Snow Festival Designer Tags Christmas Cards

A set of cards I made with preprinted tags

(Snow Festival Designer Printed Tags)

I received from Stampin' Up! years ago.

They are quite large and double sided.

I punched the ends with a paper punch

the ran Riding Hood Red striped ribbon through them.

The colored background pieces have been dry embossed

with embossing folders and Texturz plates. 

I stamped a greeting with Riding Hood Red ink.

I'm soooo disappointed that I am going to have to throw

this pad away. It developed a really thick gunky layer on the top,

it is useless. I tried squirting it with ink refresher spray,

which worked long enough to ink up a stamp.

I had to do this with each image......

then I discovered after the fact that the ink

didn't dry, it was smearing ! 

I blew my heat gun on them for a few seconds each,

but that didn't work. I had some old paper protector

spray that I tried as a last resort. It seems to be okay now,

but the cards are really smelly from the chemicals in the spray.

I'm hoping they air out - and dry out further! - before I need

to send them in a couple of weeks. 

So much for hoping to make a set of  (fairly) quick and easy cards

with these labels. I should have just used black Memento ink

and ran strips of paper behind rather than go through all of the 

trouble of punching slits and running ribbon. 

Oh well.

I opened the Cherry Cobbler ink thinking I'd use it instead,

it has a gold sheen on it and won't stamp properly.

I don't use those colors very often obviously. 

I guess I'll be searching for blank ink pads to try

to use my refills on - if those are even still good.

Thanks for looking =)