A Visit to Fall and a Reverse Stencil Technique

 

Good morning everyone! It's the last day of July and the very beginning of the dog days of summer. My mind turns to thoughts of cooler weeks ahead and yes, you guessed it - Pumpkin Spiced coffee! Being in a fall kind of mood, I decided it would be fun to make some tags to put on upcoming fall birthday presents and bags.

These tags were cut using the Art Impressions Tag Stitched dies set. It's is a great set with the large tag and several other smaller tags and decorative shapes. I also cut tag hole reinforcement donuts from the set. I suggest a good strong 110# card stock for large tags like these. I used Neenah Classic Crest Solar White 110# from CutCardStock.   

Before cutting the tags, I inked up two A2 sized white cardstock panels using a Hero Arts stencil called Swirl Stencil and a multi-colored ink pad. I used a pad that came in a Hero Arts My Monthly kit called Summer Twilight. Unfortunately it's not available in their store. An alternative would be their Ombre Autumn pad but any multi-color ink pad in the colors you like would work. In the tag on the left I swiped the ink pad vertically so that the ink would deposit in the blank areas of the stencil in color stripes. Then I took the inked up stencil and flipped it on top of another blank piece of white cardstock. My brayer was used to apply pressure over the top to get a sort of letter press image from the stencil. This resulted in a reverse and lighter imprint you see on the right tag. Doing it this way made the most of the stencil and the ink I had used.

For these tags, I selected images from the Feast Mode Set. I stamped the fox, squirrel and flower sprays on marker paper and colored them with Copic markers. I fussy cut all the images except the squirrel and arranged the fox on a tag, placing foam tape behind the main fox image. I glued the loose leaves around the fox similar to how the leaves are shown in the stamped image. Last, two of the flower sprays were arranged together at the top.

I stamped and heat embossed two sentiment strips in gold using stamps in the set. The My Sweet Petunia Cut Align Rulers work so well to practically guarantee a straight cut for your sentiments even if you stamp them crooked to begin with. I placed these at the bottom of the tags. I also cut a hexagon out of white cardstock using the Hexagon Double Stitched Die Set to use as a mat for the squirrel.

I cut the squirrel image out using a hexagon die and attached it with foam tape to the tag. Then one single flower spray was added to the top. After I did all this, I thought it would also have been cute to stencil golden rays coming out from behind him. If I do this again, I'm going to try that. He'd look a little like a squirrel super hero that way!

Once all this was complete, I added the hole reinforcement donuts in the same cardstock as the sentiment strips. I found a perfect orange ribbon piece in my stash, pulled it through each tag's hole and secured it with a piece of cream and dark purple bakers twine. 

I hope you enjoyed this quick visit to fall themes. It's around the corner and I'm looking forward to the cooler weather, beautiful fall colors, and most of all Pumpkin Spiced coffee! As always, I invite an additional stop at my blog for more details on all the products used for this project.

Happy Creating!

Janet - YouTube - Blog - Facebook - Instagram - Pinterest