Natures Lace Makers

This weeks tag theme was Lace, and not being a lacy kinda person, opted for the natural lace makers, spiders. I wanted to try and recreate the lovely dew filled cobwebs you find on a damp and misty morning, so here's what I did.

 The paper I used is an A5 piece of Reeves Acrylic 300 gm paper. I like this paper as it is a good weight and has a smooth and a slightly textured side. For this tag I used the textured side. First I coloured the paper using the distress inks above in the true TH method, applying the inks directly to the craft sheet and spritzing with plenty of water. As you can see, I hate wasting stuff so mopped up the ink with some scrap fabric which will used in something else I'm sure.

Next I added another layer of ink in the colours above, in the same way but with less water.

Then I stamped the seed heads using a water proof ink, this is very important for the next step or it just won't work.

The colours are much too vivid for my desired misty morning look so I took a big mop brush and a little paynes grey water colour and washed out a lot of the colour. I then added a wash of heavenly white H2O water colour. 

As you can see the flash on the camera really picks this up so you can't see a lot of what is happening below this reflection, but you can see how lovely and muted the colours have now become.

I cut my tag from this half of the paper. I have been using a size 8 tag for all my tags this month which are just over 3" wide and 6 1/4" long or there about.

The cobwebs were then stitched with a fine silver thread and a really fine needle. I added a bit of cotton lace to the bottom which was dyed using some of the same coloured distress inks and finally added a few micro beads to the webs and lace using a dimensional adhesive. 

I have shown you a picture here with and without the flash as the weather is just too miserable to get a decent picture in natural daylight.

This week in the Joggles MidWeek Muse, Barbara has made a great video on making a book using tags.
You can watch it here. I love this little book and will be giving a try I think.

I can't believe I have managed a full month of Tag Tuesday, and a big month is was with five tags to be done. Februarys themes are looking very exciting and should provide plenty of opportunity to keep playing with my stash of supplies I have accumulated over the years.