Just Playing

Most of my Christmas shopping is now done online as we have very few significant shops in our area. However, on my recent day trip to Granada I saw a jumper that I knew my husband would like. I was toying with the idea of buying it when a crafting friend who was with me said "Go on Kate. It's worth it just for the tag". 

What tag was that? Well here it is. This cute little chipboard reindeer was tied to the label in the neck of the jumper, so I bought it. I'm pleased to say the jumper was a hit, and I got to keep the tag!

So today I decided to have a play. I started by scanning the tag into my computer and then I used a combination of my photo editor, (Corel PSP) and windows Paint, to make a black and white image. Then I took this into my Silhouette cameo machine and made a cutting file. To start with I made it a good size and cut it out of some backing paper from my snippets box.

Next I used the Silhouette Studio software to put the image into a frame, resized it and cut it out. I mounted it onto another snippet of pale blue and gold paper.

I also found, when I was clearing up the wrapping paper, that there was a kraft-paper band around the jumper that had further reindeer on it.

I couldn't let that go to waste so I cut the seven images out using a variety of dies, and distressed the edges with fired brick DI. These will make useful little embellishments on next year's cards!

I then gave this image the same treatment as the larger one, making another cutting file which I tried out on the remaining printed paper scraps. I kept it small but the cutting files are easily resized to whatever is needed for a project.

I felt there was still some more mileage in my little reindeer, so I took a sheet of thin plastic that I had rescued this morning when Chris was tidying out his office and had thrown out a wallet-folder with a broken catch. The inner pockets were all made of thin, pliable plastic so I cut them all away. I wasn't sure whether it would cut with my silhouette, but after a couple of tests, and adjustments to the settings, I had it cutting fine. So I then cut out stencils of my reindeer and tried them out on some white paper, sponging them with tea-dye and vintage photo DIs. Of course I also have the 'positive' cut images which could have ink sponged around them, or be used as masks with spray inks, but I haven't got around to trying that yet.

My next idea was to print out a negative of each image onto very thin paper and I used these to make polymer stamps using my Imagepac. These won't get a lot of use, but I think the tiny pair will again be good for making more of the little die-cut embellishments, when I have used all the originals

Of course I also have a digi stamp of each image from the original project and these can be resized so in some ways are more useful, but as I like to colour my images I also spent ages making an outline version of the larger one. It's a bit shakey, but usable I think.

I still felt I could do more, so I played around with the images in my silhouette, resizing them and flipping some of them, and I also introduced an image of a female deer that was already stored in the silhouette library, and I made this border. I also made a border of cut grass by flipping and merging repeat images of one grass tuft that I had. I cut both borders from the plastic and sponged ink through to make this. It could be re-cut in other sizes to fit along a DL card or even a scrapbook page.

So I think I got good value from my reindeer tag. Sometimes it's good to just play!!