Down on Bourbon Street

Mardi Gras is tomorrow - or technically, it ends tomorrow after beginning on 12th night.

Carnival is an important celebration in most of Europe, except in Ireland and the United Kingdom where the festival is called "shrovetide" ending on Shrove Tuesday, and pancakes are the tradition.

Jay, from Heartbeatz Creationz is from the UK, so needless to say, she doesn't have a Mardi Gras kit out, but I felt her Grunge Love kit would actually do well as a Mardi Gras kit and I wasn't mistaken. The colors are largely right, you just need to add in some green and gold.



I recolored some of the elements to give us the green and added gold glitter to the rub on for the gold, so about the only thing added was the name and the word art. The Scripted Jewels alpha is a freebie from Bizee 1 Digi-Arts.

The Illustrated Lady is from Perfect Posers. She's one of the posers that Photobucket had problems with, so I've moved her over to my private server. I also set my account to private, as I think someone has been going through and reporting images they don't like. I don't think that Photobucket has the time to go through each album one by one to see that they comply to their TOS.



Needless to say, Mardi Gras is a bit more fun than Pancake Tuesday. The "mask" element was a CU freebie from Kissed by Pix, recolored gold. The word art template was also a freebie. Part of the problem with stashing things on my private server is I don't get to tag or leave notes, so I don't know off hand who I got it from, only that I got it off Digi-free.



Also available at Heartbeatz Creationz is the Bourbon Street kit from Created by Jill. I had a lot of fun with this kit, which really does capture the spirit of the New Orleans' Mardi Gras celebrations. The Black Butterfly Fae poser that I used in all three tags is (c) by Lacy Clagg.



If there's a disappointing aspect to this kit, it's the rather plain masks. Mardi Gras has a rich tradition of masquerade, which does not come through with mask elements - as they are - in the kit. However, there are feathers and other elements in the kit that you can use to spruce them up, as I did with this mask.



I used one of Cameron's layer masks to achieve the torn paper effect on this tag. I rather liked what Jill did with her Voodoo Dolls, which are also available separately for Commercial use.