OCTOBER TAGS

I am so enjoying Swap-Bot! Have I said that before? The thing is, it sets me up with a creative outlet whenever I need one. And there's a new challenge, a new art medium to try, whenever I feel the urge, too.

My latest love is making decorated tags, so when a swap appeared to send three "October" themed tags out, I signed right up. I mailed them today, and I'd like to show them off.

Three October-themed tags:



I knew there was a reason to save all my page-a-day calendars from Mary Engelbreit. I do love her art, and have a very difficult time parting with it.

And now I'm going to skew into an entirely different area. I sometimes get emails from well-meaning people that they've read, gasped with alarm at, and then forwarded to me. Warning! Antiperspirants cause breast cancer! Alarm! Rats pee on soda pop can lids! Take care! People are being bashed on the head and deprived of vital organs!

Those are bad enough. You have to wonder if people don't have anything better to do than to make up stuff to scare people.

But for the past several years, I've received emails claiming that one person or another has done heinous things, anti-American things, anti-Christian things. They're hate emails, with no purpose that I can see other than to stir up outrage, anger, fear, and hate.

And almost none of them, None!, have any grain of truth to them. It's So easy to check this stuff. Go to Snopes.com, and do a search on keywords from the email. These viral things are almost always there. If that doesn't work, go to Politifact.com.

I'm going to put in a scripture here that keeps coming to mind: "Thou shalt not bear false witness." To put it simply, that's a command not to lie about people.

If you read an email, allow yourself the gasp! and the outrage, if you absolutely must. Heck, it feels good to be "righteously angry", I know that. But then check to see if it's actually true, because if it isn't, and you "forward this to everyone on your email list!" you are "bearing false witness". You are lying, whether you started the email or not. If the commandments mean anything to you, you owe it to yourself to be sure you're spreading truth.

You can't unspread a rumor, but you can make sure you aren't helping to smear a falsehood around.

FINALLY! TAGS I LOVE

I have struggled with this for all the years I've been making Coffee Pot People and Tea Kettle Characters: How do I tag them?

That struggle has a lot to do with some of the tagging I've seen in the Trillium store. A lot of them were practically works of art themselves, and after seeing them I developed a severe case of raging envy. But, try as I might, I couldn't seem to come up with something both eye-catching and artful AND easy to produce.

Until Tuesday, when I had a brainstorm: Use bottle caps. Use card stock tags. Add magnets to the back!

Here are some of the new tags:

I had a number of these finished yesterday, and promptly tied them to several Tea Kettle Characters, and drove them to Mag-Big, a new store opening on Hawthorne, a very popular shopping street in Portland. The owner was thrilled with the Tea Kettle Characters, and their tags, and even consigned the rest of the tags I had to sell on their own, as refrigerator magnets!

Imagine that. A product tag that is itself a product. I AM happy!