I am hooked.....

Hi everyone and thanks for dropping by here, lovely to have you visiting.
I am hooked, - hooked on participating in Tim Holtz's tag challenge that is. After 3 years or so of not joining in, I am now doing my second one. Well, after being one of Tim's winners last month, I couldn't give up now could I?
So here is my November tag:

As most of you will know, Tim's original can be found HERE, demonstrating the Chalkboard technique  that he showed in the last video of CC102 already.  Unlike Tim I did not want my whole tag to be black, so I basically created a chalkboard panel using the Baroque die, but because for once I had all the right products I followed his technique exactly, just using totally different stamps.
Here's my mini chalkboard cut from a black size 12 tag.

Next I created my background on a size 10 Manila tag, with Pumice Stone, Iced Spruce and Picket Fence Distress Paints using the marbling technique. This was followed by some Distress Inks, Gathered Twigs and Evergreen Bough, a bit of Tissue Wrap and some background stamping, both with Ink and with some Sticky Embossing powder and Clear Rock Candy glitter for a bit of sparkle. Oh there was also some Perfect Pearls Heirloom Gold Spray in the mix.

Now for some embellishments. I cut various leaves with my dies and took a little rose from my stash, coloured the leaves lightly with Distress Inks and gave them the Rock Candy Glitter treatment too.

Time to put it all together with a hand died seam-binding ribbon and some died cheese cloth scraps and a little stamped message.

Now I could have left it at that, but for some reason, even though I had quite liked the original background, I really did not like the way it looked now... what to do, bin it? I did not want to waste all my carefully prepared embellishments, so instead I took a deep breath, brought out my Picket Fence and Chipped Sapphire Distress paints and straight from the little bottles painted right over the background to create a kind of snowy scene, spritzing water and Heirloom Gold to marble the colours and blending it all a bit with a baby wipe. And this is what it looks like now:

Not much left of the original background, but hey-ho, that's life and I am a bit happier with it now...

Thank you for visiting and I hope you are having a creative time yourself. Can't wait for the December tag now! I would also like to thank Tim for all the inspiration he has given me over the last few weeks, and as I said at the start of this post, - I am now hooked!!