Stars and Stripes All in a Row

As I mentioned earlier, I was unable to finish my Tim Holtz June 2016 tag due to some hospital hopping (very sick friends ... not for myself). Frilly and Funkie's July Challenge:  All Lined Up gave me the nudge to go back and finish that tag.  I love all things Americana.  I really wanted to do something for the June tag that would fit in with our July 4th Independence Day celebration as well.  So I had played around with some ideas about stars and stripes.

I ended up changing some of Tim's original design ideas.  First of all ... no sewing.  Yes, I have a sewing machine.  No, I do not know how to use it.  I must stop and figure it out some day.  Another change was that I used Distress Paint (Chipped Sapphire and Picket Fence) to do my stamping and coloring on the tissue wrap.  I also did not use the Distress Collage Medium.  I wanted to Distress Ink and Distress Markers to color the background.  Their water reactive properties would have just made the ink smear around under the Collage Medium.

I gotta say ... I love Tim Holtz's new Substrates (the surface that the I stamped the Blue Print Stars on and die cut out the two columns of stars.  I can see myself having lots of fun with these new surfaces.  I love texture and my ability to grunge them.  It was quite the problem solving exercise to find a way to get these stars die cut into that substrate.  After the painted stars were added to a medium brown substrate, I used Tim's #8 Tag thinlit to cut out my tag shape around the painted stars.  Now the column of stars die is part of Tim's Old Glory Die (see to the right).  The picture basically shows where these stars lie in connection to the flag on the steel die.  So the question was, " how can I use these on my tag?"  I ended up cutting my tag into two pieces.  Tim's Industrial Sticker (with the stars on it), covers the cut (see above).  I was able to do some very careful measuring and die cutting once on the painted stars face up on the die and once with painted stars face down on the die.  Whew!  I definitely worked hard to get things "all lined up" (had to put that pun in there for you F&F folks :) ).

The stripes were applied with the Stripes layering stencil using Aged Mahogany Distress Ink (per Tim's instructions on his June Tag tutorial).   This background is one of Tim's Textile Surfaces.  Love this new product as well.  I tried doing this technique on Sticky Back Canvas.  It just bled too much.  These textile finishes are great with Distress products.  

 

I added my ode to Stars and Stripes with chit chat stickers.  The tag topper is made of Carousel Clips and a dowel stick.  The clips were aged with alcohol ink and "rusted" using a technique revisited in Tim's Summer of Creative Chemistry.

Time to go hang this up with some of my Americana projects.  I absolutely love how it turned out ... so much better than I imagined.  Thanks Tim Holtz for continuing to inspire us to create!  Thanks to Frilly and Funkie for their monthly challenges.  I'm not sure I would have finished this tag if it hadn't been for your inspiration.  If you haven't visited the Frilly and Funkie blog or played along with their challenges, I would encourage you to do so.  Linda Coughin, from the Funkie Junkie Boutique, very generously sponsors the challenge and her Design Team is freakin' awesome.   I'm looking forward to getting back to some challenge play in  the weeks to come.  Hope to see you all at some of the other wonderful challenge blogs in the near future.

Have a great weekend!  Hugs -- Mary Elizabeth