A Little Trash, A Little Stash

So, this is the challenge:  make something with unusual elements, recycled items, or repurposed ones.  Hmmm.  Well, this is the trash I started with:

• brown paper bag
• tabs from Diet Pepsi cans
• catalog
• plastic packaging material
• cork from bottle of wine

And abracadabra, this is what I wound up with:

First of all, I took that cork and carved a little design into it to create my backgrounds.  I stamped it repeatedly onto tags with black acrylic paint.

I recently had a nice meal with my friend Pat and we finished a bottle of wine. (No big surprise there.)  I took the cork home, knowing I'd use it in something, but didn't have stamp making in mind at the time.  But doesn't it create a cool graphic?  And on some tags I angled the stamp differently, resulting in new patterns. 
When the paint was completely dry, I swiped each tag with a different color of distress stain.  Instant and vibrant coverage.  Here's a closer view of one of the tags:

The soda can tab was glued to the top as the ribbon holder.

The rosette (Tim's new mini) was cut from a page in the catalog.  After assembly, it was pounced with some gesso, and when that dried, it got a spritz of color wash.  Now it's a flower.
The flower center is a pom-pom kind of thingy made from a strip of the brown paper bag.  I rolled it tightly around a thin paint brush, glued it together, then made several cuts from the top to just above the base to create that fringe, and glued it down with matte multi medium.

The leaf was cut with Tim's new mini leaf/branch die from the plastic packaging material, colored with markers, and heated for a moment so it could be bent a little.  I could have also used alcohol inks, but the markers were closer and didn't require moving three boxes to get to.  Sometimes I think this blog should be called Memoirs of a Lazy Crafter.

Some ball chain from my stash created the stem.

The lovely sentiment is a Wendy Vecchi stamp, cut apart so the words would fill the empty space on the side.