Message in a Bottle

Hi everyone, thanks for dropping in here!

After grandly announcing two days ago that it was going to be very quiet here during July, I am actually back after all sooner than expected because I could not resist doing my Tim Holtz July tag.
This definitely was one of my favourites this year, even though mine has turned out completely differently....

Two reasons for that, first of all, I had none of the main supplies he used, so I had to think of different things. Second reason, - his is a very summery tag, but it's really only summer in half of the world. I am going off today to Australia and there as in the whole Southern Hemisphere it is winter, and as I was busy packing my winter things, I just could not get into a summery mood. Having said that, I still managed to use all of the techniques he used, be it in somewhat different colours.
So here goes, following Tim's brilliant tutorial:
I took some grunge paper (don't have any grunge board) die cut my shapes and coloured them with various Distress Paints, added the Rockcandy Crackle when dry and rubbed and heat set the stain to show up the cracks.:

Here's a close up of the bottle:

Next the embossing powder onto the wet paint, I did it on a large leaf rather than the sand dollar and used several colours of powder, for a more wintry effect.

Next came the background to the tag using Distress Paints, Stains, Ink, water splats and the Spritzer tool:

Again, sticking to more wintry colours.
Next came the cool technique with the plastic through an embossing folder. Well, that one had me stumped for quite a while. Then it hit me, why not create a second bottle and put the sand inside the bottle.

So this is what I did: I cut the bottle out of grunge paper first and coloured and crackled it like the first bottle.
Next I cut the bottle again, but this time out of plastic packaging. I ran it through the Harvest Words embossing folder, just picking out the word Love. It embossed it beautifully. I coloured the word with a Faber Castell Big Brush pen and let it dry while making my "sand mixture with more or less the same supplies Tim used. Glued it onto the base bottle and then glued the plastic one on top with the sand inside. I just could not manage to photograph it properly, below, you can maybe see it a bit better:

Ok, so time to put the tag together.....
Now I decided at the beginning of the year that I would make layered tags, a size 8 on top of a size 10, so I made another background, using the same technique but adding some tissue tape here and there for a bit of variation.

Next I picked a word band, using Tim's technique of bringing out the word with paint and then put it all together.

Well, there you have it, an wintry version of Tim's July tag. I have the sea horse etc on order, so I may do a summery version still when I come back.

Thank you for all your kind visits like always and hopefully you get to do something creative most days! I'd also like to thank Tim for showing us all these fab techniques, month after month!!!

Look after yourselves