Hello!

As the weather has begun to take on an autumnal chill I was inspired to create a set of autumnal tags which reflect my love for this season as the trees gain their beautiful warm shades before the leaves start to fall.

My post is a bit photo heavy so you might need a cuppa before you start reading to see how I created my autumnal set.

My chosen substrate for this project is a set of white/greyboard tags in the size 8 which is 8 x 16cm. I had a look through my stencil collection (which is huge!) and pulled out a couple of leaf themed ones. I got out my Flat Matte sprays in autumnal shades, choosing Ochre, Redwood, Blackberry, Saffron and Orange and using the leaf stencils, misted the tags with colour. As you'll see, there are a few edge marks but these will be disguised later.

As usual, when using sprays, I placed a plain piece of cartridge paper underneath to catch up any excess and also pressed on the inky stencils. The resulting sheet is rather grungy but will come in useful for other projects.

My next step was to add some more texture to the tags which I did by using part of a leaf stencil with texture paste in one or two places on each tag. I dabbed paint on the leaves and then misted Orange and Tomato Flat Matte sprays on top and added a little on the tag surface too.

I then set about making some leafy embellishments which didn't actually go quite to plan. I stamped some of Lynne's leaf silhouettes with Distress Oxide inks but when they were dry, they looked a bit dull - I should have probably used actual Distress inks instead!

However, I decided to go with the flow and painted the cut out leaves with Satin inks in Red, Orange, Yellow and Purple - this went somewhat wrong as the inks sunk into the oxides and virtually disappeared. I dropped one upside down and found the satin ink had seeped through to the back so I added more to the back and used those instead apart from one leaf which worked - serendipity strikes again! I force dried some with a heat gun and the ink bubbled up nicely.

I misted a strip of muslin and some packaging with the same autumnal Flat Matte Sprays as I wasn't quite sure what I wanted to use on the tags.

I decided on the muslin in the end and tore strips off which I glued to the tags with the leaves I made glued on top.

I stamped some text from one of Lynne's tree stamp sets on more ink spray overflow paper using brown ink and added these to the tags. I finished off with some string which I rolled across the brown ink pad to pick up some colour.

Muslin

Have a great weekend and see you next week.