Less is More Tag Card {Recycled}

Hey friends,

Today I am sharing this tag card (is it a tag?  is it a card?  no it’s a tag card!) as clearly I couldn’t make up my mind between the two so why not have both.

This month’s Mini Challenge on MTW is to use the word MORE on something small like a tag, card, postcard or ATC and boy did I go down a rabbit hole with that one!  I will share that post later but for now, let’s look at what I ended up making (finally, after multiple detours and aforesaid rabbit hole) for my DT project.

I started with a tag in mind, and this very useful tag die set from the Mayor of Tagtown himself, and I planned to use some of my recycled cardboard to cut it instead of cutting into new cardstock.

Food packaging and cat food boxes were my substrates of choice!

I also wanted to use some of my precut alphabets, also cut from cat food boxes, and was sure I would have enough of the necessary letters.

Turns out I did not have enough precut letters and had to adapt some, like making these 8’s into S’s.

Oh yes, did I mention that I had finally settled on LESS IS MORE? I also wanted to build up the dimension of the word MORE by using three layers of letters glued together.

Time to work on my background using Distress Inks on my recycled packaging.  I gessoed them first to give me a good base to work with since this is packaging and not perfect cardstock.  You can see on the piece on the left there is a dark patch where the gesso wasn’t applied and so the DI has soaked in.  That was what I was trying to avoid, so you can imagine what the whole tag would have looked like if I hadn’t gessoed it.

I did some Distress Oxide stamping using my Weed Love Rubber Dance stamp.  Btw that cut along the top is actually the edge of the side of the box that I cut up.

I added some splatters and edges to both pieces of card.

And a little Vintage Photo also around the edges.

I painted the LESS IS with Botanical Alcohol Ink and the MORE with hmmm I think Evergreen Bough DI(?) I can’t remember now but it doesn’t matter because it doesn’t work for me and so I changed it and painted over it.

I had this idea of two tags overlapping each other but I couldn’t get the positioning right so I had to rip the MORE letters off the tag and repainted everything, this time with liquid acrylics.

Here’s a closer look at those triple stacked letters.

Since my two-tag idea didn’t work out I was able to rearrange the placement of the tag so that LESS IS could be placed on the card and MORE could take a prominent position on the tag.  I added some leftover burlap from a previous project and mounted the whole thing on a kraft card base made from Gina K Sandy Beach cardstock.

And that was it really, I tried a different background for my card using this “bag for life” type shopping bag which celebrates the colour LINDEN GREEN.

 

 

 

 

 

The Mini Challenge is held on their Facebook page, click this link to enter More Than Words March Mini Challenge.
The word inspiration is:

 

Challenges:

Simon Says Stamp Monday Challenge – A Bit of Green – definitely qualifies with quite a bit of green included
Simon Says Stamp Wednesday Challenge – Use Some Green – so I’m entering this tag in this challenge too

 

PROJECT RECIPE:

Distress Inks
Decoart Fluid Acrylics
Rubber Dance stamps
Tim Holtz/Sizzix Alphabet bigz (letters already cut out from cat food boxes)
Nuvo Deluxe Adhesive
From stash: recycled food packaging, burlap