Who hid the chocolate?

Hello everyone, and welcome back after a short break in the relentless posting (sorry!).  This post should be good and short (for me) too.

I'm here to share my version of Tim Holtz's March tag.  Tim's inspiration tag is amazing (of course) and it took me a lot of failed goes to get something I was happy with... but now I am, even though it's travelled quite a way from the original.

The main "problem" that needed solving was that I don't have the bunny die.  I tried the butterflies and the hearts I do have, but it didn't seem to be going right.  I tried hand-cutting a rabbit, with some pretty "meh" results.

In the end, it was Beatrix Potter who came to my rescue, in the shape of one of the illustrations from the Nicecrane Designs Peter Rabbit Save Pack (sorry to those of you in the UK: for copyright reasons you're not allowed to buy these; the rest of you can knock yourselves out!).  I used these on my Rabbit, Rabbit, Rabbit triptych, so you may remember they are coloured images.

I altered the image to create an enlarged sepia (or shall we say chocolate-coloured?) version, and then I was away!

I mounted the rabbit on chipboard, cut it with the Alterations Labels die, and inked with Vintage Photo for a deeper sheen.



From there, it's fairly faithful to the rest of what Tim did...

Another breakthrough for me was switching papers.  I love the seasonal ones but for some reason it just wasn't clicking for me this time.








I suddenly remembered the gorgeous Suchard paper from the Vintage Shabby Paper Stash.  So chocolate won the day!

Using the 6x6 version, and making sure "chocolat" was on there, meant there wasn't quite enough to cover the tag, but I knew that would be okay because of the grasses at the foot of the tag.

(Also wanted a quick pic here, as I'm always sad when I'm covering up something this pretty!)






I handcut my grasses and - poor things - they've been so many different colours and flipped round so many times in my different versions, in addition to travelling all the way across Europe in a half-finished state, that they're a little bedraggled now.  They still add great dimension, I think.










I love Tim's metal flowers painted with Distress Paints (think DPs on metal is one of my favourite uses of them I've seen).












I've got a few DP colours (guess what shades?!), and they fitted in well with the paper - Broken China, Weathered Wood, and edged with Vintage Photo - but had to add a couple of ordinary acrylics for the stems and leaves (Peeled Paint is on the way...).








And the ribbons are obviously dyed to suit the new colour scheme which had turned up.






And look, it's even got a decorative back from one of my failed attempts!!







The sentiment popped straight up out of the expression on the rabbit's face... although if anyone knows where the chocolate is hidden, it should be the Easter Bunny.  I guess all the eggs are somewhere under all that snow!




Oh, okay, not that short then, sorry - I do try!  Thank you so much for taking the time to stop by.  Hope you're having a wonderful weekend doing whatever it is that brings you joy!

I'm entering this as my March tag in Tim Holtz's 12 Tags of 2013.

What do you get if you pour boiling water down a rabbit hole?
Hot Cross Bunnies

How can you tell where the Easter Bunny has been?
Eggs marks the spot

Why did the Easter Bunny cross the road?
Because the chicken had all his Easter eggs



P.S.  Well, I'm afraid my short post has been blown out of the water!

We visited the farmer's market (farmářský trh - that final 'h' to be pronounced on a hard exhalation, a touch softer than the 'ch' in a Scottish 'loch'; and I'm not even going to start on what that diacritic over the 'r' does to the tip of your tongue - just part of what I'm up against with the Czech language!) in the village this morning, and there was the most amazing local crafter there, Andrea Weckova, creating absolute works of art out of duck and goose eggs.











She was working on decorating the eggs on the stall, adding the dimension you can see on some of them, and painting some, and showed me how she marked up the eggs to start with.









She had one special cutting tool (which she couldn't demonstrate in action as there was no power point), and another for carving/moulding, so I think you probably couldn't just leap in with a chisel!








We bought one to add to our collection of beautifully painted Bohemian eggs (well over forty years old - amazing they're still around at all!), and I just had to add this postscript to today's post, with the Easter tag, and I'll take the opportunity, in advance, to wish you all a very happy Easter.