Better

This Found Relative seems wise beyond her years and the hand-written text kept running through my head as I worked on this tag.

The background was stained with Tumbled Glass then collaged with fussy-cut Wallflower vellum and embellished with some texture (stencil by Crafter's Workshop) and crackle mediums and tinted with gel pens and oil pastels.

Braves

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Even though it's made entirely of Tim Holtz products, my entry for this year's November tag departs a great deal from Tim's inspiration piece.

At least it has an Autumn/Thanksgiving-ish theme?

All I know is I wanted to use the photo from the Occasions Found Relatives of children dressed up as Indian braves.

You may recognize the feather from the Wallflower paper stash which I embossed with a stylus to bring out the individual feather strands.

The nest/eggs background piece is also from Wallflower which I delaminated a bit by sanding the back to get it as thin as possible.


The background is a textured page from the Destinations paper stash and I added a few more darks with Distress Ink (like the shadows at the boys' feet). I topped it off with some machine stitching and Remnant Rubs and called it complete.

Snow Birds

Many birds migrate to the Arizona desert during the winter months and we call the humans that come here "Snow Birds."

Their presence is keenly felt right now--it's a big change from the slow quiet pace of summer and is my inspiration for making this tag.

I used a stencil (Stampendous) to create the trees which were covered with Crackle Accents (Ranger Ink) to give the illusion of bark.

It's been my experience that when you use this product on paper it's best not to use a liquid over the cracks for emphasis because the product may peel-off. So I used oil pastels instead.

The birds are from a stamp called Birds on a Wire by Tim Holtz and I used a gel pen to ink them individually before placement.

A bit of white from a Souffle Gelly Roll pen was used to accent the branches with snow.

I'm linking my tag to Simon's Monday blog challenge--

this week's theme is So Glossy.