 Well, hi there, my name is Sandy Allnach. I'm an artist and paper crafter here on YouTube and today I'm going to make one of the 12 tags of Christmas with a feminine twist. Ellen Hudson has this series every year with a bunch of designers. You can go to my blog to get links to this years as well as the past couple years and get some ideas for making your tags for Christmas. I'm going to use Art Impressions Merry Christmas stamp set and I'm also going to use some Ellen Hudson products later on in this video. I'm going to use a dye from that and I'm also using a color combination. It's all part of the mix it up challenge. So we're combining that with the mix it up challenge and the tag series all at once. It was quite a lot to try to put all of this into one cute little tag. I'm coloring with my Copic markers and I decided the ends were closest to the color challenge that's included in the mix it up challenge and so I'm coloring with a couple of different grays to try to make it look shiny and what I found is if you allow a little bit of white around each one of those center portions and then maybe a lighter gray to the outside, then you can create something that looks like a shiny bell. And I know there's a lot of Christmas bells out there and this is just one way that you can do some quick coloring to make that happen. I'm coloring over top of some of the darker colors with the N1 which lightens them and sort of makes everything blend a little bit. I'm not worried about too much of the blending though because it's a tag. So don't stress yourself out too much about your coloring when you're talking about a tag because the likelihood of somebody keeping something like this. I'm not really sure how high that is but I do try to make my tags to be something that they might want to hang on their tree after Christmas and save that for next year. So this one is one of those because it's got lots of parts to it. It'll be nicely dimensionally layered. I've stamped the mouse a couple times because of that layering because my plan is to do his little outfit, his little sleeper with the little footy pajamas which I love. Secret confession that I love footy pajamas. And I'm going to cut that out and I'm going to layer this in pieces so you'll see how that plays out. So I'm going to color each portion separately. This one is I'm going to use for the base colors for him for his fur. So I'm going to color those with the neutrals. And I'm going to test out some colors on his outfit because I wasn't sure which of the colors that I really wanted to use in the outfit. There's a pink, a green, a teal, and then the gray in the color combination. So I'm going to throw maybe some polka dots in the the blue-green that teal color and then decide whether or not I wanted to have pink for the outfit and you know where I wanted the pink on the card itself or on the tag itself because I didn't want it taken over too much by the pink but I wanted enough pink to make it a feminine tag. And as I started doing some of the details on here realizing I wanted the ears and the hands and the the tail to be pink I didn't want the outfit to also be pink because then you'd lose the impact of those other pink parts. So I thought well let me try the green on the outfit. Now you're not going to see this portion but it's a way to test out my colors to see which ones I'm going to like in general. And as I color this I thought no I think I want to flip it. I want that that green to be a little less on the tag at least on the the outfit. So when I do it for real this is the one now that I'm going to cut out the outfit on and glue it on top of this. I'm going to actually do my shading first. So I'm going to pretend like it's going to be a white outfit with just some gray shading and then do my coloring over top of it. You could do the gray shading over top of the colors that you put on but then you'd have to do some adjusting because you'd end up with some weird modeling going on. This way it puts all of that shading underneath and allows me to just do a quick kind of wash of color over top when I add those colors. And as the color transitions from a polka dot to a non polka dot it retains that shading. And I'm going to use a couple colors for the the blending here but you don't have to use very many colors. You can actually make it you know like you can see it's not super blended because I'm putting so much color on top it's not going to matter a whole lot. So it makes it a little easier for the coloring. And also since I'm going to be fussy cutting out I could just go outside the lines so you can make it much faster when you're talking about holiday things and everybody's trying to get stuff done quick. You could just scribble over top of it and not worry about it. But since this is a video I like to make it a little tidier. So I can already see that I like the teal as the main color of the pajamas a little bit better than I did the green. So it was a good decision to practice it and get the idea that I didn't want that much green in there. And I'm also getting the dimension now in the outfit. You can see how that color works right over top of the grays and just kind of makes it look like a dimensional little little suit. And like I said I'm somebody who really loves footy pajamas. I actually own footy pajamas adult footy pajamas. I know they were on my Twitter recently so if you go back and look a couple weeks you'll see the feet on my footy pajamas because I was having a discussion with somebody who didn't believe that I owned them. So now I'm going to do the background panel. This one I wanted to have some of the green in behind him since I've now removed the green from the main part of the outfit I can put some on the tag itself. So I'm going to create not necessarily a scene in here but a little bit of a background so that I have some color on my tag. And this is all done just on some Neenah cardstock so you can even use some scrap pieces of cardstock to do this. You don't even have to have them separated out like I do just stamp a whole bunch of them and start coloring. But this one I've got it cut to a little bit less than two inches wide and then I'm going to mount it on another piece but I wanted to get some good solid color on here because I'm going to do some die cutting on top of this. So I'm using the pink color as well as the green color for the background and I realized I didn't like having that green there specifically. I wanted a little more contrast between where the mouse is going to sit and the background. I wanted to push that background back a little further. So I took the next color down in the YG63. I went to YG67 to add some depth to the color and since I'm going to be gluing everything on top it doesn't matter. I'm just going right over top of the image itself but it's going to give me a place to line that up when I start assembling the tag and putting everything back together. But you can see how just going over in a couple times is going to give me a fairly solid background for it. And I've die cut it using the stitched background die that's brand new from Ellen Hudson. It's got just a whole panel that you can pick which kind of patterns you want on it and I've also done the same thing on his little outfit. So I can fussy cut those out but before I do before I do my fussy cutting I'm putting some B creative tape on the back of the pieces that I'm going to cut out. I put some on the back of this panel as well and I'm adhering it onto a layer so I can have a little more strength to it. Now I thought I'd show you my fussy cutting scissors. This is what happened to them recently. My puppy got a hold of them. The big dog stole them off the counter and I heard some crunching and I couldn't figure out what it was. Fortunately there were no injuries due to the pointy end of the scissors but they are now being kept a little bit further away. Having puppies in the house has been quite the challenge for me as a crafter because they love anything they can chew on including paper and tools. So I'm learning to keep my room tidied up quite nicely. So you can see how easy it is to glue this on now that I've got that sticky back B creative tape on it. I can just adhere it right onto the panel and since I had him already stamped on there I know exactly where he's going to go. Get him all lined up and press down and this tape is not going to let go so if somebody decides to save this for many years in the future this B creative tape ain't going anywhere so it's going to hold really well and I also have the little outfit and when I stick this on it's going to give me an extra layer of dimension and it also has a little bit of that texture so it's going to look a little different and it comes out really adorable and really makes him pop on that little background. Now I keep saying him because it's supposed to be her. This is a feminine tag so I thought I'd put a bow in her hair and all I'm doing is making a little circle with two bow flaps on either side and I made a couple different sizes because I wasn't sure which one is going to work and you can draw a whole bunch of them and see which one is going to be the right size for whatever animal you're putting it on and I can just put a little bow in her hair. You could put glitter on it you could do all kinds of things to it. Now for tying on a piece of ribbon it's a real easy way to do it. I just tucked the loop through the hole that I punched and then take the two ends and pull them through that loop and it makes it a really nice little tag with two strings on top that you can tie around the package bow and you could also hook that onto a tree little hanger thing. This little stamp set comes with an action wobble and I usually check to see which side wobbles the way that I want it to wobble then they're sticky back on both sides of it so I peel off the backing I'm actually going to put the thing onto the sentiment panel instead of on the bell because I have a different plan for the bell that I wanted to share with you so it's got sticky on both sides and that will bounce around as you tap on it give a little motion to it but the little bell there's a a die that comes with the stamp set so I can cut that out and I've got some B creative tape you know me the B creative tape is my friend so I'm going to peel off the backing and I'm going to put it into the negative piece just to hold it while I put a piece of string in there and it's just holding it in place a little bit to have that frame around it and then I can stick the bell on there I untied my ribbon so I could thread the the bottom tails of that piece of ribbon through the bell and then pull it through again and now I have a bell that will dangle around as well and I'll have another part of motion I can put the two and from down at the bottom or on the back of the tag either way works just great so if you're planning on joining the challenge and you want the colors they're right there on the screen you could see there were other colors that I used a little bit to match with them but those are the four basic colors that I matched up when I was working on matching the challenge and there's my cute little feminine tag I hope you enjoyed this if you'd like to see more tags that tag on the left is one of mine from my own tag series that I did the 24 tags of Christmas and the other two are action wobbles in action so you can see more about how to use action wobbles on your greeting cards as well you can hit the subscribe button if you haven't yet hit more on the blog to see lots more links including all the links to all the tags that you might be interested in and I'll see you later bye