Tim Holtz May 2013 tag

I recently joined Swap-Bot, a site for all kinds of cool email, postcard, and package trades.I joined it mostly for the craft aspect of it, but I've also been doing a lot of postcard swaps. I really just like getting mail, so it's nice to find cool stuff in my mailbox almost every day.

A lot of the crafts are stuff I don't normally do, but I have really been trying to get into a routine of making stuff. That makes it easier to make something the next day, and the next.

I have a lot of Tim Holtz products because they are really cool and unique. I'm not into scrapbooking and that kind of genre of crafts because it's usually way too twee. But the trend in crafting is a hodge-podgy, grungy assortment of found objects and rusty old things. That I can get behind.

One of the swaps I just participated in was the Tim Holtz May Tag. I don't normally make tags - I don't even know what you're supposed to do with them. Display them? Put them on a gift? But I was curious to try some of the techniques. I don't have all the exact products that he suggests, so I just dug through my stash and used what looked good. I had a little trouble with the rub-ons I used for some reason, plus they warped a little when I used my heat gun. But I like how it turned out, and I hope my swap partner will too!

I love my fierce unicorn stamp. I used some embossing powder on the music note.

My favorite thing to use lately are these old slides I found at the thrift store. I actually bought a slide scanner to scan them all, so I feel less guilty for tearing apart all these cool vintage family photos from the 50s-70s. I found the silhouette stamp set at Jo-Ann's last weekend for a dollar.