Spring Quartet

Hello everyone, thanks so much for dropping in.  It's lovely to see you - well, you know what I mean!

I'm here with my creations inspired by the glorious March tags Tim Holtz offered us at the beginning of the month.  I was completely bowled over by his inspiration tags this month - so, so beautiful! - so I went for a pretty close version to start with, learning from the subtle techniques on offer.  Here they are...

But I had such fun doing it (plus I wasn't happy with my Distress Marker colouring on the nests) that I decided to do a whole other pair, and this time I stuck to a mainly neutral palette, with a touch of honey, just to see how that would be.  So here are those...

You don't need me to tell you how it's done - all of Tim's clear and detailed instructions are right here.  So I'm just going to do some compare and contrast photos of some of my favourite bits.

It was love at first sight for me for the new Wallflower vibe in all of the Holtz collections (across the Alterations, Paperie and Idea-ology).  

I'm afraid there's been some heavy spending (thank goodness for the discount earned at The Funkie Junkie Boutique by playing along with Linda's 12 Tags of Christmas!!), and this stamp set was right at the head of the list.  I was so happy to see it in action on Tim's tags.

The layered egg is beyond cool!  I love it.


I love that you can have any colour you want as the base layer.


And then speckle with other colours to your heart's content.


Not perfect over-stamping... but I'm thinking there'll be lots of practice in the future, and we all know what that makes!















I loved the multi-colour stamping on the feather...


Blending ink colours on one stamping is something I quite often do (did it on the eggs too!), and I love the effect of doing it with bolder colour contrasts than I would usually go for.


Though, of course, on my neutral tags, it was back to business pretty much as normal!


I'm one of the people Tim mentions when he's demoing the marker spritzer - the ones who picked one of them up, somewhere, at some point, and have had it hanging around for years, with very occasional use.  


Sadly mine's bright red rather than sexy black!











Not quite happy with the string on my "ghost" versions... 











I wanted to use a paler colour, but this is more heavy-duty than the regular twine, so the effect is a bit heftier than I'd like.









The Stormy Sky DP of the colour version of the word band becomes Antique Linen on the neutral tags.









And I picked the smaller fonts for the "ghost" tags, which have a lighter appearance than the larger letters of the single word Word Bands.










I used the matching twines at the top to secure some strands of raffia for a natural look.

So there you have it, my Spring Quartet (apologies for the abysmal pun, but I'm sure you'll understand that it was irresistible!).











These were such a joy to make - smudge-stamping, shadow-stamping, spritzing and all.

Thank you, Tim, for another outstanding month of inspiration and education - what a killer combination!

Live as if you were to die tomorrow.  Learn as if you were to live forever.

Mahatma Gandhi

I'd like to enter these as my March tags in Tim Holtz's 12 Tags of 2014.