Drip, drip, drop!

Hello all!  Apologies if that post title's just given you an earworm (you know, one of those songs that you get on the brain, round and around and again and again - and there's another) - and it's not even April yet, so that's doubly annoying!

But there is method in my madness - the fabulous Sue has chosen Drips and Drops as the new theme over at Country View Challenges.

(Oh, and Love is in the Air (Again!) over at The Artistic Stamper if you're looking for that post which went out at midnight... and I'll be back this evening with a big PaperArtsy party post - the first of the month is busier than ever!!)

For my first inspiration offering, I took some of the ideas and techniques from my recent Winter Journalling pages and transferred them to a tag.











So, I started by dividing my gesso'd tag with a pastel pencil line, and then applied DecoArt Crackle Paint with a palette knife in fairly random (though not entirely random) streaks.

Once that had cracked up nicely, I used a plastic pipette to drop trickles of Salty Ocean Distress Stain at the pencil line and let them run down the crackle.









Then Rusty Hinge got to come and play too... something nicely Gaudi-esque about the crackled mosaic full of colour at this stage.

I added some Vintage Photo and Faded Jeans into the mix too, though somehow as I added more ink it seemed to take less on the crackle.










Might be me, might be the humidity in the room, might be too much mopping up with paper towel, too much heat tool and not enough patience to let it dry in puddles (that's my chief guess) - we'll have to see next time I'm playing whether the same thing happens.








Anyway, once I was done with that game, I moved on to a new one - creating much finer drips and drops of Distress Spray on the top part of the tag...  Same colours, different drips and drops patterns.











So that was my background which I really rather liked, so I didn't want to cover it up too much.  It always seems to happen to my favourite backgrounds - they vanish under what comes next... not this time, I was determined.

Even though it's not full-on winter like the journalling, there's something quite autumnal and melancholic about it, and I found myself drifting towards a slightly sombre state of mind.








I was flicking through the ChitChat stickers (I figured that since they're nice and small, they wouldn't cover up too much of the background) and the word Commemorate just leapt out at me.

I found this coppery label holder in my stash and that was the words done.









The Distress Paint altered clock was hanging around the place (having been rejected from my Ring In The New card as being a bit too much of a good thing, even though its matching hands did get to take part there).

But now, I thought it might be time for it to earn its keep.











I sanded back the numbers to give them a bit more shine, and then did the same on the label holder and on the skeleton leaves surrounding it.










The sanding reveals a little light-reflecting gleam under the weathered look of the metal.














There are some thorny branches reaching up into the sky...













... stamped in Sepia and clear embossed.













At the top, we have some twine and some properly weathered (ie completely rusty) wire to finish things off in a simple manner.










All that metal was a bit heavy for the tag so I glued the whole thing onto some cardboard to keep it flat, and that also gives it a lovely weighty presence in the world.

So there are my Drips and Drops for now.  Do hop over to Country View Challenges to see the fabulous drippage my team-mates have conjured up for you, today and throughout the month, and we hope you'll come along and play with us.

As I said, there's the new challenge at The Artistic Stamper too, if you want to take a look at my offering for that, and I'll be back this evening for the PaperArtsy fun and games... don't miss it!!

Constant dripping hollows out a stone.
Lucretius
You have been warned!