ETA: I apologise for the ads now appearing on my blog.  This is NOT my choice.  When I can afford it, I will pay to have them blocked.  In the meantime, please ignore them, but if you see something inappropriate, I urge you to report it immediately.  Thank you.

Hello blog visitors!  Tomorrow will be the final day of 2012, so it is fitting that I show you my final tag for the Chocolate Baroque Alpha Tag swap.  I am quite proud that I stuck with this swap & completed my twenty-six tags, some better than others, but none a complete disaster & I have a lovely collection of tags from my swap partners to treasure.

Most of the year, I wondered what on earth I would do for the final tag, ‘Z’.  Finally, I took a deep breath & chose ‘zentangle’.

I stamped the balloon ship from the Steampunkery set onto white card, cut off all the sails, coloured it with Promarkers & drew a border, freehand, around it on the tag to separate it from the patterns.  When the tag was finished I decided to add Glossy Accents to the balloon, it just gave a little bit of dimension to the tag.  I used the Spellbinders’ edgeabilities die to make the zigzags, trying to keep them as evenly spaced as possible.

Then I started doodling.  Well, there wasn’t a lot of doodling, as I thought about each segment for ages first, starting at the bottom & matching each pattern with another at the top.

I found the quote on a Zen Buddhism website.  It seemed appropriate for the end of the swap.

And here is the finished tag.  It turned out rather better than I thought it would.  Zentangles look wonderful, but creating them does not come naturally to me, I’m too impatient & my crafting style is definitely in the make-a-major-mess zone.  I also don’t have the kind of brain that can think up incredible patterns.  However, I enjoyed making this tag, so maybe I’ll do a little more tangling.

So, that’s it for the 2012 Chocolate Baroque swap.  Our intrepid leader, Margaret, has already organised a new swap for 2013.  It’s to be two QUINTILES a month & she has given us a topic for each month – hurrah!

Thanks for looking, I shall be back tomorrow, or the next day.  Until then,

Love & light