Rough Around The Edges

Hi all and welcome, with an especially big welcome to the newest followers - I'm absolutely delighted you decided to join the journey.

I'm here to share a tag inspired by some playing around I did with rustification the other day (more about that very soon), and by the arrival of my first ever Stampotique stamp - the wonderful Moth Fab, a lucky bid on ebay - yay!

And it seemed only right to create a piece that would fit in with the current Stampotique Designers Challenge, which is to Recycle It.

And we go from oodles of colour back to the rusty neutrals that give me so much pleasure.

I started with corrugated cardboard, ripped from one of the packaging boxes I keep under the table.  And I gathered up washers, muslin and various other bits and pieces lying around the craft room to subject to some rusting.











While they were busy oxidising, acidifying, or whatever it is they're doing, I gave the cardboard a rough coat of white paint, and then added Vintage Photo Distress embossing powder in tiny amounts around the edges.













I distressed a paper doily with some ink and then grabbed some kraft glassine paper, discarded from a previous make, for my next layer up, and then - all rusting done and dusted - layered in a scrap of the now rusted muslin, fraying the edges for an even more lived-in look.









Moth herself (well, I had to have the one named after a character in Shakespeare, didn't I?) is stamped on an old book page, which I've then torn and inked to frame her.  I added a little snippet of lace left over from my Love of Vintage canvas which was lying on the table - inking it, and fraying it a little more as I went.











The words came to me as I was playing (and no I wasn't suffering from a hangover!), and seemed to fit perfectly - not only with what was appearing on the desk in front of me, all distressed and frayed and decaying, but also with my mood in recent weeks, when I've felt very unsettled and uncertain quite a lot of the time.  

(I've started to get the bit back between my teeth now.)








I stamped them onto one of the leftover tags from a previous tea-dying session which had been lying around for ages and which, at some point, had got itself a rough border of gesso'd brush strokes. 

Since this was becoming all about the edges, I stamped around the edge of the tag, so that all the words also got a touch of the gesso'd area.











I layered some of them onto some rusty tin wire net from The Funkie Junkie Boutique, teasing and twisting the edges for a lovely grungy effect.










The Idea-ology flowers, thoroughly rusted (fastener and all!), and some differently-sized washers, also thoroughly "decaying", add the metal touch to the tag.














I'm a little bit sad that the act of gluing everything down robbed me slightly of some of the fabulous dimension from the creased glassine and wrinkled material that the tag had when I was in the layering up stages... but overall, I still love the look of the thing.









A little bit more of the rusty muslin tops the whole thing off, tied together with some rusty wire, curled around some dowelling.

I had an absolute ball with this... I'd forgotten how much I love altering things for a rusty look.  And all the fraying really tickles me.  And of course I love the book pages...

Part of the trouble with all this crafty adventuring is that there's always something new to try (and I strongly feel I'm still in exploration and discovery mode with it all), and while that's wonderful, it's easy to let the things you've really gelled with slip into the background.













Well, they're all here with a vengeance: book pages, stamping, distress, ageing and good old layering, and it felt good to just play again.

I may still be feeling a little rough around the edges, but I'm ready to start living closer to the edge...

Come to the edge, he said. 
They said: We are afraid. 
Come to the edge, he said. 
They came.  
He pushed them... 
and they flew.
Guillaume Apollinaire

I'd like to enter this into the following:
Recycle It at the Stampotique Designers Challenge
Anything Goes at Simon Says Stamp and Show
Show Us Your Metal at Try It On Tuesday