What to do with all of those tags?

It's fun to create artwork on manila tags. The stock is durable and such a pretty shade of ivory. They're small-ish, smooth and take well to paint, watercolors, inks, stamps.

They're great for demos at trade shows.

After a season at various Scrapbook Expos throughout the Midwest, I have quite a pile 'o tags! Many of them had artwork created with the Spring Chorus stencils and the WOW Spring Unmounted Stamps along with Gelatos and Big Brush Markers from Faber-Castell.

I spent a little bit of time on Saturday morning sifting through the tags and stamping them with a quote from the upcoming Fire & Ice unmounted stamp collection. (Spoiler alert!)

Then today, in a whirlwind ninety-minute card-making frenzy, I managed to complete a nice stack of beautiful "A2" cards.

Here's how:

1. Trim the tags horizontally at 5.5" and vertically at 3". (This will take off the reinforced hole at the top.)

2. Prep a coordinating stack of 5.5x8.5" scored and folded card bases.

3. Trim a complementary matte for the tags to 3.25x5.5". 

4. Add a simple embellishment from your stash to each card, if you're in the mood.

5. Hand the cards to Kay Williamson and say, "Hey, can you take a few pictures of these?"

Well, you can skip step five. 

But I needed to do that step so you could enjoy the results! I had two batches of cards in two color schemes.

I diverted from the pattern listed in the steps above on this one . . .

And there 'ya have it. Twelve cards in 90 minutes combined with a few days of playtime. I still have about 200 tags to go. But now that I have a system . . . 

I hope your week is splendidly creative!

Tricia