Gift #1037: All Hallow’s Eve

Happy Halloween Everyone!  We’ve had a lovely couple of days celebrating the season.  We had a Halloween pitch-in and costume contest at work and then I’ve been passing out candy this evening.  In between answering the door, I made Halloween cards.  Now I’m watching Clue and am contemplating finding a pumpkin-flavored something to snack on.  Ahh fall, how I love you!  It’s hard to believe that in a few hours we’ll be saying goodbye to my beloved October.

For Halloween I wanted to share with you some tags I made for a Halloween swap with RedLead Paperworks.  I’m a guest artist for them and enjoy their Halloween stamps and making art with them very much.  They always make great fall/Halloween stamps.  For this year we needed to make 4 tags and a holder for them.  Here’s my Halloween bouquet.

And now, a tour.

For the first tag, I wanted to use the wonderful bottle stamp and decided to pair it with the orange tag which I toned down by tapping black ink on the surface.  I die cut a magnificent spider web designed by Tim Holtz to decorate the back.  Various Halloween images were stamped to create a scene in the bottle and colored with watercolors to look like a sunset.  I stamped a tag and fastened it to the bottle with twine.  The bottom of the tag is decorated with black cardstock and washi tape.

Feeling excited about the first tag, I turned my attention to a stamp that wasn’t quite my style, but I wanted to make a Gothic-feeling tag.  So for this one, I stenciled a damask print on the tag and colored with purple and orange inks and kind of smudged up the edges.  I stamped the woman and a little raven to sit on her shoulder.  She’s decorated with rhinestone jewels and some obliging bats that are making themselves at home in her hair.  It needed a bit more punch, so I created a black paper rosette, stamped the quote and layered them together.  I tied cheesecloth ribbon around the tag and nestled the rosette on top.

For my third tag, I needed to think of some way to subdue the fluorescent green.  I knew I wanted to use the owl on the branch stamp with a moon and the tombstone raven.  I played with a layout on this tag, and then I noticed part of a paper doily that I’d inked with green and discarded because it didn’t work on a previous project.  Almost without thinking, I picked it up, tried it out on the tag, and decided I loved it there.  More bats took up residence in front of the inked moon and the I found this Halloween quote which I cut into strips, colored, and layered to the front.  It gives it a fun, quirky look and this ended up being my favorite tag.  The quote says ” The moon is full and bright and we shall see what can’t be seen on any other night”.  Oooh.. spooky!!

The little tag features a cute owl wearing his Halloween party hat.  He and Percy the Spider are hosting a Halloween soiree.  Oh, and look… the bats have invited themselves in.  Tag is finished up with spider web and orange polka-dot washi tape.

I hope your Halloween is filled with special treats and moments and that you might spy an owl or bat as you say goodbye to this magic night.

Blessings to you,

Sarah