Suitcase Gift Bag

When I saw the new DarkRoom Door Postage Background Stamp I thought of the Sizzix Suitcase die.

I started with cutting out two sets of the dies.

I stamped the postage stamp using a water resistant black ink onto the background.  I added touches of color to the postage stamp using watercolor pencils and a waterbrush.  I sponged the other pieces with black dye ink to get the edges and pieces to pop against the colorful background.

I added a few brass accents to the front.

I then decided to turn this into a gift bag.  I didn't want to create the bag myself and had an "AHA" moment where I ran into the kitchen and pulled out a brown paper lunch bag.

The bag was a bit too long for my purposes so I trimmed it off to fit behind the suitcase without it showing.

The only other trick was to make it lay flat when it wasn't open.  To do that I had to fold the bottom of the bag in half to put another crease in it so it would lay flat.

When you stand it up it looks like this:

To finish off my bag I decided to take some beautiful tissue paper I up-cycled with adding travel related words using the Journey Wordblock Stamp.  I used black water resistant ink on the tissue paper.

Any good traveller has charms and mementos picked up along the way.  I created a few Faux Metal charms to dangle on my suitcase.  I started with applying versamark to white cardstock. I used a gold embossing powder.  I heated it up and repeated until I had a nice thick coat of embossing powder.  I applied Versamark ink to the the Postage mark  from the New York Volume II set and heated up the embossed paper until it was liquid and set the stamp in the embossed surface. Let this cool off for a minute and the stamp will pop right out.  I then cut out the shape. I also took my Journey Wordblock and did the same thing and cut out one of the words to make a longer shaped charm.  I found the word Explore on the Venetian Wordstrip which was mounted on black cardstock and added to the charm collection.

Now I have a great gift bag to give someone who is going off on a Journey. My gift bag can be used for a graduation, retirement or any other journey in life.

Happy Inking.

Suzz