August 25, 2013

Witch's Potion

Hello and welcome!  Linda here to share a Halloween tag I made for the Artistic Outpost Halloween hop this past week.  I love vintage Halloween art so it was a pleasure to play around with these fun stamp plates!

And now for the details about my tag.  I started with a jumbo manila tag and dredged it through a puddle of Black Soot distress stain with some Pewter Perfect Pearls mixed in.  I did this repeatedly until the entire tag was colored, drying it with my heat tool.  Then I spread a liberal layer of Claudine Hellmuth's Multi Medium Matte over the entire tag and applied regular white tissue paper, scrunching it up for texture as I patted it down.  You have to be careful not to rip the tissue paper when you are mushing it round.  Once I had it nice and wrinkly, I ripped off the excess around the edges and dried it with the heat tool.  But then it wasn't black enough so I repeated Step 1.

I decided it needed some sort of design and used a Dyan Reaveley stencil and white Wendy Vecchi embossing paste, which I tinted purple with a couple of drops of Dusty Concord reindeer.  I secured the stencil to the tag by applying low tack painter's tape to the back of the tag and stencil.  I didn't want the stencil to move.  However, as it ended up, I didn't have the stencil tight enough to the tag and some of the embossing paste oozed out around the design.  My assumption is that the surface of the tag was too textured for the stencil to lay tight enough thus allowing some of the embossing paste to spread outward a bit - a practice makes perfect sort of error.  Just know that you have to hold the stencil tight enough so it is totally flat and be conservative in the amount of paste you apply.  The embossing paste takes the color beautifully with one or two drops of Distress Ink reinker.  I decided not to re-do my tag for a more crisp look because normally I cover up my designs anyway.  
The apothecary bottle was stamped on white CS with Jet Black archival, sponged with Vintage Photo and painted with Clear Rock Candy Crackle Paint.  The tags were all cut with the Tiny Tabs and Tags die, cut with white CS and again with chipboard and then stamped with images from Artistic Outpost's Apothecary and Haunted Halloween plates.  The spider was cut from chipboard and painted with Black Soot crackle paint and the "31" clips were painted with black Vintaj paint from the Retro Highway set.  

Thanks so much for stopping by today.  I hope you are having a wonderful weekend!

Designer:  Linda Coughlin



4 comments:

Unknown said...

This is adorable :) in a spooky kinda way ~

Terry said...

So much spooky fun, Linda! The texture and purple touches on the background are just awesome! Love this tag!

Words and Pictures said...

Perfect Halloween colours - and that background is totally fabulous!
Alison x

Lucy Edmondson said...

This is fab, love the colours, the enamelled tags and the composition. It has such an impact. I had problems recently with clay when I added reinker because it made it too wet, so maybe this happens with the embossing paste too, and makes it ooze? It still looks pretty perfect to me though,

Lucy x