...a cuppa sweet

Good morning! Happy Wednesday! I made this little clay tag for yesterdays Blog Party and I thought I'd pop up a wee 'how-to' here today.

First though, a wee word about yesterday's Blog Party times - we will be reviewing the timing of our blog party for next month - my hand is right up in the air, I done picked a wrong time - I must have been somewhere in a giggly cloud of mulled wine when I decided on yesterdays times as it was pretty much impossible for anyone on this side of the pond to participate if they were at work yesterday...doh! My apologies for that!

So, what I'm proposing for the next blog part in February is this - I think I'd like to kick off the party link at around 6:30PM my time, and close it at around 4:00AM the following morning - I'm thinking that this will be between lunchtime and bed time in US...how does that sound?

So, our schedule for Feb would be something like this:

UK - 6:30pm 17th Feb - 4:00am 18th Feb
USA (New York) 1:30pm 17th Feb - 11:00pm 17th Feb
Australia (Queensland) - 4:30am 18th feb - 2:00pm 18th Feb
Canada (Alberta) - 11:30am 17th Feb - 9:00pm 17th Feb
Malaysia - 2:30am 18th Feb - 12:00pm 18th Feb
Norway - 7:30pm 17th Feb - 5:00am 18th Feb

OK, let me know what you think of the proposed times, and we'll try to take it into consideration, thanks ladies!

Back to yesterdays party and I must say tho, that the folks who were able to take part were on fire!! We'll be doing a little round up post on the 20th to point to a few that especially caught our eyes!! Outstanding stuff!

How-to

In the meantime, I have a couple of these little clay taggies to show you. Super simple, once these dry you can use them time and again, decorative ornaments, place setting ornaments as in my pic above, napkin tags...whatever tickles...

Can I just mention those delicious chocolates in the pic, they were sent to me by a friend in USA - I only just opened the package yesterday, I'm in caramel heaven!! Divine Caramel creations by Ellie...and they are!!

Here's what I did:

I made them from Fimo light, air drying clay. It is white when you purchase it and all you have to do is roll it out to the desired thickness and stamp it!

In the pic you can see a piece of it rolled to - I stamped it with the heart from Seasons of love tags. I used Stampin' Up cherry cobbler ink and just inked up as usual and stamped right onto the clay, I pressed it down a little all over and I was very happy to see that it held the colour really well. You will get a little hairiness in your impression and if you press too deep then you might find that other parts of the stamp also leave a trace of ink, but you only have to try it once to get a feel for it.

Next I set my Spellbinders heart tag die template on top as if i were going to trim it out and then I used a scalpel to simply trim away the excess clay.

When I removed the die I had a ready made guideline into which I pressed an embossing tool to create a row of dots around the edge. That was pretty much all I did, the hard part is waiting for it to dry...OOh and don't forget to make a hole for the ribbon if you are making an ornament to hang.

For the second ornament I simply trimmed the heart as before and then added some dots around the edge as before and stamped an unlinked sentiment and a scroll (Seasons of love tags) into the centre.

Once dry, I sponged it with Ink, the indented sentiment stayed nice and white, putty...I thought! And easy peasy!! Hope it tickles!