Tim Holtz July 2015 Tag

My July 2015 Tim Holtz Tag really strays from Tim's design because I had NONE of the materials Tim used this time.  (Oh, Tim, please pick my name this month and send me goodies so I can play along nicely!)  I had NO Americana stamps and NO stars, so I dug and dug trough my stencils, then dug and dug through my stamps, then dug and dug through my embossing folders and settled on CHEVRON and POLKA DOTS in place of stars and stripes.  Bear with me...

 For this technique, I started by rubbing dye ink on the debossed side of an embossing folder.  Then sandwiched a tag partially in the folder, carefully holding it in place and then ran it through my Big Shot.  The ink transfers to the debossed part of the pattern.  My plan was to then wet emboss the embossed portion of the pattern in white, but my white pad had dried up.  WAH!  This seemed hopeless...

 My blue pad was older, so I took the lid off and repeated the process for the top half of the tag.  I wasn't thinking about that red stripe showing up when I ran it through the first time, but prevented it this go round by wiping the border of the folder off with a baby wipe.  Don't try to clean your folders with a baby wipe or you will make a MESS!  Go to the sink and run water over it, trust me...

 Look at the cool texture this creates!  Love!

Next, I inked the tag with Vintage Photo Distress Ink to create an aged look.  Then cut out the word Celebrate with a die and layered over a piece of distressed manila.  I added the gold stars for fun.

I finally found something with stars on it, it was an old (one of my first) embossing folder by Tim that was a collage of all sorts of things in a grid.  I ran through pieces of manila through it to get three stars using the same inked embossing folder technique, then distressed the edges and rubbed on more Vintage Photo. 

I tried to ink some ribbon, but cut it in half for some random reason and it looked terrible, so I went with some spikey fibers that I thought resembled fireworks.  I bundled some gold packaging material in the loop since I didn't have any gold fibers like I wanted.  It worked well.

Lastly I colored a K&Co. #4 sticker and made a little embellishment grouping at the bottom with a rose and label tape.  All in all I am happy with the way it turned out.  I'm linking up to Tim's blog HERE and enjoying the 2015 tags, making my own.