go up to the ward with the rest of my belongings after my operation on Wednesday. Originally I was just going to use a luggage label but then couldn’t remember if I had any left or where they were, so I decided to make a pretty tag with my name on it, and afterwards I could put something else over my name.

Some time ago I bought a set of Sizzix tag dies and used the largest of the set to cut the tag, from a scrap of fairly thick slightly shiny card that came with a parcel in the post the other day. I lined up the die as accurately as possible in the centre of the piece so that I could use the piece as a card mat later.

For the waste piece, without removing the die from the card, I put it back through the Cuttlebug with my No More Shims embossing mat to get a nice embossed edge to the frame. As for the tag, I selected the die of next size down, lined it up carefully on the tag with the cutting side to the back of the tag, and again with the No More Shims embossing mat, put the whole thing through the Cuttlebug again. I was very pleased with the great embossed edge I achieved.

Last week I had to re-ink my Spun Sugar Distress Ink pad and finished the re-inker. There was still a tiny bit left in the bottle so I added a small amount of water and thought I could probably use this. The same applied to my Fruit Punch Stickles – I’m not surprised I’d finished this bottle because this colour is my go-to Stickles colour! On a scrap of white cardstock I did a bit of experimenting – dropping a few splodges of the diluted re-inker with the dropper in the bottle, and then squirting two or three blobs of the diluted Stickles onto the craft sheet, spritzing with water and smooshing the piece through it. I dried the whole thing with the heat gun.

This shows that you can still squeeze a bit more life out of products when the bottle is empty! Always worth trying, anyway. At the top of the above photo, you can see the kitchen paper I used for mopping up – already maturing into a really useable piece for other projects!

I decided that it might be a bit risky to do a lot of wet smooshing with the tag, because I didn’t want to lose the embossing on the edge, so I abandoned the re-inker idea, and applied Spun Sugar Distress Ink all over the tag with an ink blender. This began to pick out the raised embossed edge very well. I spattered the surface with my finger dipped in water, left it a few seconds and then blotted it off.

I repeated the process with Worn Lipstick Distress Ink.

I distressed the edge with three colours of Distress Ink: first, Aged Mahogany.

I forgot to photograph the second colour, which was Vintage Photo. I finished off with Black Soot, just doing the very edge by swiping downwards with a blending tool.

I dropped a little of the diluted Fruit Punch Stickles onto the craft sheet, spritzed it with water and gently smooshed the tag through it. I achieved the lightest of glitter finish to the surface of the tag. I propped it up to photograph it and I hope you can see at least a little of the shimmer.

I added Spun Sugar Distress Ink all over the reverse of the tag, and distressed the edges lightly as for the front.

Now for some fun with my new Crop-a-dile. This was the first time I’d used it, and I managed to place a very nice bronze eyelet on the top of the tag.

I coloured a length of twine with Aged Mahogany Distress stain but it came out too dark, so I rinsed it quickly under the tap and squeezed it out in kitchen paper before drying it with my heat gun, to get the colour I wanted.

I selected several flowers from my recent Floral Mini-Album project and hot glued them to the tag.

I added my name with a sanguine archival pen.

After the tag has been used to identify my wheelchair, I intend cutting one of the labels from the tag die set and adding some different text to the tag, and possibly some more decorative yarn to the top. I made sure the flowers were well attached right to the edges with the hot glue, to prevent them catching and the petals becoming damaged.

I hope the nurses will get a bit of joy from seeing that I’ve taken a bit of trouble to identify my wheelchair, to co-ordinate with the floral decorations already on it.