Recycled Scraps and Clothing Tags - Book Marks

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This weekend as I looked at my work table it screamed back at me to clean it up. I keep all my scrap papers and little bits of unused images scattered about on several trays. I decided this was a good place to start. I also keep all those thick clothing tags and several cards you get from stores about sales and upcoming local events they tend to stuff your bag with these days.


Starting with these tags as a base for my collage I decided to make some bookmarks. With summer just days around the corner it is always nice to have a few extra for summer reading. I then took my scrap papers and glued them to these tags. I stamped the word read or cut the word read out from some dictionary pages. Added a few images. The ones with holes I added some ribbon or fiber to. Viola! some new bookmarks. The scrap pile is smaller and I have some lovely bookmarks to give away or use for my summer reading.
p.s. I forgot to mention the girls are paper whimsey images.

ATC and Tag from Scraps

ATC

My goal this year has been to recycle my scraps and buy less. So far I have been doing really good at sticking to my mantra. I took the scraps from the sheet of paper I made Tamara's banner with and was able to get one tag, one ATC, 5 moo cards and 5 inchies. I haven't done anything with the moo's or inchies but, I thought I thought I would share these with you. Click on the tag to see it larger.

When I copied and printed my castle I did several different sizes. I was not sure what size would look the best on the banner. This also gave me several different sizes to play with for something else. The tag is actually quite large - larger than the ATC, but in scanning it and including the ribbon it does not appear that way. I used a large castle with the tag and a much smaller on for the ATC. Both of the girls are from Paper Whimsey. The wings are from Collage Visions. I needed something that would show up well with all I had going on.

The ribbon on the tag is leftovers from the banner. I have been in a real lime sherbet green mood lately. I love the combination of the green, orange and pink, with some yellow. I feel like I am in a container of rainbow sherbet. Yummm.

Tag Fever Two...

Tags are great things to have in your stash pile. I like to keep a few down in my kitchen all made up. They are great to add to a "little something" for someone, to write a quick note on, etc. I use to send them in to my kids teachers with a "thank you" or "I will be picking him up early" type of thing. Sometimes I keep a few in my car and if I stop by someone's house and they are not home I will leave one tied to the doorknob with a note. You get the idea.

I make the tags with leftover paper from projects. I keep a variety of tag sizes on my work table and put the scraps in a scrap box. When I have accumulated a few I will spend an hour or two just making tags. I also keep already made manila tags on my work table and when I paint and have left overs, I smear it on the tags. It gives me interesting tags that I might not have made. You can use the hole strengtheners to make them look official. [the orange tags are 120 lb. watercolor paper with hole strengtheners] It is a great way to recycle scraps and leftover paint.
Feel free to copy and use these if you like.

Tags made from a leftover project.

Tags painted with leftover paint.

Tags made from leftover scrap paper, scraps, and paint.

Tags painted with left over paint.

Tag Fever

Around Father's Day I realized so little of my collages use men or boys. Which is so odd because I have been the only female human in my household for almost thirty years. I made a small promise to myself to find some "male" images that I liked and start using them. So here is a couple of tags using this lovely image from Paperwhimsey, an old dictionary, the US Postal Service and some miscellaneous trim.

Bandana Tags

These tags I made for a tag swap on one of the Yahoo groups run by "Trish Bee". It is called the Creating Chaos Swap group. A very talented group. Our mission was to take two tags joined together and use the Bandanna technique on them. I used two sizes of tags.

The smaller tags are easier to cover with a large collage style stamp. The larger size tags make you do a little more of your own design work. I used juiced up chalk pads for most of them. The last two I used spray inks on. I just happen to like the green and purple of the chalks. The dye inks are very rich in color. The chalks leave your paper and tags a little heavier. I also like the range of colors in the chalk ink for this project. I think there is more control with the pad than with the spray bottle.

I took the tags and just randomly placed the pads on the tags. I waited in between colors for them to dry as to not contaminate the pads with other colors. With the spray - I set the tags on copy paper inside a shallow box and spray. If your bottles become plugged. Use a pin to press into the nozzle hole gently to unplug the sprayer. Be sure to do this with nozzle hole away from your face - voice of experience talking. The copy paper with the extra sprayed ink can make interesting backgrounds for other projects. I hope my swap person likes her tags.