Let’s grunge dye some tags in my dye studio

I am grunging up some tags in my dye kitchen today.

I am using a small sized tag that comes with string.
In this batch I am going to dye most of the box.

I used a recipe that I found online. Here is a great link for some fun recipes and whatnot including how to dye tags with coffee. The recipe is at the bottom of the page. It is basically 1/2 cup of instant coffee to 2 cups of hot water.

After soaking it for about 10 minutes, I put them all on a wax paper lined cookie sheet. I left them in clumps initially so that I would not have to handle them dripping with coffee. I baked them for 10 minutes or so in a  200˚ degree oven, then took them out and separated them into a single layer. I gave them another 10 or 20 minutes to dry.

My coffee mixture was leftover from a previous dye session. Now when this was baking my husband asked what the strange chemical smell was. No, it did not smell anything like coffee. So you might want to put on the fan for this part of the process.

If you take the tags out when they are just damp you can put a book over them to flatten them. Otherwise they will be a little warped, which you might like. Mine were pretty dry so I lightly misted them with water and topped that with a cookie sheet with several heavy things on top of it.

After everything was dry, I did some embellishing. Here is my favorite stamp block that I am going to use with my Tim Holtz Distress Ink in the colors Old Paper and Vintage Photo. I am going for some background images.

After the initial stamping in brown inks, I wanted to stamp over these with black ink.

Images and parts of images were what I was after, like the tags were cut out of a larger piece of paper.

Next I gave everything a bit of Pearl-X mica powder. You can also use eye shadow!

Here is my basketful of grungy tags.

While supplies last, I will be putting a mini tag in every Primitive Spirit order made through my catalog or Etsy.

Have a creative day ~ Karen