Springs & Blings Are Better Than Strings by Wendy Mallas

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Hello again, good people! It's Wendy here with another project for you.

It's well known amongst my nearest and dearest that I have a bad relationship with snow. Don't get me wrong, it's beautiful from an artistic point of view and it's inevitable when you craft at Christmas, but if that stuff is outside, I'm staying in. It's safer that way.

This week, I thought I'd try to demonstrate how I feel about snow, starting with a good sized MDF tag (#10). Using a brayer, I applied PaperArtsy Fresco Finish in Antarctic. Then I applied Bora Bora lightly over the top. A few quick swipes of Snowflake with the edge of some thick card and the base layer was nicely covered.

The phrase "Let it snow" is bandied about a lot at this time of year and my inner conflict continues - yeah, but no, but... - Jo Firth-Young (JoFY) has some lovely stamp sets this year and one of them contains exactly that phrase in her super, bubbly font, but it's smaller than her alphabet collection stamp set so I had to compromise by trying to emulate her style by hand on a slightly smaller scale. It didn't take me as long as I thought. In fact, apart from a small adjustment to the kerning (spaces between letters), I did it in one go.

I then copied it onto the tag with a 3B pencil.

Using some masking paper, I covered up the lettering, then stamped some JoFY snowflakes all over the tag with Versamark ink. I covered the tag with WOW embossing powder in White Twinkle and set it with my heat gun. They certainly chose an accurate name for that one! It's quite dazzling in real life.

Then I painted over the text with Snowflake to give it an even base for a layer of Caribbean Sea on the top. It got slightly lost in the background, so I lined it with a black paint pen and gave it some highlights with a white gel pen to make it pop. I then rubbed some Treasure Silver around the edges of the tag to frame it. And so it was finished, but it lacked some embellishment tied through the hole at the top.

I tried all colours of ribbon, fibres, strings, cords etc., but everything looked a bit lame. When all else fails, add more bling! I made some European style paper beads using some painted paper strips curled around a knitting needle and covered each of them in three layers of Ultra Thick Embossing Crystals in Lapis Sapphire from Cosmic Shimmer. This would have worked on any paper though, as the embossing crystals are opaque.

Next, I curled some silver coloured jewellery wire around a pen to make a spring shape (subconsciously yearning for a change of season!) and threaded beads onto it at equal intervals. Four shiny beads on some bright silver springs finished my tag off quite nicely, thank you.