Holly Jolly Unicorn Tag

This year, I’m participating in Ellen Hutson’s 12 Tags of Christmas 2019 Challenge for the first time. I’ve got a couple of other tag designs roughly sketched out, but this month has been so crazy that I haven’t yet had the time to sit down and make them. The design for this tag, however, leapt into being pretty easily — it was inspired by Carly’s tag for Day 10. I liked her circular base, the candy-like colors she chose, and her use of holly.

For my tag, I went for a pepperminty color scheme with cool, minty greens, a pink-toned red, and lots of white. Arranging the sentiment took way longer than I’d like to admit, but I’m satisfied with how it turned out — definitely worth all those scraps of paper I consumed while testing iterations.

I originally intended to make a pile of presents for the unicorn to be standing among, but that didn’t work with the circular card, so I ended up going with a wreath of presents and holly in a scaled-down echo of Carly’s. Rather than stamping the unicorn and presents in black ink, which would have been very stark against the white areas, I used a dark purple, which adds to the cool tones present in the rest of the design. Adding dimension to the white body with a purple marker, instead of just grey, further boosted the candy-like wintry feel. I covered all the white surfaces of the unicorn with a shimmer pen, and for once I think my camera managed to capture it decently.

The pearly shimmer pigment ink I used to stamp the sparkles and snowflakes is somewhat opaque, but it has almost no color to it, which makes it impossible to see on white paper unless the light hits it just right. I wanted the sparkles and snowflakes to fill in the space, not just hint at glimmer, so I first stamped Fairy Dust ink three times to get a light cool grey, then layered Platinum Planet on top of it, muting the grey color and leaving the shapes pale but clearly defined. Although the sparkles and snowflakes don’t show up well in the photos, they’re perfectly visible in person.

I almost forgot to stamp the back of the tag, and then I had to scramble to see if I even had any “to/from” stamps to stamp it with! Somehow, I only have these two, so they’ll be getting a workout if I can make the time to create more tags. Do you have any good “to/from” stamp sets to recommend?


Supplies
Stamps:  Lawn Fawn “A Little Sparkle” (unicorn, sparkles), “Winter Alpaca” (snowflakes), “Year Five” (present);  Hero Arts “Build a Wreath by Lia” (holly);  Papertrey Ink “City Scene Christmas Sentiments” (“merry & bright”);   Clearly Besotted Simple Silhouettes (“to,” “from”)
Dies:  Hero Arts “Nesting Circle Dies” (3 ¼”);   Lawn Fawn “A Little Sparkle”
Ink:  Memento Elderberry, Brilliance Platinum Planet;  The Ton Caribbean Turquoise;  Hero Arts Pale Tomato;  WPlus9 Fairy Dust
Copics:  R27+R22 (cheek, rear present), V20+C00 (body shadows), BG32 (hooves and ear);  Sharpie Mint (mane, tale, presents), Turquoise (mane and tail);  Stampin’ Up Blendabilities Costal Cabana medium (mane and tail)
Paper:  Papertrey Ink Stamper’s Select White
Miscellanea:  Zig Two-Way Glue Pen, Spectrum Noir Clear Sparkle pen, hole punch