Scraps Of Brilliance: Build A Tag - Flying Unicorn December Kit

It's my turn to host the Build A Page tutorial at Flying Unicorn this month, and this month I created a tag with the wooden Julie Nutting Doll included in the Small Art, Big Passion kit. The wooden dolls can be a bit more daunting to customize than the stamps or the dies, so I wanted to give you some tips on ways to make it your own (and pitfalls to avoid).

To start, I custom blended a skin tone using several 13 Arts Matte Paints: Sand, White, Cocoa and Pink (not pictured), and painted it on with a fine-tipped paintbrush.

To create body in the dress I used Shimmerz Dazzlerz, which because of its thickness allowed me to create ridges and valleys.

I applied the Dazzlerz following the sections of the skirt, keeping application over the laser cuts to a minimum so they remained visible. In the photo below you can see the gorgeous texture.

Pictured below is one of the potential pitfalls I mentioned. When using inks (such as markers or mists), this type of wood is susceptible to bleeding, as you can see in the photo. Because the dolls are etched, this is not a problem as long as you only want to use one colour, but if you try to combine colours they will bleed into one another.

Once the shoes and handbag were coloured with alcohol markers, I painted on embossing ink and heat embossed the pieces with clear embossing powder to give them a glossy finish.

For the hair, I carefully painted on the Chalk Woodbine mist from the Mixed Art Add-On.

Isn't her hair colour stunning?

I added touches of white using a Sharpie Paint Pen, colouring the buttons, her leggings, highlights in her hair and the collar of her dress.

The packaging from the wooden doll makes an ideal backing to build a tag upon.

I trimmed some of the 6x6 papers from the Small Art, Big Passion add-on to fit the tag, and added some of the 13 Arts Cosy Evening stickers.

The 13 Arts mask and some modeling paste added some perfect raised snowflakes to the background.

I die cut two snowflakes using the Prima Doily die from a 6x6 sheet of 13 Arts Cosy Evening paper - the first the entire snowflake, the second just the interior portion from a leftover corner of the paper.

One of the fussy-curable images from the 6x6 pad is perfect as a centre for the snowflake.

A little inking to tie all the elements together, using a Prima Chalk Edger...

And here is the finished tag, trimmed with the red grosgrain ribbon from the Mixed Passion add-on, Prima and Petaloo flowers and cork embellishments and an Ingvild Bolme Lamppost.