Ampersands and Tags

The Pie Contest patterned paper from Studio Calico's State Fair collection is one of my favorite papers from their Winter CHA 2011 release. I love the overlapping letterpressed ampersands pattern, so one day, I decided to lift the beautiful design when I was decorating shipping tags. The end result of my experimenting turned out pretty great, so I thought I'd make a quick tutorial on what I did.

Today, I'm posting a quick tutorial on making this:

What you need:
- ampersand stamps (I went through my Studio Calico stamps and pulled out all the ampersands from alpha/number sets, as well as two mini ampersand stamps)
- various ink pads
- shipping tags
- optional supplies (not pictured): white Mister Huey, label sticker

1. Start stamping your ampersand images onto the shipping tag, using various ink colors. I decided to go for a blue/green/grey theme. You don't have to re-ink your stamp each time you use it so that sometimes, you get a faded effect. Don't be afraid to let the images overlap.

2. Keep on stamping the ampersand images until the shipping tag is pretty full.

3. As a final step, use a small ampersand stamp to fill in any odd-looking holes on the shipping tag. I used this tiny ampersand from my Studio Calico addy alpha set.

Now your shipping tag is all good to go! I decided to do a little bit more on mine to finish it off...I splattered some white Mister Huey, added dotted lines around the edge, and stuck on a little homemade tag. Here's the completed version, as well as a pink/orange/red version.

I thought the tags would be perfect to use for scrapbook layouts or even mini-book pages. I'm definitely thinking of trying this again, but using a letter in different fonts, instead of an ampersand on a shipping tag (eg. repeating Gs ;) hehe). Anyway, I used the pink/orange/red ampersand tag on this scrapbook page I made on Friday night:

Hope you enjoy! Link me up if you make your own ampersand-decorated tags :)