Simply because...

Hello all!  Well, it's raining again... grim.  And there are many many things I'm supposed to be doing, but my Ground Espresso Distress Ink arrived, and I needed to play with it.  So here are a couple of quick tags, simply because...

It's not just Ground Espresso - love, love, love it! - but also Blueprint Sketch and some good old Stormy Sky in the mix.





First of all I used Distress Sprays, spritzed onto the mat and wrinkle-free distressed up again onto the tags.  And then some inks blended on and spritzed and flicked.

Very happy with the backgrounds, so I needed to not cover them up too much.











I also needed to make sure whatever I stamped would show up against the dark mysterious depths, so it was out with the Vanilla White embossing powder and the delicate daisy stamp.












I cracked open my new Ledger Script stamps to add some detailing in the background.

Some of the text is stamped in Stormy Sky and clear embossed so that it shimmers.












And some of it is stamped in Picket Fence Distress Paint to add lighter highlights.














I used just a hint of watered down Faded Jeans Distress Paint to shade the petals and leaves.












Just love the ghostly look it gives the flowers.

Since there was a bit of paint left on the mat, I splattered the rest around the tag surfaces.













A couple of very simple phrases from the Small Talk stickers...












... softened with Stormy Sky and Antique Linens DIs, and with a shading of Ground Espresso around the edges to bed them in to the tags.








It's so lovely to have new blues and browns to play with!  Of all the new colours so far, Ground Espresso has shot to the very top of the favourites list - and it's challenging the original browns too.

There's just a wonderful, wonderful depth and richness of colour to it.  You can see why I had to put other crafty deadlines and dull administrative chores on hold (though at some point I'll need to do some invoicing so that I can be paid!) in order to play with it.







Simple toppings - lightly dyed seam binding and some twine - and we're pretty much done.








It had to be indoor photos since there'd be an almighty spritz and flick disaster if I tried to take these outside to photograph in the pouring rain!

And now I'd really better get on with some of the stuff I'm really supposed to be doing today.

Hope to be round to visit soon, and I hope your Sunday is sunnier than mine!





Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Albert Einstein
(I think I may have used this quite recently, but I don't care - he's brilliant!)

I'd like to share these in the following:
Anything Mixed Media/Creative/Inky Goes theme at the Love to Create Challenge
Get Texty at the Mixed Media Monthly Challenge
Repeat Yourself at the Stampotique Designers Challenge - as so often, I have created in double - mirror images and repetitions are built into my creative process!
Sending You Flowers at Try It On Tuesday - so long since I've managed to play along there!!