Christmas in June????

Yesterday I mentioned that it's not good policy to argue with your muse (bad things can happen), so when mine decided to ignore the calendar and start pulling out wintery, Christmasy supplies, I just rolled my eyes and went along with it.  I was attempting to complete the final challenge piece I wanted to do this week.....The Compendium of Curiosities 2 challenge, organized by the wonderful Linda Ledbetter. 

The featured technique (on page 62 of Tim's second CofC book) is called repurposed packaging, and Tim shows two variations.  I've included both in my tag.

I started with Tim's tall pines embossing folder, and used it on a background I had previously made and cut into a tag.  The embossed trees were darkened with several green and brown distress inks, but primarily forest moss.  The bird (close up below) was done with one of the techniques and colored with many shades of blue alcohol inks and blue prismacolor markers (alcohol based, like the inks).

For the second repurposed packaging technique I used Tim's pine tree die and colored it with just about everything I could think of, LOL.  I wanted it to pop off the background more than it did, and it took forever to get something I could live with.  So, in no particular order, the tree was colored with alcohol inks, alcohol based markers, archival inks, and stazon inks.  

The stars were made with a Sakura white glaze pen as well as their clear stardust pen.   To finish things off, I cut some black cardstock with Tim's townscape die, backed the open windows with yellow cardstock, and attached it to the bottom of the tag.

It isn't hot enough here (yet) for me to be yearning for winter again, but I know better than to fight with the mojo.