 Hello there, it's Sandy Olnok and today we're going to make some faux stamped pyrography tags. Let's get going. The tag I'm going to show you today was almost in the Creative Holiday Tags class and if you haven't heard about that yet then please do see the information in the doobly do on how to enter to win a tag as well as how to get 50% off the class. But first let's talk about what is pyrography. There's pyrography tools you need. You need a tool or they sometimes call it a pen that has a nib on it and there's all different shapes of nibs. I'm still just starting to explore what these nibs do but my kit came with two of these pens and holders. They connect through this thing that you can adjust the temperature, the amount of heat that you use, has different effects and then you use this toggle button to point the heat toward one or the other so they're not constantly heating. If the toggle is in the middle then nothing is heating. So there is some safety here so don't worry about that but read the instructions for whatever pyrography toolkit that you get. But basically you use it like a pen and you draw with it and here I'm just drawing on a little wooden ornament to make some pine cones and some some fur bows. Like I'm just practicing to see what these things do. So I wanted to share with you an easy pyrography ornament. So if you decide to get a pyrography kit it's super easy to use stamps and lots of my followers are stampers so you're going to have things that you can use. I'm going to use a text stamp but you could trace around a snowman stamp or a Santa Claus stamp and make an ornament that way or a tag. These are little wood blocks that I got just at a craft store and you can get them in all different kinds of places but you want something that does not have a coating on it. You don't want something that's already been sealed because you need to burn into the wood because this is heated up at a really good temperature so don't touch the nib when it's hot. These do heat up and cool down really quickly with the set that I got and in my mind that's a really good feature to have so look for something that heats up quickly and cools down just as quickly. But I'm tracing over the stamping that I had done and I stamped in a light color just so it would disappear if my lines weren't perfect but you can see it gives you a rough edge that's just what wood burning is. It's not going to give you a perfectly clean edge but you can also draw with it without stamping. The stamp set from Cine Studios has some little bits of holly and berries and leaves and things so I decided to see what would happen if I draw some leaves in here and I've sped this up a bit and if you use the tool in a light fashion rather than going slowly if you if you go really quickly you can get a tint so you can kind of color in an area and get that color in there and then go in and make your line work so you can see how it it can change the color by just moving quickly across the surface because you're not holding the heat on there it's not getting a good chance to burn and this tool has the ability to make lines if you actually use it as a line maker kind of turn the tool in different directions and there are just a ton of tools I'm just scratching the surface with this. So I wanted to distress the background because the tag was feeling a little plain so I used that that whole like light touch really really barely touching the surface and moving quickly this is sped up in the video but I moved really quickly across the surface so I could start to burn in the background I wanted to make it really feel like wood because this is just a manufactured machine type of tag it's not really looking like gnarly wood and that was the look that I wanted so you could stop where I've already finished it or you could go on and do a background like this so I kind of knocked the color back so that I would have darker color around the edges and then drew in some wood lines so as if there is a real wood grain in there instead of that really soft one that's been polished in by a sander this I wanted to make it look like it was all roughed up after spending a little time on it you can see it gives it a very rustic look to do this kind of thing to the background and you can hold the burner on the edge and get it all distressed and there's that kind of a procedure to make a pyrography tag but how about if we were just going to stamp it I thought about a couple ways to do this one of which of course is to use inks and I'm using some distressed inks and distressed inks are water soluble this one is vintage photo so I'm going to use a paintbrush and some water and I'm just going to paint over it because that's going to soften the edges they're going to get a little squishy and I'm leaving it in the misty in the stamping tool so that I'll be able to stamp over top of it when I finish this step so you don't want to take it out leave it in there if you're doing this with blocks it'll be a little bit tougher to line it up depending on the complexity of the image but if you have other ways that you can line up an image and make it align perfectly then you could do it without having a misty the second stamping is going to be with versifying onyx black it's going to give it more of that wood burned look because you've got some of those soft fuzzy brown edges coming out from outside of the happy holidays but the black is going to give it that burned look the holly and berries there's a couple stamps in the set and I'm starting off by stamping them in the brown and using the water to move that around a little bit so it'll lighten them and then stamping with the shadow stamps that are in the set so that I can get some difference in color so I'll have some shadows on both leaves and on the berries and that'll give it a little bit more oomph now distressing the background on this one is significantly easier than the one that I did with the wood burning so I'm going to use a tool along with the distressed ink and I'm just going to lightly go around the outside edges I'm going to leave the center a little bit open as I want don't don't want to interfere with that but if this tool that has felt on the end of it if it starts to go over top of the image it's not going to hurt anything because we have that black pigment ink holding it still so now I'm going to use the actual ink pad itself to go around the edges and darken the outside edges as well as letting the edge just the very very edge of that stamp pad go across the surface and that's going to give it just a very light kind of look of wood grain it's really simple to do you can do this on a piece of paper as well and create that kind of look and if you get too much on there use a baby wipe because this is water soluble distressing and you can wipe some of it off if you either get too much or you have one big giant dark line in there you can soften that up real easily and there we go that's that's the first step now you can go in and do more work on these and make them even more interesting by finishing the edges and making them really look distressed the pyrography one just going to take the tool and go all the way around the outside edges and you can do it lightly like I'm doing here by the time I was finished I decided I was really going to go in and blacken them and that's going to take some time to do but guess what when you do this stamped one you just take your black stamp pad and go around the outside edges and that's going to very quickly make them into very dark edges bring the pad around the front a little bit if you want to bring that black more into the front and give it more of a frame around the tag but then you're going to want to let it dry because it's going to be all over your fingers it is messy to do this with a pigment ink but it's going to make the tag just really pop once you finish your tags you can coordinate them with the gift wrapping there's sometimes it's going to be real easy this is green it's going to work well with having some greens from outside and I found a branch that had a pine cone on it so the brown ties into the tag itself as well as the craft twine on it and I've got them hooked on with an ornament hook sometimes there's a red paper you want to use and how do you tie that in when it doesn't look vintage well I used a piece of brown to wrap around the gift in addition so that brings in the color ties in the pine cone and the tag and the red twine ties it to the paper so it doesn't have to be a natural themed kind of paper in order to use a tag like this and if you want more ideas on how you can coordinate your tags and your gift wrapping that is one of the lessons in the creative holiday tags class so I would highly recommend going to check out that class links in the doobly-doo for as I said before how you can get the class for 50 off as well as qualify to win a prize and I will see you guys again Friday with a little more hierography okay I'll see you then