Hand-Made Paper

Whenever I smoosh with my distress ink pads on my craft sheet, I either use a piece of scrap card to mop it up, and save these to make backgrounds with, or if I’m feeling lazy, I just mop it up with paper towels. I am careful to use separate sheets for different colour combinations, and decided when I had enough, I’d start making something with them as the blended colours are so gorgeous.

Tonight I made my first one. This is only two layers thick, and may need building up a bit from behind if it proves too delicate. I first took the sheet with the blue colours on it, and added a bit more distress ink, using all the blues, smooshed and spritzed with water on my craft sheet, so that no white remained. I then laid this out flat, carefully, as it was quite wet, and took another sheet, with mostly purples and bits of green, and again added more distress ink to ensure complete coverage.

This piece I tore into smaller pieces, and gently spread soft matt acrylic gel medium onto the backs, and laid them onto the background, adding more gel medium as I went. When it was covered, I coated the whole surface with the gel medium and sprinkled on some gilding flakes (variegated green, although that doesn’t show up much – they just look gold!) and gently flattened them onto the surface with a large soft paintbrush. I dried it to almost dry with my heat gun, leaving it to dry completely overnight.

I love the result! I think this could be used for different things, according to what you mounted it onto. You could use it to cover three dimensional objects, gradually building up the layers like papier mache. I’m certainly going to use it to cover those small papier mache boxes you can buy – they are so irregular that it’s hard to cover them with ordinary paper. This first sheet was just done to the size of a single sheet of paper towel, but you could build it up into as large a sheet as you wanted, and whatever shape, too.

You could add anything to add texture and interest – bits of thread, leaves, angelina fibres, anything really, covering each layer with gel medium.

You could also use a gloss or semi-gloss gel medium to give a more shiny surface if you wanted.

Watch this space as I make up more of this!