What did we make at the Guncle’s?

Not only did we pretend to be angels, then vampires, do some redecorating, play with pups, watch Tru Blood, and eat a ton of good food (I was afraid to try to zip my pants for the flight home), we did lots of creating in Randy's studio too.

The deadline for my Bird Song tag book swap is coming up and I wanted to have some tags to swap too, so brought along stuff to make some. Randy had a lot of supplies to use also, and we shared back and forth as we worked in the studio till the wee hours of the night. And through most of the days too!

I also packed up a bunch of papers that Mary had given me from her new collections.  Both of these previous tags are sitting on a page from her collections, and the roses in the first one is from a previous collection of hers.

These tags aren't for the swap, I just felt like making them, because I loved the images that Mary had provided.  She has pages and pages of lovely ladies, some in color, some in black and white. I cut out these girls from the black and white pages and colored them with Coptic markers. I've always wanted to try those, and Randy's crafting bud brought some for me to experiment with.

I think I like them… the fact that you can buy a blending pen makes them much better than most markers. I'll be buying a few for myself with the weekly 40% off coupons that I clip out of the paper for Hobby Lobby or Michaels.

Randy and his friend joined the swap, so we made tons of tags between us.

(this is the black and white version from Mary's collection, after Randy cut one of the ladies out to use on his scrapbook page)

  Then he worked on scrap books, while I kind of messed around with whatever sounded fun. Like fairy-ing up some old photos.  I used some of Mary's older papers to make the wings and hat, and tinted him with the Coptic pens. (the sweet picture behind it, is from her new collection)

But mostly I worked on bird tags.  Have you ever noticed how much more fun it is to make things with other people's supplies (or with a new package of goodies you just purchased)? Randy had some great ephemera and Kevin was popping in with things he'd found while out junking that he thought we might want to use.

  Like the blue print paper in the background of this one.  I made a lot with this paper, I'd never worked with it before, and really liked it.  I got on a roll with making a night time sky with this paper, and birds in front of a full moon over the deep blue sky.

All the info for sending in the tags is in a post you can reach by clicking on the Bird Song Tag Book Swap button on my side bar if yours are ready to send in.

They are starting to arrive, every day the postman has a bundle for me!! Its so fun to see them arrive.

I'm not opening them yet, please understand that I can't keep track if your package has arrived or not. I'm getting over 900 tags in the mail, that is a lot of packages!  And I am not the only one in the family to bring the mail in, so I haven't seen each one yet. My son and husband bring mail in and know to pile up the packages for me to open later.