Sherlock Holtz

Hello all, and welcome (back) to Words and Pictures on this sunny (here at least!) day...

I'm participating in the Tim Holtz 12 tags of 2012 for the first time.  Each month, the great TH (I may have mentioned him once or twice..!) produces a tag full of gorgeous ideas, techniques and possibilities and invites us all to play around with the inspiration provided.  It seems that you can stick quite close to the brief, or you can take the idea and run with it...  Well, I found myself LOVING the August tag, but without lots of the equipment to reproduce it, so improvisation became the name of the game.

Let me give you a quick look at TH's tag - it was inspired by the silhouette artists at DisneyLand, so the central silhouette is the main feature.  With my love of Vintage, you can see why I was pretty smitten from the off. 

But I have a confession - I'm not that wild about using flowers in my projects... controversial, I know, and maybe it's just because I'm not very good at them yet!  The challenges were piling up thick and fast!!

The first thing was to locate a silhouette which made my heart dance.  This stamp TH is using is just gorgeous - but I haven't got it, so I went on one of my Google Image trawls... and something slightly different caught my eye.  Let me show you what I ended up with and then, if you're interested, you can stick around while I take you through some of the alterations and adaptations I found myself having to make, and in the end wanting to make, to add to the story of the tag... (Oh, and if you do nothing else, I'd love you to have a look at my magnifying glass before you go!)

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you: Mr Sherlock Holmes... or should that be Sherlock Holtz?!

I'm completely in love with the latest TV adaptation of the Holmes stories, Sherlock,  created by Steven Moffat (creator of new Dr Who amongst many other things) and Mark Gatiss (of The League of Gentlemen fame), and starring a supremely fine double act at the helm: Benedict Cumberbatch (there's a name to conjure with) as SH, and Martin Freeman as Dr. Watson.

It's updated to present day London yet sticks to the stories, riffing off them, and adapting, with genius, elements within the stories.  If you haven't seen it, I urge you to seek it out.  (Two series on DVD so far...)

Anyway, once I'd spotted the Sherlock Holmes silhouette, it wouldn't leave me in peace, and the other elements of the tag started to work their way into my mind and onto my craft table - combining SH and TH!

Improvising round the lack of certain products became a positive pleasure... can you spot the SH references?

No Mini Leaf and Branch die... so I used the keys from the TH Hardware Findings die, because SH is always seeking the key to the mystery.  I still used the Kraft Core cardstock, as TH has... sanding the edges of the brown card to reveal the paler Kraft within.










For the leaves, I traced round some Tattered Leaves die-cuts I got ready cut off ebay... I coloured them with Bundled Sage and Peeled Paint Distress Markers and stamped them with the little music manuscript stamp out of the Pink Paislee London Market set. Voilà - the leaves of sheet music from which SH learns his violin pieces (though he prefers to play from memory once learned of course).

I didn't have the lovely frame stamp, so instead I used the one from TH's Urban Grunge set.  Now, some of you will know that it's really a horizontal frame and not the same top and bottom.  You're right - so instead of inking the whole thing with Ranger Embossing Ink, I just did two thirds of it, and then the same two thirds again the other way up, to complete a symmetrical frame around my printed silhouette.


And having embossed once with Detail Black embossing powder, I then threw some UTEE at it while still hot, to get a really thick glossy frame.

No Book Covers embossing folder, but by now I wanted to represent the brick-built houses of Baker Street, so it had to be the TH Bricked embossing folder instead.  

One problem with that is that it doesn't have a natural flat area in the centre, so I tried an experiment, creating a shim frame (extra layer when cutting) that should have protected my central area.  It did to a certain extent... the embossing is not nearly as deep in the middle, but I didn't quite pull it off as I'd've liked.

I used sand-coloured acrylic as my resist layer, then inked with Tea Dye, Vintage Photo and Walnut Stain towards the edges, wiping some away to reveal more of the opaque acrylic again.  I played with inking and wiping for a while until I got a brick look that pleased me.

I have cut the bottom of the tag with an On the Edge die, but mine's the Brackets one, and added the little 221b reference to the house number in Baker Street where Holmes and Watson share rooms.









No Tattered Pinecone die to make the flowers with, but I do have the TH Vintage Lace Decorative Strip die.  I wanted another SH element, so I decided to cut them out of vintage newsprint from The London Times of the 1890s (Google Image Search again - I love you!).







Rolling them around the toothpicks as TH suggests with his pinecone made life a bit easier (and I even tweaked each 'petal' before starting as the video tutorial recommends), but since it's not a flower-specific die, I have got slightly tighter rosebuds, rather than open flower heads. Still, I rather like what I've ended up with. 





The paper was aged with Old Paper Distress Ink and Vintage Photo on the edges, using a blending tool.  And they benefited, of course, from the final spritz of Perfect Pearls in Heirloom Gold which the whole tag received...



I like to "read" them as crumpled balls of newspaper that SH has hurled across the room in frustration when one of the adverts he has placed to flush out Moriarty has somehow gone astray!

I had some brown and cream ribbon, which I coloured with TH's Bundled Sage Distress Stain, and then used the Peeled Paint Distress Marker too for a slightly richer green, to hint at the tweed material of SH's famous hat, the Deerstalker.

The initials are pretty obvious; they're littering this post, infact!  They're taken from a set of fridge magnets shaped like old-fashioned typewriter keys.  Perhaps in preparing the stories for publication, Dr Watson might have used the still relatively new-fangled technology of a typewriter (invented 1867 - for the nerds amongst you...).







And the pearls, prompted by the TH inspiration tag, can also be read as referencing the SH story: The Adventure of the Six Napoleons, in which a pearl has been secreted inside a plaster bust of Napoleon, and subsequently mislaid!






The fabulous TH Chitchat stickers don't include the particular words I needed for my tag, so I had to print them from the computer myself.  The font?  Baskerville.  If you spotted that you get double points!!

Finally, my last little touch was to create another extra little 'twig', or branch of detection - the magnifying glass.  It's made out of one of those very cute, bulbous, pear-shaped safety pins, slightly squeezed together.  

I wrapped some leftover brick-embossed card, inked with Walnut Stain for a slightly leathery look, around the fastening end as the handle.  Then I dolloped some Glossy Accents onto a piece of card and scooped it into the circular end to create a 'bubble' of glass.  

It took a couple of attempts before I did it at the right moment of the Glossy Accents being liquid enough still to spread across the gap, and on the way to drying enough to stay there.  Rotating it like a spit-roast helped a bit.  

Okay, so it doesn't magnify very much, but I'm dead chuffed with it, nonetheless...  And I even quite enjoyed making the flowers too!




So glad you could join me on the case here at Words and Pictures today.  If you head over to Tim Holtz's blog, specifically August where I'm entering this, you can see amazingly creative versions of this tag from all over the world - reinvented, reinterpreted, recreated and really special!  I love seeing the variations on a theme as they arrive throughout the month.  Thanks so much for dropping in, and I hope to see you again soon - here or elsewhere in Craftyblogland!

I'm also going to throw it into the ring at Simon Says Stamp and Show: since I've broken almost every rule in creating it, it should fit well in their No Rules challenge this week!

It has long been an axiom of mine that the littlest things are infinitely the most important.
Sherlock Holmes

Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers.  All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance.  But this rose is an extra.  Its smell and its colour are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it.  It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.
Sherlock Holmes

When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.
Sherlock Holmes

All taken from The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle