SOS201: washi, washi, washi!

we *ALL* love tape, am i right? well, if not, i'm sorry to hear that, but it won't necessarily prevent you from participating in this week's challenge at shopping our stash, because we want to see your oldest washi tape, so even if you only bought one roll five years ago, you can still play! personally, i have more than one roll. quite a bit more, actually, but i digress; for this project i've used a bunch of different ones that can (kinda/sorta) qualify as "oldest". but first here's my project and then i'll essplain:

yellow acrylic giftbag of unknown origin; sunflower shapes cut from strathmore watercolor paper and painted with craft acrylics with accents of glitter and tiny sequins; sunflower centers punched from tim holtz kraft cardstock and accented with a few different (rather ancient!) tapes and some machine stitching; dark brown peel-off tape by 7 gypsies, light colored peel-off tapes by heidi swapp, tim holtz natural-colored, text-printed washi; green tapes on bag: more heidi swapp and 7 gypsies plus recollections, october afternoon and love my tapes; 3m foam tape used to stick the sunflowers and centers on

ok, so, YEAH: more sunflowers and another giftbag. what can i say? but when i started thinking about this challenge, i wanted to do something funky and multi-media, and it occurred to me that sunflowers would work pretty well. so i painted some petal-shapes with a few colors of acrylic craft paint, leaving it a bit streaky and textural. when it was dry, i brushed on a bit of gloss gel medium to adhere some random sprinkles of clear, gold and yellow glitter. for the centers i punched some nice big circles out of kraft colored patterned cardstock and added tape accents. i used my oldest "washi" tape (a tim holtz text pattern) but also some heidi swapp deco tape that's quite a bit older and in fact pre-dates the "official" tape craze by a few years, because that heidi has always been a trend-setter! :) splitting the difference is the dark brown music print by 7 gypsies, which is a bit like masking tape, but thicker and sturdier. like the heidi swapp variety, this tape has a sort of peel-off backing, which is nice if you want to make it into shapes... but more on that later.

my original plan was to attach the sunflowers directly to the bag, but then it occurred to me that i could accent the bag too... and really easily, just by adding more strips of tape. (i'm keeping this idea in mind for the times when the bag i want to use has some sort of logo on it... instant upcycling disguise!)  

once again, i thought i was done, but then the convenience of peely-back tape resurfaced: why not use it to add some leaf shapes and extend the design further? so i did:

i added a few marker accents to coordinate with the black stitching on the flower centers and called it a day.

and now why not hop over to shopping our stash to see my fellow tape addicts'... AHEM! ...i mean my fellow design team members' gorgeous projects! off you go, tape-loving darlings! :)