Cathy and Catherine Create is an absolutely wonderful blog offering all kinds of great scrapbooking inspiration through posts from their design team and their monthly, tag and card challenges. The Scrapstorian Design Team enjoys a wonderful friendship with the ladies over at Cathy and Catherine Create, and are high on the list of “biggest fans”. 🙂
The Tag Challenge for March is to create a tag using the negative – in short, a neg-tag. I love the idea of using negative for a couple of reasons: it’s a great way to mix multiple patterns while maintain a central focus on the shape or word cut out, and it’s a great way to use scraps from other projects.
Here is what I created for the challenge:
Supplies: Heidi Swapp Color Shine (bronzer); Prima Stencil (6×6 crackle); Recollections @ Michael’s (Embossing Powder Gold, Alphabet Stickers, Creative Tags); EK Success Brands Aristocrat Small Alphabet Stickers
I played on the negative challenge a couple of times for this tag – both with the heart punch, that shows gold (for the “heart of gold”) through the negative image behind the cute heart pattern paper, and with the gold Polaroid frame layered over top. To kick the back ground up a bit, I embossed a crackle stencil in gold, and then gave the whole thing a quick mist in bronze after putting it all together to tone down the bling just a little bit. Add some matching ribbons and voila.
Thanks Catherine and Cathy for the neg-tag inspiration!
Scrapstorian 
Loving all the gold! Great tag, and yes great friendships!
Beautiful tag! So to add the ink using the stencil, how did you apply it? With a sponge? Sorry I am not familiar with this technique and I am very interested to learn how to do that! – Kristal
Thanks and hi Kristal – the gold crackle on the tag was created as follows: I put the tag down on my scrapbooking table and secured it with a bit of washi tape (you can peel it off without damaging the tag when you are done keeping it in its place), then overlayed the tag with my stencil and also used some washi tape to hold that to the table. Then I used embossing ink that comes in a bingo style dobber, to dob over the stencil. Once dobbed, I peeled up the stencil, and sprinkled the wet ink with gold embossing powder, applied the heat gun and voila. The ‘bingo dobber style’ for applying the embossing ink is the key to adapting masks and stencils into embossed images, in my opinion 😉 – http://rangerink.com/?product=emboss-it-dabber
Oh thank you for all the info! I have used versamark for embossing, but I did not know there was a dauber out there as well! Guess I will be adding that to my list of things to get. 😉 – Kristal
Neg TAG!! hhahahahaha I love it and we love you!!! :> Of course the tag is awesome~~ I’ll say it again. we should retreat together soon! hahahaha
If we could transport you to our retreat we would! Brande even had a “what would Cathy do” moment yesterday. 🙂