Rusty Rosehips

Hello all, I'm here to share some Rusty Rosehips with you today.  These tags have so many of my favourite things... nature at her finest, rusty wire and plenty of crackle and weathering!

I mounted my tags - cut with a Tim Holtz die from some plain card - onto some stiff waste cardboard before I started, so that they wouldn't curl up once the crackle paste started doing its thing.

And I kept things nice and messy around the edges as I was spreading the paste on, so that you get all those nice distressed edges.

The rosehips are from my PaperArtsy botanical stamps - EAB26 Rosehips Edition.

I had a glorious time painting them.  Look at this array of rainbow colours of PaperArtsy Fresco paint... not my usual jam, but it was such fun using them!

I generally put a dot of each paint onto the craft mat, spritz it with a bit of water and then use a water brush to apply the paint.  So really it's a kind of "watercolouring" even though it's using acrylic paint.  The watery technique gives me the ability to get a really subtle application...

... and to add layers of colour, even when the paints are opaque rather than translucent (PaperArtsy has some of each in their line-up, and semi-translucent paints too - worth keeping an eye on which type you're playing with).  The blue sky behind provides contrast to make those berries really pop!

I created some especially rusted bits of weathered crackle where I wanted to wind my rusty wire around the tags.  DecoArt's Quinacridone Gold, Raw Umber and Payne's Grey Fluid Media Acrylics do a grand job of rustiness.

And I added an Idea-ology Muse Token to each wire, keeping the words to a minimum on these tags. 

Actually, if you look closely, you'll see there are quite a lot of words.  There's text detail going on over the crackle background, as well as the Latin name for the rose (all also from the same stamp plate).

So I hope you like that quick tour of these rusted, crusted, crackled tags, with the glowing rosehips at the heart of them.

The to-do list in the garden to get ready for winter seems to keep getting longer rather than shorter, and there's some very big stuff going on behind the scenes at the moment... watch this space on Thursday, that's all I'll say!  Do hope all is well with all of you and I'll see you again soon.  Thanks for stopping by and happy crafting, all!

It is the time you have spent on your rose that makes her so important.

From The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry