My personal challenge for January is to have a stash ban and survive by crafting from my storecupboard. Several of us on the Money Saving Expert forum are having a stash ban. I thought I’d have a go at writing some tutorials as there are a couple of newbies who might find them useful. Hopefully the Top Tip Tuesday team will be ok with the tip being a bit long 😉
Today I’m using a technique that I think I saw on Split Coast Stampers with a couple of adaptations. I deliberately made a lot of my Christmas cards with matching papers so that I could utilise the scraps.
This is a post with lots of my bulk Christmas makes!
1. Get your scraps together! Take a big sticker (I get A4 sticker sheets from Poundland) or some scrap paper and cover it with spray adhesive.
2. Sort out the scraps into matching patters. Since I used the same size cards and papers when making my Christmas cards I had lots of scraps of the same size. I wanted to use the pieces cut from my background mats which were all about 1cm wide.
3. Choose 3 patterns that contrasetd well to use. Lined them up on your sticker. In my case green, red, holly…ad nauseum or until I ran out of paper or sticker!!
4. Place on paper trimmer so that the parallel papers are running at ninety degrees to the blade.
5. Cut equal size strips. Since my strips of paper were 1cm wide I cut 1cm strips!
6. Have a play and decide on a repeated pattern to use.Here are a couple of the ones I tried.
7. Take another piece of sticker and put the strips onto it in your chosen pattern.
8. Trim the ends. Keep for another project (keep an eye out for them on my blog this month as I try and use up my scraps!)
9. You should now have a backgound paper which is useable instead of lots of scraps in the bin!! In fact these are large enough for me to cut in half and use on my cards.
So here are a couple of the cards I made using this technique. The die cuts are from Lili of the valley and I highlighted them with stickles.
Thanks for reading!
I would like to enter the cards for the following challenges
Top tip Tuesday- anything goes
Phindys place challenge- scraps
If the shoe fits scrap it- use your stash
52 Christmas card throwdown- anything goes
Delicious Doodles challenge- anything goes
Card crafters circle- anything goes
The secret crafter saturday challenge- anything goes
One stop craft challenge-Winter wishes