The Nine Tags of Christmas

Hi, guys!  Winnie’s hubby here again.

Win’s finally finished all of her card orders and is now busy making all the Christmas cards we need for our family and friends, so she asked me to step in and blog the tags I made for Christmas.

But for all of you crafters who think you know what’s coming from the title, trust me, you don’t.  What is coming is yet another example of why I leave the stamping to her and stick to taking the pictures of her beautiful creations.  For those who have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s some background:

Anyone who follows this blog faithfully knows that Winnie is a huge fan of Tim Holtz, and for good reason – the guy is to crafting what R.A. Dickey currently is to the knuckleball: probably the finest and most inventive practitioner out there.  (And the Mets traded him – Dickey, not Holtz - don’t get me started.) For a number of years he (Holtz, not Dickey) did what he called the “12 Tags of Christmas,” where over the course of twelve days he demonstrated on his blog various techniques he used to make these beautiful tags, suitable for attaching to gifts, as the gifts themselves, or, as we’ve done for the last two years with a tag Winnie made and gave me in 2009, when we were dating, as a Christmas tree ornament.  In fact, here’s the tag in situ on our tree this year:

This year he made it easier on himself (after storms and power outages last year forced him to trek to the local Starbucks every day to send his posts) and craft retailers around the country (who had to scramble to stock their stores with the supplies he used) and spread the work out over the year, turning the exercise into the “12 Tags of 2012.”  But traditions die hard at our house.  So here are my “9 Tags of Christmas”:

And here’s a close-up:

Supplies:

Stamps:  PSX Stamp E-317 (Winnie tells me some of these are valuable now – I’m guessing not this one, though)

Paper:  Red construction paper (Staples?)

Ink:  Personal Stamp Exchange Green

(Told you.)

I’ve been making these for my Christmas presents for the last twenty years or so.  I found the stamp at a craft fair back then and haven’t bought a tag since.  I may even be using the same stamp pad.  Winnie finds all this endearing somehow.

By next Tuesday this may wind up being the “22 Tags of Christmas,” as I’ve already used up five of them.  It’s kind of like the old snack food line “Crunch all you want, we’ll make more.”  But I (or anyone else) would rather get one of Winnie’s any day. 

However, she, as she recently showed me, has saved all the tags I made her, which as you can tell from the picture is basically the same one over and over again.  She has a tiny drawer full of them.

Awwwwwww, dang.

Merry Christmas, everyone!