Winter Light

Hello all!  It's Tag Friday at A Vintage Journey... that extra Friday in the challenge month where the Creative Guides get to take a tag out for a spin and see where they end up.  I've found myself at a rather wintry destination, partly because I've been so embedded in my new quote stamp sets, and EAB05 The Winter Edition grabbed my mojo with these words.

Yes, there's a chill wintry air blowing across these tags, and that magical winter light which lays bare the bones of the natural world so that they can shine with their own particular beauty.






To be honest, I'm not really certain exactly what went on here.  I'm pretty sure that's some gesso, or it could be white acrylic, scraped on to the tags with a palette knife.  And I think it's Weathered Wood Distress Spray dribbled on from the sides, though it does look very dark.









There are layers of stamping - the Gothic book text background stamp by Wendy Vecchi, one of Seth's fabulous new large word stamps from Impression Obsession, and the glorious grasses are by Penny Black (a lucky Ebay win).

And I'm pretty sure everything is stamped in either Watering Can Archival or Hickory Smoke Distress Ink.











Last but not least, I blended on some Weathered Wood Distress Ink, so you have that lovely icy tint in the air, and I decided the pair of tags needed to live the other way around for a more balanced look.













There's plenty of spatter, both Weathered Wood Spray, flicked from the end of the inner tube, and white paint, spattered with my preferred spattering paintbrush.













And that's really almost the full picture... apart from the words of course.

They're almost all about magical winter light, so the choice of large word from Seth's set was pretty easy!













These are words by L.M. Montgomery, but from The Blue Castle rather than the much better known Anne of Green Gables books.

I love that you could use any one of these phrases by itself, or put them together in any order you like.














I've kept things very loose and informal here.
















They're stamped in Watering Can Archival, and I used a grey pen to add the doodled frames.














Then I played with the arrangement of the phrases until I was happy with how they carried my eye across the tags.














I used the grey pen to add some subtle frames around the tag edges (you can probably tell that I was still slightly under the influence of my Singing Zinskis!).

And I finished things off very simply with some cheesecloth and rustic twine for the toppings.














You can probably guess that the phrase about the moonlight on the birches will get to come out and play soon with the beautiful Tim Holtz birch stencil, which is one of my favourites to use.















And I'm looking forward to experimenting with creating some icy ferns too - maybe on a dollshouse window or two - we'll see how that goes!

For now, I'll wish you a happy Tag Friday (do hop over to A Vintage Journey and see the tag trips my fabulous team-mates have been on) and a wonderful weekend.

Can you believe October is almost upon us?  Happy autumnal crafting all!



Nothing can match the crystal clear silence of a winter morning or the sea smoke rising off a bay in soft tendrils. There is a special quality, not only to the scenery, but also to the quieter pace of life. Winter's peace is incomparable.
From Maine's DownEast & Acadia Regional Tourism information - they've snagged a decent writer there!

With lots of layered stamping, and some of them being inked for the first time, I'd like to share this at Frilly and Funkie where the theme is Show Us Your Stamps