Empress Wu Designs with Wilma

 It has been such a long time since I participated in a Tag Tuesday  challenge … This fortnight the theme is ‘Gothic’  and  it really engaged me because I really couldn’t at first think of anything I could create as a tag. I recently have  been playing with photo manipulation and editing so here is one of the results - a double exposed image of the interior of a gothic cathedral and the head of a sculpture I made a few years ago . I also added a few touches of gold leaf and coloured a few areas of the image with Prisma pencil to add some depth. I was thinking the gothic arches created mitred headgear ?  Or is just a spectre of a saint interred in the cathedral crypt? … it’s gothic! 

Here comes the Sun,   Here comes the Sun and I say It's all right Little darling It's been a long cold lonely winter Little darling It feels like years since it's been here ....  At   Tag Tuesday , the current theme is  "Here comes the sun" . The challenge is to create a tag with the sun on it, with an optional twist of including a Beatles image.  My first tag is simply a gelli plate print background, with a photo transfer of grass and a stamped image of a fairy. The second tag suggests a  peace-loving Beatle (or a look alike) against a sunny background. In both these tags, the sun is implied rather than figurative image and  I have associated "gold" with the sun.  (    

  For the  Tag Tuesday theme  " Animals, Wild or Tame ( no insects" , I made two small tags, both with my favourite collage material - postage stamps.  For the first one , I chose an Australian stamp , issued in 1982 , rasing the awareness of the endangered corroboree frog. Here is some information about it....  Corroboree Frogs are Australia’s most iconic amphibian species and amongst the most visually spectacular frogs in the world. They can be readily distinguished by the bold yellow and black longitudinal stripes on its top, sides and legs. Its belly is marbled black, white and yellow. Both the males and females have the same colouration but females are slightly larger than males. These frogs are found in marshlands and sclerophyll forests under logs, and subalpine bogs of south-eastern NSW and the ACT. Catching a glimpse of these stunning creatures is a rare and exciting occurrence. They are largely nocturnal but are also occasionally active during the day...

  Nature does not hurry, but everything is accomplished ... Lao Tzu  For Tag Tuesday's theme "time and clocks" ,   here is my  collaged reflection on time.  Do you have  favourite saying about "time"? 

  It's been a long time since creating a tag for the Tag Tuesday  fortnightly challenge....  The current theme is 'orange and purple' .   I made this tag for the challenge as a collage constructed from magazine pages , with a photo transferred as another layer. The photo is one of a tree in my street  and from a laser print, I  transferred  part of it  to the collage background with acrylic medium. With such bold colours, the silhouette of the tree branches seems to enhance the vibrancy of these colours.  I am always interested in working out why colours seem to "go together" , so it's always good to go back to the colour wheel.  While not quite analogous, orange and purple are close  secondary colour neighbours  and they present as a brilliant pairing as they also come from the opposite hot/cool families of colour.  We only have to look at Nature to see how well orange and purple go together.    References...

 These days, I am always late to the Tag Tuesday party, but here are my offerings for the  current theme. NUMBERS . I have interpreted this theme fairly loosely....  in the above collaged tag,  there are very small numbers on the green paper section, which is part of an old map, so the numbers are reference points.  I am also counting the numbers on the postage stamp.  And likewise for the other two ...and I am sure you also  spotted 8 on the one below.   While I was creating these, I was thinking of other ways to interpret this theme, and I just couldn't stop remembering one of my favourite TV shows....  how would you have interpreted NUMBERS? 

When I heard the theme for Tag Tuesday this fortnight is "Haberdashery", I rummaged in my sewing drawer to look for "vintage" items of haberdashery which I knew I had in my stash. I was particularly happy and surprised to find a number of cards of press studs, buttons and hooks and eyes. These brought back such great memories of the haberdashery shops which I used to frequent years ago when we lived in small country towns. They seemed to stock whatever you needed. You can tell the age of some of these items in my "habbie" stash as Australia changed to decimal currency on 14 February 1966, and the button card quotes a price of 1/3d...  As I have been making little wearable pins for #the100dayproject, accompanied by a haiku, I thought that Day 30 had to be about haberdashery ... hence my tag within a tag for Tag Tuesday....  "Just a word recalls Sewing notions long since used:  Haberdashery"  This is a cloth /mixed media collage with...

Signing in late for the fortnightly challenge "Gold and Silver" for Tag Tuesday.....  This tag is created from a cyanotype* print of a photograph I took a couple of years ago of winter trees in our neighbourhood, with a circular mask. The stitching - couching- is done in gold and silver threads. *Note:  Cyanotype is a photographic printing process that produces a cyan-blue print. Engineers used the process well into the 20th century as a simple and low-cost process to produce copies of drawings, referred to as blueprints. T

Anything Industrial is the theme for the current Tag Tuesday , with fantastic tags as inspiration by Tag Tuesday designer, Sandie . Not sure if I have gone a bit off the mark with this interpretation, but my tag depicts "remembering".... remembering what a place was like before it became a technology park and industrial centre.  I am sure there are many places you revisit, and remember perhaps a more rural scene from childhood, far from the current high rise, industrial  and high technology cityscape.  As a feature of this collage, I included a person  riding  a bicycle to add to the theme, as it  has been said,    " A bicycle is an industrial revolution in an individual’s life  ..."  (F.K. Day, Founder of World Bicycle Relief, 2012 ) 

Fussy cut  pattern on a text background, with hand stitching-  WS  The current theme at Tag Tuesday   is TIME/CLOCKS, nominated by design team member, Joan who prepared some great tags as inspiration. Sometime ago, I cut very carefully these white rabbits  out of a piece of paper... I loved the  pattern design of the shared ears being part of the central chessboard. This seemed a good time to find it in my stash and create a round tag for this challenge. I continued with the Wonderland theme, and remembered the Mad Hatter announcing "It's always tea time!" so here is another tag inspired by that saying... watercolour and ink drawing with photo transfers and text an fabric. Watercolour pencil and ink drawing ( Alice) , photo transfer ( trees and quote)  onto text background paper, with fabric. WS  Please visit Tag Tuesday for  contributions from other tag artists who have interpreted this theme.

Nothing like coming to the party late - the Nautical /Seaside theme for Tag Tuesday has already been up for almost two weeks, and I just got around to making a couple of tags today.   They both feature postage stamps with images of sailing ships. The first is a stamp from Singapore on a background of crumpled painted tissue paper with some metallic charms.  The second stamp is an Australian one, on a background of torn paper from an old National Geographic magazine  Some of the pages have been treated with Orange Power Goo Remover, which somehow melts the inks and creates a fusion of colours.  Please visit the Tag Tuesday blog to see the art work of talented tag artists from around the world. 

At Tag Tuesday, this fortnight Sandie  is hosting the Steampunk/Mechanical challenge. Although this isn't a theme I usually tackle, Sandie's tags are so fantastic and inspirational that I was motivated to create a tag this afternoon. I had some fabrics on my desk which I discharge dyed last week.and this piece with the addition of a few copper cogs reminded me of " industrial and mechanical" . The way the background fabric was created was by applying bleach gel with a roller over the top of a plastic stencil. The fabric was originally a  bluish dark grey   cotton, When the bleach had removed the colour, the process was halted with a commercial  neutralizing solution  called AntiChlor. I have been told that a vinegar solution  will also stop the discharge of colour and act as a neutraliser. The metal cogs were stitched on to the fabric by hand. Here are  a couple of great resource sites for discharging colour with bleach. - Threads ...

This seems to have been a long hot summer here in Australia.... so when Tag Tuesday's theme was announced last week as "Use a Quote" , I began to think of some 'sunny' quotes.  Both of these tags use quotations which have been printed on my laser printer and then transferred using a 'sticky tape' method.  Here is a video which describes this technique well.  The first tag also has magazine images, a water coloured sun and a background of gelli -plate printed paper. The second tag is an eco print which I originally thought was not so great, but it seems to have worked for this tag.  As an aside, I was really interested to find out whether we do in fact have a lot of sunny days...  I live in Newcastle NSW  and my home town is Townsville, Queensland, so compared these two places with a few of the Australian State capitals.  Average total days a year with sun City           ...

Tag Tuesday's  current theme is ' Steampunk' and I am away from home and have limited resources and of course, no stash. However, I am travelling with water colour paper,  a black pen, some coloured pencils and a 2B and a 4B lead pencil.  I also have scissors so I cut out an advertisement for a watch from the in flight magazine and with the purchase of a glue stick and some string  , I created this interpretation of 'Steampunk'. I actually enjoyed working with so little at hand - sometimes it challenges you to think more and do something differently.