Last week it was background papers, but this week our challenge to our design team – and to you, our readers! – is making your own patterned papers. So not just the shy retiring papers that form the backdrop to our photos and patterns, but the patterns themselves. Stamping, drawing, templates and masks and more lend themselves to creating custom patterned papers to work with your photos, themes and colour schemes.
We’d love to see what you come up with this week for this patterned paper challenge. Email your projects to aussiedt@iinet.net.au by midday next Wednesday and we’ll include them in the blog post for a chance to win a prize pack!
Congratulations to Heidi Barclay for winning last week’s challenge. We loved the innovative way she brushed ink all around the Crafter’s Workshop template as well as the inking and misting. Our best wishes go to her and her fellow New Zealanders following the devastating events of this week as well.
It’s been one of Kathie’s goals recently to use more paint and stamping on her layouts. On this gorgeous non-photo page, she’s used text papers, paint, ink, stamps and templates to create a custom background.
To begin, Kathie took a sheet of text paper and washed it with a diluted mix of blue acrylic paint. She then stamped the blue background with a variety of stamps and found objects to create further visual interest. She’s used glasses and laundry rolls to create rings, bubble wrap and a Tim Holtz Dots stamp to create dots, and a Fontwerks Paintlines stamp to create lines.
Swirly vines in dark green paint begin to build up the scene. Kathie created these by sponging dark green paint through a Crafters Workshop template. She also added some fine detail brick pen work, by tracing through another Crafters template with her journaling pen. To finish she added some butterfly and bee rub-ons onto the page.
She now had a perfect garden background to add her floral paper images. Some further fine detail paintwork and pen outlining blend the images into the background.
Nic wanted to create some perfectly grungy looking paper for this layout of her son Alex. While there are some paper ranges out right now that suit the "tween to teen" boy theme, Nic figured she'd get a better match to her vision by creating her own.
She started with the brick wall template from The Crafter's Workshop, lightly colouring the white base using watercolour paints. They weren't particularly fancy paints, just the type that come in a cake palette.
She then created the wonderful variegated coloured, textured and layered patterns by applying these same paints to Stamper's Anonymous stamps by Tim Holtz and stamping them over the painted base. The trick to achieve this look is to avoid being careful. Apply the paints in varying colours and dilution quickly and then stamp. You will never achieve the exact same effect twice and that is the beauty of scrapping this way.
To create the patterns on the kraft background, Nic used stamps and masks by Prima with more watercolours, this time painting the colour directly onto the masks, then quickly flipping them over and using as a stamp.
Jane Clark said that this little BasicGrey 'stamp set was begging to be used for a random patterned background, with the smaller designs fill in the gaps perfectly. Now she has a card suitable for her tea drinking friends!!
Jane picked out co-ordinating inks, in this case she used Tim Holtz Distress Inks. She started with the largest stamp - the teapot, and stamped the cup second. Jane placed the teaspoons in between these images then stamped the small flower and the word 'yum!' where it was needed. A handy hint is to turn the design of the stamp each time you stamp it and make sure the images go off the edges.
For this final card, Jane needed a paper that was colourful but didn't overwhelm her embellishment tag, so she grabbed a Hero Arts woodgrain design stamp and choose colours that complement the tag.
First Jane stamped the woodgrain image four times using different ink pads. The flower is a We R Memory Keepers 2step Flower Stamp with which she first stamped the outlined image over the background in a random pattern, and then stamped the solid matching image over it using a light coloured ink, so it was visible but not dominating.
