Recycled Mini-Album Pages–Circles

I’ve completed another page in my recycled mini-album. For the background I used a piece of kitchen paper which I’d been using for mopping up and cleaning brushes, with a predominantly black and white colour scheme with a touch of blue. I love the randomness of these papers, and also the large scratch sheets I use to work on, cleaning my brushes and rubber stamps on them and generating layers that build up in to unique background sheets.

Here is the black and white kitchen paper. Kitchen paper is 2-ply, and the layers can be pulled apart so you get twice as much for your money!

Here’s another one with a different colour scheme.

Sometimes the paint causes the layers to stick together, and they have to be gently teased apart. Sometimes this is not possible without tearing the paper, but I love the holes that result! It all adds to the texture.

I shall probably be using some of this one in the Recycled Mini-Album too.

Here are some newer pieces of kitchen paper at the beginning of their creative life:

Who knows what they will end up looking like? Top left in the picture are some used baby wipes. They are now dry, of course, but I can still use them for mopping up. They have the added advantage that they do interesting things when heated, shrinking up and eventually breaking into holes, so definitely useful for mixed media projects.

This is the scratch paper I’m creating at the moment – as it was just after I finished my current page. I have been concentrating on circles and swirls. You can generate interesting patterns by thinking about how to move the brush as you clean it, rather than just scrubbing randomly.

There was quite a bit of black and white paint left on the palette at the end of the project, and I lifted this off with a large foam brush and added it to the scratch paper, resulting in this:

I find this all very intriguing and adventurous, and it goes along with my current recycling ethos! Perhaps to be truly recycling, I should use newspaper as my scratch papers… or cardboard packaging? Certainly ideas worth considering.

I also found a couple of background sheets I made several years ago, which may come in for this album too. I can’t remember exactly what I did, but there is definitely some distress embossing powder on them. They were embossed using a Cuttlebug embossing folder (Iron Works). They are wonderfully rough and textured.

However, to return to my Recycled Mini-Album pages, here is the page with the kitchen paper stuck down with regular matt gel medium.

You can see the borders from the larger pages underneath. Laid on the page are some circles cut from silver tissue paper. My hubby brought home some wedding service sheets one day – people always leave them behind and he knows I can often make use of the materials. These sheets had been hand-made by the couple and weren’t anything to write home about, but they had these tissue paper circles glued on not very firmly, so it was easy to pull them off and keep them for future use. I thought they’d fit in well with this page, and they also dictated the theme of the page which is circles.

I lightly distressed the two photos using a combination of Weathered Wood (fast becoming one of my favourites!) and Black Soot Distress Inks. I am finding that the photos seem to be developing a green tinge when I use them in the album – I am not sure what is causing this, but it could be a combination of factors, or maybe some substances reacting against each other. I have to spray the scanned and printed photos with fixative because I have an inkjet printer, and it may be this that is reacting with the gel medium used to adhere the photos to the page, or it may be a reaction between the inkjet ink and any of the products I am using.

I have made a video of the process of creating the page but as usual I am behind with my video editing and the video is not yet ready to be included with this post, but watch this space and it will appear in due course. Here is the completed page. I wasn’t sure to start with whether I liked it, but it’s beginning to grow on me!

In addition to the tissue paper circles, I have created smaller circles using the lid of a pen dipped in silver metallic acrylic paint, and also done some bubble wrap printing using the same paint. Here are the bubble wrap printing blocks I made this afternoon:

The white is the Scotch Quick Dry Adhesive which is still wet. It will dry crystal clear. I stuck the bubble wrap onto some wooden blocks I’d saved from when I unmounted all my wooden block rubber stamps and remounted them on EZ Mount foam. I got this idea watching a Youtube video this afternoon, and it certainly makes the bubble wrap easier to handle. For this project, I just used the smaller one.

The border of the page was done with the same black and white acrylics that I’ve been using for all the page borders. This time I used a circular foam applicator for the larger circles, and stencil brushes for the smaller ones, wrapping an elastic band around the bristles to keep them in a tight circular formation. I tidied up the border with black and white pens afterwards.

As a result of the position of this particular page in the signature, this border will not be visible underneath other pages.