Making My Own Patterned Paper

Happy Friday! The past few days I've been playing with my stamps, inks, and spray stains, inspired by the class Stamps Meet Scrapbook by Altenew.

I'm featuring my third attempt, though I will share the first and second at the end of this post.

First, the color palette and supplies I used:

My eyes just get happy looking at those colors! I started by cutting a sheet of American Crafts textured card stock into 4 6x6 inch pieces, then coloring the non-textured side with Distress spray stains in Tumbled Glass, Spun Sugar, Milled Lavender, and Shaded Lilac.

Next, I gathered my stamps:

First, the background stamps, which are all three from Stampin' Up! many, many years ago.

Second, my focal image and accent stamps, also both from Stampin' Up!, the one on the right being as old as the backgrounds.

Then, I got busy stamping, playing with the images and colors and having fun. I used another stamp set from Technique Tuesday as a larger image, and I used some Distress Oxide inks in some of the same colors to add a different texture to some of my images.

Here are my four patterned papers:

I tried to add some silver ink to each page, but it didn't show up to my liking, so I did some sprinkles of Distress mica spray, the pewter color, and that really finishes off these papers well.

Before these, I did a couple "practice runs," and here are those papers:

The same stamps but a different color scheme, and the inks were Stampin' Up!, rather than Distress, with Heidi Swapp Color Shine in gold.

These are a completely different color scheme, of course, with another old Stampin' Up! stamp set, and I used one stamp (the dot) on all four papers to add a sense of continuity.

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So, the next step will be to use these papers in my memory keeping. I've been really liking 6x6 patterned papers lately, even though I mostly scrapbook in the 12x12 size. I love that I made them myself and used my stamps.

Stamping makes me so happy!

Layout Share - The Last Straw

For this page about Star Wars: The Last Jedi (and my obvious feelings about it), I used a sketch from a class at Big Picture Classes, modified from 8.5x11 to 12x12. Patterned paper scraps provided all of the elements on the page, except the matte for my photo, which I cut from a 6x6 piece of paper. I added lots of embellishments, including a few hand-drawn doodles, and two different puffy sticker fonts form my long title.

Sometimes, my scrapbook pages don't work for me. I'm not going to redo this one, though it's definitely not my favorite. There's something sort of scattered about my execution of this design, which I've used on other pages I like a lot better than this one. Then again, the movie itself was scattered, as were my feelings about it, so perhaps the page works on a deeper level, even though I don't find it visually appealing.

You win some, you lose some, but this story is told, and I'm ready to move on.

Coming up: my plans for the month of June!