A Personal Challenge for Me!

A very happy Friday to all you lovely people,

I hope the sun is shining as brightly for you as it is here.  It's absolutely perishing though with a thick white frost on everything and my little water feature in the garden is frozen solid.  I bet it ends up cracked when it thaws out.  Oh well, these things don't last for ever do they and I was amazed it survived last winter's hard weather.

Over on the Chocolate Baroque Guild Forum (link in my sidebar) a lovely lady called Margaret has organised an Alphabet Tag Swap for Guild members this year.  I've only entered a couple of one off swaps in the past and this one is going to be hard for me to keep up for a whole year.  Obviously it's not compulsory to do the tags every month but now I've started I really want a full alphabet so I'm going to do my best.  Today I'm going to share the first two tags I made.

Here is A for Asia

I used the Paisley Elephant set of Chocolate Baroque stamps to make this tag with a Distress Ink blended background using (I think) Dusty Concord, Rusty Hinge and Bundled Sage.  I can't remember what I stamped the background with because like a numpty I forgot to jot some notes down before I sent the tags off, Doh!!! but I think it was the Dusty Concord and Bundled Sage.  I stamped the lovely fan onto Shrink Plastic for an embellishment and the elephants were stamped with Flitterglu before applying Crafty Notions gilding flakes.  I have to say that Flitterglu does give you all the nice fine detail of the image but I need to get some of the proper cleaning stuff from IndigoBlu because it's a b.....r to get every last bit off the stamps and I'm a bit fussy about cleaning my stamps, lol!

My second tag is B for Bottle

My immediate thoughts for the letter B were either butterfly or bird as I have loads of Chocolate Baroque stamps to fit but I wanted to find something a little out of the norm for me and then remembered these little used bottle stamps.  For this tag I built up layers of Distress Inks on the background by pressing the inkpads on my craft mat and spritzing with water before wiping the tag through and after drying between layers I finally tapped the tag onto the ink globules to create little spots.  Again, I think the colours were Pumice Stone, Spun Sugar and Victorian Velvet.  I stamped the shelf and the table directly onto the tag using black Versafine and then the table again onto card, cut it out and applied it with 3D foam.  Some of the bottles were stamped directly onto the tag and coloured and some were stamped onto card, cut out and coloured before attaching with 3D foam.

All the images came from either The Dressing Room set or My Lady's Boudoir set of stamps from Chocolate Baroque, of course.

Once I got into them I really enjoyed doing these tags but I have a feeling a few letters of the alphabet are going to be a bit brain teasing to find a subject let alone one I have Chocolate Baroque stamps to fit (even though I have hundreds of CB stamps, lol).

REMINDER !!!

Before I finish today (to get on with some h.......k, lol) I just wanted to remind you that over on the Snazzy's DT Blog there is still a week or so left for joining in with our first ever challenge.  There's a lovely prize up for grabs and the theme is 'Love/Romance'.  If you're not into the slushy Valentines type of creation, there's always the love we have for our family and special friends or even beloved pets.  We'd love you to join in and add to the lovely gallery some of our visitors have already started.  Hope to see you there so I can visit you back!

Have a lovely weekend everyone and see you again soon.  I'll show you the gorgeous tags I received yesterday when I've had time to take pics.  Thanks for popping by today and keeping me company.

Hugs
Lesley  Xx