Friday 9 December 2016

"It's the end of the Christmas Gift Tags...." by Melissa Struhs



Happy Friday Colour Blast Fans!

When I last blogged two weeks ago, I hadn't given much thought to making any kind of start on Christmas crafting but I am happy to say the house is decorated, the shopping has begun and now comes the fun part of wrapping and the finishing off the handcrafted gift tags.

If you want to refresh your memory, here is Part 1 of the last blog post so you can see the start... remembering that I used assorted sized kraft tags and wood veneer Christmas shaped embellishments.

When it comes to these kind one off style gift tags, I like to dig through a bag of embellishments that live in the back of the cupboard and are usually old supplies that I am not particularly fond of anymore. Perhaps you will recognise a few of these as they are probably in your scrap stash too!


You can see that I love solid blocks of colours for decorating around our home for the Christmas season like lime green...



hot pink and



orange. Far from a traditional look for Christmas.



To finish of my hubby Adam's tag, an oval shaped craftwood shape
(Who has one of these?.... Okay, I have more than one!!)
was given several coats of White Heavy Gesso and dried off with my heat gun.


A damask style stencil was used to decorate the flat and raised section of the wooden shape



with Snow White and Apple of my Eye Colour Paste. I love the lighter shades achieved when the two colour start to blend together.



Here are the layers coming together as each of them are glued into place, leaving the holes of the tags free for dressing up later on.


This next one is all for me and I really wanted something with all little more of a white base, so I started by adding a thick strip of mesh tape to the kraft tag base.



The same stencil was used but this time with a combination Snow White and Lipstick Colour Paste .


When it was dry, I felt like a bolder look of white was needed and just went in with my palette knife and smeared gesso across the right side.



As the layers pieced together, the silhouette shape of the Christmas tree has the gesso base underneath.



And last, but not least my sons, Griffin's gift tag. It uses an embellishment so old...I recall buying it when he was maybe 2 or 3.
(Yikes, definitely time to use it!)



The clear acrylic frame was flipped over and the stencilled technique was applied to the reverse side of the frame with Tangareen Dream  Colour Paste.



This took about half an hour to dry naturally and then layered together with elements from Part 1.

Revisiting the old supplies can be a lot of fun and we know that all of the Colour Blast range gives you so many options for altering everything.


Why not dress up your Christmas projects with a little Colour Blas this coming holiday season? We would love to see what you come up with, just pop them up in the Colour Blast Creative Corner.
Till next time,
Mel.





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