I love you to death...

I was making a quick tag ready to share today and ended up going in a very dark direction.  The tag definitely fits the prompt over on Country View Challenges for February: Anything but cute, so I will be sharing it as my final submission for this month.  Although I do have a husband and three sons, I can assure you that no family members were hurt in the creation of this art work!

I started as I often do by adding a layer of paper towel mop up sheet to a #8 manilla tag to create a background.

However, as I have made a few tags recently with a similar colour theme, I decided to add another layer of paper towel over the top.  This one had been used to clean off my stamps when making washi tape on masking tape for a journal background (see HERE for details).

It was at this point that I decided to go in a darker direction.  I had received some stamps of old fashioned bottles and was also listening to Kate Bush (Coffee Homeground) so I grabbed the Tim Holtz Crossbones layering stencil (THS064) and added some skulls and crossbones with Jet Black archival ink.

I stamped one of the bottles from the Vintage Bottles set by Stamps Away onto mixed media card, coloured it using a Kuretake Clean Colour pen and fussy cut it (removing the fancy top on the stopper).

I then added a double layer of clear heat embossing, using my Versamark pad and detail clear powder, to create the illusion of glass.

Before adding the bottle to the tag, I found some pieces of ephemera from the Snippets pack by Tim Holtz idea-ology and stuck them down, so they would stick out behind the right hand side of the bottle.

The bottle was then added, along with a price tag from the same ephemera set.

The 'i love you' sticker from the Small Talk Occasions set was added at the top and 'to death...' was printed off in a small, bold font using my Dymo Letratag to complete the sentiment.