Posts tagged ‘paper’

Last year at Zero Landfill I grabbed a ton of stuff. I’ve used at least half of it, but there are a good deal of items which have just been stuffed into the stash box.

This year I took a different strategy to the event. I only grabbed stuff that I ran out of last time. So I picked up 4 wallpaper sample books and some loose fabric swatches. They weighed my grub on my way out. It was a whopping 38 pounds!

These books are going to be free for your use in decorating a journal if you show up on Thursday to my class. Otherwise I will be cutting them up for all sorts of crafts, as will my scissor-happy girls!

I have lots of cardboard record cases left over from the record bowls I made for Christmas gifts.  Some of the pictures on the cases are really fun, so I needed a way to reuse them.  I decided to make them into file folders. Read more »

Come Saturday to Craft Akron’s Holiday Open House for free make & takes and some handmade gift shopping.  I’m teaching these tags for one of the free crafts.

The background papers are just small leftover papers from larger projects, and the flower & tree are made from pages of an old song book.  The “Happy Birthday” & “Merry Christmas” are stamped.

Each year I have plans to make an Advent Calendar with my kids, but it never happens. But when I checked my email this week I found an advent themed edition of Kids Craft Weekly and I found new inspiration to make it happen. There are some really cute projects that use recycled paper items, like toilet paper tubes. But the one that I like the most is the origami paper advent box which from Loobylu.

This might be just the right sized project for me to complete this weekend. Just in time for the first Sunday in Advent.

For my grandpa’s birthday I whipped up a quickie card made mostly from recycled paper in this old song book.

I stamped “happy birthday” and used a circle punch to cut it out and a smaller circle punch with the treble clefs.  I glued these to a gray paper background to make a border.  The hat is folded from scrapbook paper…it’s just a mini version of the hats typically made from newspaper.  The background is a page from the song book.

I first discovered Iris Folding through a library book.   It took a long time to understand the instructions, but I figured it out and made tons of Christmas Tree cards that year!  Iris Folding has a learning curve, and after that, each project still takes awhile.  For that reason I make fewer greeting cards and more frame-worthy projects.  Plus, after learning the traditional methods I decided to be less rigid with my style.  I prefer more random color patterns & less calculated placements of each paper, and I don’t care for the “Iris” shape in the center.  Plus, for this project I’m using paint chip samples, which if I folded them, they’d be way too thick!  So, this project is inspired by Iris Folding, but if you’d like to see the original methods, I recommend the book 460 Iris Folded Cards to Make: The Complete Iris Folded Compendium.  And for more images & inspiration, check out the Flickr Iris Folding Handmade Cards Group.

Here are instructions to make this tree, along with a free original pattern.

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Much of the time when I’m stamping I emboss my images.  Embossing makes the image stand out by raising it and making it shiny.  There are a few different approaches to embossing & some different products you can try (such as clear or colored powders and white or colored stamp pads, plus we’ll discuss whether to use pigment or dye based inks).  But the basic idea is you stamp your image on paper with ink, sprinkle embossing powder & remove the excess, then use a heat tool to melt the powder.  So here goes…

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For a friend’s bridal shower gift I’m making her a stack of thank you cards.  The best part is I managed to use entirely scrap paper except for one full sheet of the background paper on the far right card (I kept the label but can’t locate it in my pile of paper right now…will look later.)    I also used a thank you stamp, ink, clear embossing powder, zig-zag scissors, a sewing machine to stitch white thread around the perimeter, glue, tape runner, and my favorite paper rose (a trace & cut template called Fold-It Swirls.)

Here’s a “Cookies In A Jar” I put together for a birthday gift.  I used pressed leaves for the recipe instructions card & lid decor.  I can’t find the recipe I actually used (this is a photo from my archives) but here are a couple good recipes:

M & M’s Cookie Mix, Oatmeal Chip Cookie Mix, Hershey’s Cookies, and Sand Art Brownies.

Plus, here’s an article on how to make your strata layers look their best.

I really enjoyed our class on Friday night at Nervous Dog Coffee. The women who came out to learn how to bind journals were a really cool mix of people. Everyone came ready to work and get sticky (Jenn!). We also came to chat. I really felt like I’d had a girls’ night out after it was over.

Here are some shots of the class sorting through wallpaper sample books to find their cover papers. I wish that I had been able to take some pictures during class time, but unfortuantely Colleen couldn’t be there and so I couldn’t step away.

Baby B #3 is due in a month, so I’ll be on maternity leave (from myself and Colleen, if that counts!) for a few weeks afterwards. But I hope to teach the class again in December. Everyone who came remarked on how gift-able this craft is and I want to give everyone another chance to learn it before the Holidays.

There were a few people who mentioned wanting to take the class, but not living close enough or having to work that night. I thought I’d ask if anyone would be interested in buying the instructional booklet in pdf form to print at home? If you are interested it will be offered on a limited time basis for $7. Let me know in the comments if you’re interested and I’ll email you an invoice through paypal and then I’ll email you the pdf.