Neutral Zone for A Vintage Journey and a blog break

Hello friends and welcome. It's the first Friday of the month and that means a new challenge is starting at A Vintage Journey. This month the lovely and talented Nikki is our host, and this is what she had to say about her chosen theme "Neutral Zone":
Time to banish colour! You can create with blacks, whites, greys, beiges, creams and browns but whatever you make, and whatever style, needs to stay in the neutral zone. And remember to create in one of our preferred styles of vintage, shabby,mixed media, art journaling, industrial, timeworn or steampunk.

I decided to make an eggshaped tag, seeing this month we will celebrate Easter. I then decided to use the tag to decorate the cover of my latest journal insert.

At the last moment I decided to add one of my dried ferns, which of course adds a little spot of colour, but I hope this will still qualify as most of it is definitely in the neutral zone....

Below a quick step out of how I made the tag:

I diecut the tag from white card, using the largest of a set of tag shaped dies I had in my stash, and added some strips of book and craft paper and some texture using one of Tim Holtz's stencils.
.

Next I added a mix of some Paper Artsy Fresco paint in Buff and some Decoart Media paint in Translucent white and while the paint was still wet a few spritzes of Distress Oxide spray in Vintage photo, plus quite a bit of water. I then dried with my heatgun.

Next came some background stamping and a little strip of washi tape, to balance out the darker left side a bit.

Finally I added some lace, some dried baby's breath flowers and a wax seal and hand wrote the sentiment with my dip pen. At first I thought that was the project all done and dusted, but as I had no one particularly in mind to give this tag to and I have piles of tags and other projects gathering dust in my craftroom (do other people have that problem)? - I decided to add the tag to the cover of my latest journal insert.

As you can see that's when I then decided to add the little fern to the other dried flower, gluing it down with some collage medium.

Below still a few close ups and a few of the journal pages inside.

And some of the journal pages, please bare in mind this is really a writing journal, not an art journal, I just like to decorate the pages a bit with ephemera, washi tapes, some background stamping and so on. Makes it more fun to write in it.

So, that's it for my project, do hop over to a Vintage Journey  to see what my talented teamies have created and of course we would love you to play and share your neutral projects with us all.

Well, like always thank you for your visit for now and it may become even more quiet here as I will be going off to Australia in a few days time to spend time with my grandchildren and family there and I am pretty sure there will not be much time for blogging. So I may see you now and then and again towards the end of May on my regular Fridays...

xxxxx