A Guiding Silver Star

Hello all!  The clock is really ticking now... we're almost there - just one week to go.

But happily the deadline for the Funkie Junkie 12 Tags of Christmas is the 29th December, so there's just a bit more wiggle room than there is for decorating, and gifts and food-shopping.

And I'm still merrily making my way through the lovely inspiration tags Linda Coughlin has been serving up.  We're now on to Tag 8, and it's a silvery star of a snowflake.

You may remember me saying on Tag 6 that TH's starry snowflake stamp sometimes confuses me - I can never quite decide whether it's snowflakes or stars.

Well, this tag takes advantage of that slight haziness with a giant starry snowflake all of its own - a wondrous sight!









I love Linda's funky alternative colours on her inspiration Tag 8, but you know me, once I'm in a colour groove I tend to stay there.

I also like having a set of tags at the end of the challenge which work as a collection, with common colour palettes and motifs and echoes from one tag to the next.











So I didn't go with the bold colour combination Linda played with, but followed my heart to this blue and silver and white-gold affair.

Linda's embossed background is a stunner, so I had to stick with it, though I used Stormy Sky and Picket Fence rather than Broken China...











... and then DecoArt Media Fluid Acrylic in Silver and Treasure Gold in Silver to highlight the dry-embossed snowflakes.  Love that icy shimmer.










The large snowflake is layered up with padded tape using the Tim Holtz Layered Snowflake and one of the two smaller snowflakes from the Snowflake Duo.

Both these Bigz dies come with a Texture Fade embossing folder so that you can add all this fabulous texture to your snowflakes.












To highlight that texture, I put on some Silver Treasure Gold (sounds silly, but that's what it's called!) with my fingers, and swept the Versamark ink pad across in places...















... so that I could add some Aged Silver Frantage powder for extra va-va-voom.











I don't have the metallic rub-ons so I had to go another way round to get my metallic words.  I cut mine with a couple of the Handwritten Holiday Words thinlits.














I dabbed them onto the Versamark pad and then went to town with the Aged Silver Frantage again.  I absolutely love the dimensional script you get this way.













They're stuck down across a banner of music paper handcut from the Jingle Christmas pad.  I like to add a touch of music where I can, and I liked the warmer colour tone against the icy snowflake background.














I loved Linda's fabulous antique metal holly leaves so I nabbed that idea too, though mine are again done with the Frantage.













I like it when everything ties together and echoes across the tag.














That's why I also Frantaged the metal snowflake charms.  Once I start, I can't stop!

Having added the statutory white twine, I thought I was done, but I felt something was missing somehow.

Well, all the other tags so far have had some Christmas Clippings on them so, although I already had a Christmas sentiment in place, I decided we needed more words.









And I found the perfect ones - about the guiding silver star, and the wondrous sight, and it wasn't until I was gluing them down (although they're stickers I always add a dab of glue for extra security) that I realised this was a snowflake, not a star...

Ah well, now it's a bit of both!!








Thanks so much for stopping by today, especially at this busy time of year.  I really do appreciate every visit, even when you haven't time to leave a comment.  (Yes, I can see you in my little view-count statistics!)

I hope you all have a wonderful week - though I'll be back well before it's over, so I'll hope to see you again soon, either here or elsewhere in Craftyblogland.

Snow was falling,
so much like stars
filling the dark trees
that one could easily imagine
its reason for being was nothing more
than prettiness.
Mary Oliver


I'd like to share this as my Tag 8 in the Funkie Junkie's 12 Tags of Christmas, sponsored by the Funkie Junkie Boutique