Making Your Scrap Papers Work For You (by Judith)

Hello everyone, I hope that you are keeping well. I have a couple of projects to share with you showcasing some of the retired stamps that we brought to the TV shows on Create and Craft last month. The TV shows were so busy, and if you were watching, you would have seen that we had to change our demos, sometimes in the middle of what we were doing, it certainly made us think on our feet! 

I wanted to share two of the projects that I talked about during the shows, although one you did not see in its completed version, I made a different version on the show due to sellouts of the stamps that I had planned to use.

Often we have bits of card and paper in our scrap boxes that do not seem to go together, a piece of card left over from a crafting session that is blue and purple, and a piece of brown card. Whatever would make them work in a project together? 

I like to mix and match my scraps together, and can easily put these pieces with each other by using toning inks. I used the piece of tea dyed card as the large background, stamping a small worker stamp randomly all over using various shades of blue and purple, then edging the card with a blue ink. I then stamped a large flower three times onto the blue/purple card using purple Versafine Clair ink and clear embossing powder. I cut the flowers out and adhered them to the background, adding a piece of scrap corrugated card underneath the third one to raise it up slightly. I can add a sentiment at a later date when I know what the card will be used for.

My second project was created by taking a piece of greyboard and painting it with white paint. I added torn strips of book paper and then painted the whole piece with acrylic paint. I chose a pretty green paint, and some touches of plum around the edges. The green paint allowed the book pages to still be seen, as it was not completely opaque. I added some stencilling with Plum Archival Ink, and stamped a pretty leafy sprig from one of the retiring stamp sets, Take It or Leaf It.

I chose some patterned papers to stamp and emboss birds from Sing Your Song, Live Out Loud, and Fly Away With Me. I added a bit of colour using Distress Inks and a blending brush to make the papers fit my colour scheme. I also had some left over card from another project, which had originally been blue and green. It did not match my colour scheme, but I had some of the plum paint from this project on my craft mat, so I spritzed it with water, and splattered it over the card, to tone the card in with this project.

A very simple way to get the card to match. I then stamped the sentiment onto a die cut piece of the card, and sponged some of the Plum Archival Ink around the edges. Finally, I attached the birds to the leafy branches, and attached the sentiment to the panel.

Thanks so much for stopping by, I will be back later in the month with more projects to share.

Take care,

Judith xx