12 Tags of 2016: February-- Felix Culpa!

*Typing from my phone... I'll post now and then this evening I'll fix errors and add the butterfly DP make! :-)

Well, I pulled this together pretty quickly-- had the idea in my mind, and had little pieces all around that conspired to inspire...

Pretty happy with it. This is sooo "me" (the anthropocentric view of the human world coupled with repurposing items in a nicho?  Close to perfect.)

This month's Twelve Tags Remix  by Tim made me much happier than last month's... he totally redeemed himself! We're "back together now." Haha!

Supplies & notes:

• Library card base, folded into a nicho (I'm addicted to this right now... haven't had time to get messy lately, but I am building boxes daily in preparation for the nichos festival in my shack this weekend!)  Anyway, this nicho was drenched on the inside with Aged Mahogany Distress Stain then sprayed lotsa water. Note the interior corners: AM Distress Stain is like the Chipped Sapphire Distress Stain to me in that it creates funky bleeds... Can anyone corroborate that? 
• I used Ranger Transparent texture paste over a Heidi Swapp stencil with Ranger Princess Gold embossing powder for Tim's embossing technique
• For the monoprinting aspect, I decorated the exterior of the nicho. I inked up Tim's alphabet stencil with Rusted Hinge, Scattered Straw, and Gathered Twigs Distress Inks, misted like crazy (what drought?), and pressed the wet plastic to my box-- sides as well as back.  I didn't dab immediately with a paper towel though, because the wet colors were so bold-- I felt they fit the tone of the project as a whole. I did absorb a couple bigger puddles and set it with a heat tool.
• The butterfly "specimens" came from () DP, which I had used under the transparent gloss and Tim's stripes stencil months ago.  I pulled the paper out and fussy-cut some butterflies out before this project was even on my radar (remember how I said this card basically came together through serendipity? Truth.) 
• I had a cork that I've been whittling for a few days and I decided to slice segments as my mounting platforms. I then had an old pin cushion in sight, and so I grabbed some pins and snipped them to fit in the box

  

  This little pincushion right here is a battle-hardened trooper! Time for my kids to get all OCD on it and color-coordinate the pins :)

• The "escapee" butterfly atop the box was hot glued... because sometimes nothing compares...
• The typed Latin phrase-- which was typed to mimic a true mount box specimen identifier-- can be interpreted different ways, but in this case,  I interpret "happy fault" to mean this whole project was kind of a bumbling happy accident! If you saw my craft shack right now, you might think, "How did anything come from that desk?" And with the tiny amount of time I've had... Yes, all things considered, felix culpa. 

Cheers to you all.  Hump day!!!