12 Tags of 2014: July

Hello to you from burning hot Finland,

Over the past days we've been hit by a heat wave, and have witnessed temperatures not typical at all for July in Finland. Especially the nights have been really tropical, and the meteorologists say this has been the hottest end of July in past 50 years! Can you imagine!

So when making my July tag in '12 Tags of 2014' and following the instructions by Tim Holtz my mind traveled from my hot crafting room to a sunny beach, and I could almost hear the seagulls screeching and feel a refreshing sea breeze on my face.... I got so carried away that instead of just one tag I made two!

I did not have many of the suggested dies, so I had to improvise: The sea horse is cut with my Cameo, as well as the two larger fish. The smaller ones are just hand drawn and cut, as are the star fish. For cutting the sea weed I used the suggested Sizzix Sizzlits Decorative Strip Die - Spring Greenery, but for the embossing folder I used an older Sizzix design (which worked still quite well, I think). The plastic is clear packing material I kept from a kid's toy box.
  

 
The treasure chest I simply drew on heavy craft cardstock, cut out, painted with distress paints and markers, and decorated with silver and gold colored bead seeds.

I loved the background textures; they were created applying layers of Distress paints, stains, and inks together with some water splashes. My hands are still blue and green from the project, but I don't mind at all, lol!

I have to admit that I'm very bad with storing my projects in a proper way. So even if I loved Tim's sand decoration a lot, I did not want to make bottom part too three-dimensional; I knew that parts of the sand would break off very soon. Therefore I covered the bottom part of the tag with a piece of cardstock I had decorated with paints and embossing powder (using the same technique as for the star fish). On the finished project the painted surface is covered only with a thin layer of 'sand mixture' which is a more simple and practical but less beautiful solution.

Only few more days to go before the new tag tutorial is revealed. Woohoo! Have you followed the series of tutorials and made your complete set of 2014 tags?

Wishing you a nice and sunny day,