12 Tags of 2013 – July Tag – 67 minutes

  I didn’t think I was going to enter the challenge this month.   I was really stuck for inspiration – we don’t celebrate the 4th of July (being South African and all) and I have been saving all my tags with the intention of eventually installing them onto a collage of sorts to hang on my bedroom wall.  So I reckoned a “ US Independence Day/freedom” type tag would be a little lame and weird if its going to hang on the wall of this  “makhoti”  in Kwazulu right?  

Anyway I went about my business, messing around with all kinds of other projects, but I think if I don’t do something Holtzy I get a bit anxious and fidgety.  I swear I think I’m Holtz junkie. 

So then the 13th of July rolled around which is my birthday and I got a sweet horde of Holtz-aphenalia….which I generously gave myself as a birthday present,everybody should save up all year to do one big bank-busting Tim Holtz buy for their birthdays right?  In addition to that – I received an order from Inspiration Emporium.  And you know how that goes – once you get your stash, it takes an extreme amount of self-control and pleasure delaying to stop yourself from wanting to play with your goodies….


Inspite of the haul and the intense desire to cut, copy the July theme, and paste ideology charms and adornments I was still stuck for an idea that would fit somewhat with the theme. 

Then the 18th rolled around which in my country is celebrated as Mandela Day as it is his birthday.  This year he turned 95.  The celebrations were less pomp and festive than usual as he currently lays gravely ill in hospital.  As we collectively held our breath for news of his wellbeing, an idea started forming in my head.  Yes we don’t celebrate American Independence Day but we do have a new and very worthy July tradition  - the 67 MINUTES tradition.  The concept of 67 MINUTES is a pay-it-forward sort of deal.  

In recognition and honour of the 67 years that Nelson Mandela (known affectionately in my country as Tata or by his clan name Madiba) selflessly served in the aim of greater good, we give 67 minutes of our own time to do something good, charitable, courageous or gracious.  Madiba being such a genuine example of humility, benevolence and grace – asks that the day be marked not by some kind of reverent worship or adoration of him, but instead be marked by your own 67 minutes of good deeds on this day.  I think this is an awesome way to honour a man that I have utmost respect and gratitude for.  And that is what jump-started my idea for the July entry into 12 Tags of 2013 challenge.

The concept was “freedom” in a sense.  The idea is that doing something good frees your soul.  I also wanted to share the idea of the 67 minutes challenge.  One of the other great gifts I received this yeas for my birthday (from someone else this time) was a copy of a book called “The Secret”.  The ideas contained in this book speaks to the power you have within you to attract that which you desire if you are in alignment with the Universe (It is lot less hocus-pocus-chant-Aum-gaze-into-my-crystal-ball-New-Age-magic-sparkle-unicorny than I am making it sound).  

The basic premise of the movement is that within the universe there exists a law of attraction – like attracts like.  It espouses that the Law of attraction enables you to call goodness into your life by just focussing on it, wanting it and envisioning it.  

If you persist in negative thought patterns, you by default invite negativity, if you dwell on positivity you by default attract positivity.  Your thoughts are your intentions.  You cannot change the outlook of others but you can change your outlook.  

I thought about what I most wanted in my life (I always thought it would be unlimited credit at Ranger)  but it turns out that what I want more than anything else is to love unreservedly, be good and be surrounded by love and goodness.  I want to challenge myself to spend at least 67 minutes of each week doing something constructive, positive and benevolent.  

The book offers a tip on how to bring this into conscious awareness and thereby into conscious manifestation by advising that that you should try putting visible reminders of what you want up where you can see them.  What better visible representation of what I want and hope to be than a pretty tag that reminds me of the 67 MINUTES challenge?

If you know my style at all – you will see that I have deviated from my usual style which is often dark, moody colours with jarring eye-poking contrast.  This month’s tag is a little lighter and softer – I worked a colour palette that I have never felt at home with before – a kind of sorbet,pastel palette.  This already might be the effect of the law of attraction in operation.  I am starting to feel lighter, my heart is starting to feel softer, less anxious and not so at odds with the world and I think it is starting to reflect in my every day life, including my choice of colour palette.

Back to the tag - as always – here’s a blow by blow photo show of my whole process – even though it is not as super detailed as I usually do it. 

Background
I brayered on Distress Stain – in various colours and then over that in the opposite direction I brayered on White Picket Fence Distress Stain, Loved how it it toned down the eye-pokey.  Following Tim’s instructions, I random stamped incomplete images all over to make a pretty collaged background.

I used a couple of Alterations dies for this tag – Fanciful Flight, Sewing Room and the leaves were from the Tattered Florals Strip die.  I crackle-painted and baked in the Walnut Distress Stain on the wings – loved that porcelain look.  I also put some glow in the dark paint on the outer wings – this is both cool and a little creepy when you turn the lights off. 

The flower on the bottom left is a tissue tape flower. I used a variety of different tissue tape on this tag.  

The quote comes from one of the Visual Artistry Clear Stamp sets.  I thought it was perfect – Madiba himself achieved the somewhat impossible by his dream of being more.  I stamped on Vellum, heat embossed and then used Distress Ink and Stain to colour the vellum.  I Distress Stained the little strips behind the sentiment.  Those cool strips are so awesome, they used to be a window blind, I cut it up, cos I am a rebel like that.

 

I attached the wings to the dress-form with brads, added the INSPIRE token – I kinda wanted it to look like a medal as if  your 67 minutes that you give frees your soul, you “win” by inspiring kindness in others as well.  



When I was little we got “stars” if we did something right or good, they represent the same concept – I crackle-painted and glossy accented those.  They were so tiny though, your fingers get a little crampy, and you get a headache from trying to get your aging eyes to focus so while the awesome grungy end might justify the physical trauma of method - I am going to have to admit that it took effort and supreme determination to stay committed to that effect. 

 

I ought really to go to bed now cos it is 3am and I have two classes to teach tomorrow.  I hope that you were inspired to act on your 67 MINUTES as well.  I love this quote by Marianne Williamson (often erroneously attributed to Nelson Mandela’s Inaugral Address btw) – I am going to end this post with it.

"...Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
We are all meant to shine, as children do.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us.
It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone.
And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
- Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love -1992

Getting in on the Tim Holtz 12 Tags of 2013

I have a confession – I am a little bit envious of everyone in the US.   Why?  Because “y’all” can get cool Tim Holtz stuff for next to nothing while I have to save for ages and ages to get one product – the rand-dollar exchange is nothing short of dismal and with our shady national postal service – things go missing regularly.  So in order to get anything Holtzy, I either have to order online from abroad and pay a weeks worth of salary (conversion-specific), and because you have to insure, send via traceable USPS Priority Mail (and their rates are soul crushing) – or I wait until the product is stocked in South Africa often months after the initial release – and then there’s their mark-up on top of all of that.  Not only that – but these products usually arrive at weird times of the month when your wallet is not feeling too fresh and they appear on the stockist site for a millisecond before the stockist sells out. Thus, it is the sad state of affairs that I can usually afford one product a quarter.     
This year I decided – enough drooling – I have to take charge of my desires – I have to own my lustful wants and I am charging forward with a game plan to set it in motion.  What I came up with was that I would try to win some Tim Holtz – I figure entering a competition is worth the challenge…..well that and the possibility of scoring some funderful Holtzy goodness if they would randomly draw my ticket in the Tag Challenge.
All was good and well until I realised that barring an impressive collection of distress ink, stain, and markers – I didn’t actually have a whole lot else of Hotzness.  I have a couple of Movers and Shapers dies, a few embossing folders and couple of shades of distress paint and a bunch of Ranger Mediums.  The order that I put in for a couple of sets of Visual Artistry Stamp sets last year – got lost somewhere via route to me in my quiet little east-coastal village here in South Africa.  And even though I licked my hurting wallet wounds and swore never to put it through such agony again, I gave it one more shot like a trooper and tried to get some off E-Bay a while back – we’ll see how that turns out., still patiently-on-the-verge-of-blind-panic-waiting for any kind of notification that it has got here, even into the country would be a step in a calming direction. 

All these little inconveniences presented to me a problem that I didn't consider - getting in on the 12 Tags of 2013 challenge, would sort of require you to use all the stuff that he was going with – and I didn't necessarily have all the cool stuff – yet (for the next couple of years yet) so this was going to be challenging indeed.  I really wanted to do it though and so I made it a quest to create a personal creative interpretation of the tag posted in this month’s challenge.
What I eventually came up with was truly a test of creative work-around.  I interpreted the challenge  in a way that would be somewhat original, but embrace the basics of the Tim Holtz “sketch” or blueprint.  I didn't have the bunny die, or the foliage elements and I threw out all my tinsel last year after Christmas so here is what I did.  My concept was something whimsical, that included my love of the genre of steam punk and that would work with what I have on hand.  In the process I discovered a handy trick, later on in this post I will unpack that a bit about that. 
I drew the egg-shape in GIMP, traced that image into .SVG on Make The Cut and cut it out of grunge-paper on my cutter.  I distress inked the egg shape and then ran it through the cuttlebug with the sizzix gears folder.  I then ran some Metallic distress stain over the top to pop out the gears.   I then applied a layer of Glossy Accents to make it glossy – who can resist a little gloss right?  I cut the  tattered florals out of aluminium tape that I taped onto lightweight cardstock with the Movers and Shapers mini tattered florals die from Sizzix Alterations. 

Using the gears folder again, I ran it through the cuttlebug and then I used distress paint (loving this stuff) in Fired Brick, Salty Ocean, Chipped Sapphire, Mustard seed and a blend of Dusty Concord and Picked Raspberry.  I made my own version of Kraft Resist Cardstock to cover the background of the tag by stamping and embossing on kraft cardstock and then inked it with Fired Brick, Crushed Olive and Chipped Sapphire.  I cut the tattered banner out of grunge-paper as well and inked it with Old Paper (I think) and Tumbled Glass – I then wrote on an Easter sentiment with a laundry marker – I love laundry markers.  The little wire swirls were a just ordinary wire that I swirled and shaped into the elements that I wanted.
Now comes the crazy discovery that I made – You see the wings, the frame and the little crown – well I discovered a neat trick when trying to get the right proportions for my tag.  I discovered that if you have those physical dies in whatever size they are, you can resize them to some degree.  Here is how you do that. 

• Using your regular die-cutting system like the Big Shot / Vagabond / Cuttlebug etc – go ahead and cut the shape out of black paper.
• Place the shape into your scanner with a white background.  My Scanner has a white background anyway, but for good measure I placed a piece of white printer paper on it.
• Scan and save the shape.
• Open the scanned image in an image editing programme like Gimp / Photoshop even MS Paint will do the job
• Crop as close to the image as you can and then convert the image to black and white. Adjust the sharpness etc if you want. You now have quite a bold digital silhouette of your shape.
• Open MAKE THE CUT and pixel trace the silhouette.  Add that shape to your Mat.
• You now get a passable copy of the die-cut that you can resize to whatever size you need (it is not going to be as crisp and tight and neat as the original die-cut – but it is a fair enough copy.
• I wondered whether this was ethically correct to post this trick that I discovered – but I rationalised it by going – I bought and own the original Sizzix die and all this is doing is like either cutting it down to make it smaller (which I could have done painstakingly with “fairy-sized” scissors or blowing up the shape on a copier and then painstakingly cutting around it.)  The ability to manipulate, trace and cut shapes with MAKE THE CUT just make it heaps less painful.

Anyway I did that with the Mini-tickets and Mini-labels dies to make the frame – I placed the mini-label in the resized Mini Ticket die.  Don't do this with Sizzix images taken off the net though because I think that would infringe the patent or whatever they call that.
The background behind the egg is a piece of an old venetian blind.  I always look out for people throwing stuff away because you find the coolest texture thingies like that.  This stuff is made of a type of material that is almost like paper and almost like cloth – I have no idea what it is – the thrill in this discovery though is that it inks up pretty awesomely.  It takes Distress ink really well, but in this case I used Salty Ocean Distress Paint.
For the second tag, the concept was more storybook-fantastical but steampunky of course.  The elements that I kept from Tim’s original tag were the cut out window that exposes the background texture, the sentiment banner, and the fringe-bottom.  I also endeavoured to keep the look of the lacquered enamel on the “tattered floral” in lieu of the foliage elements.  I designed and cut the grassy fringe in MAKE THE CUT by tracing a royalty free clip-art graphic of a hair comb – I did the old resizing trick with the tattered florals  and wings– as you will notice – the smaller you resize, the less detail you get.  I steampunked the wings and the florals through the cuttlebug.  The little gears were from an X-Cut die-set I think.   I loved the rusty egg effect I was able to get on the egg – it involved painting multiple layers on the egg, sanding bits of it off and then applying some Metallic Distress Stain.  I used crackle accents on the little egg and the “BE”.   I used a lot of Distress Paint on this tag.  The other product that I used on it is Dala Puff Paint, which I then highlighted with Salty Ocean Distress Paint.  Anyway, these are the two tags I came up with for the March edition of the 12 Tags of 2013 Tim Holtz Challenge.  I am still not sure which one  am going to submit, maybe they will let me submit both – I dunno….creating them were fun anyway.