Papertrey Ink Make it Monday Challenge #181

Whew…this has been quite the unexpected week. I’m a little behind but I did get some card-making done this weekend. My main project was creating baby shower invitations for my best friend’s upcoming shower but I also had time to sneak in a few cards for the Papertrey Ink Make it Monday Challenge: Paper Casting. I actually completed the paper casting part of the challenge a week ago but didn’t have time to do anything more with it until today.

Paper casting was a fun technique and one I’ve never tried. It requires stamps (or dies), a roll of toilet paper, water, and dry towels or paper towels…weird, I know. But here’s the basic idea, you mount a stamp on an acrylic block and turn it upside down (so the stamped image is facing up). Then you stack several layers of toilet paper (I used 7) on top of the image and thoroughly wet the paper. When the toilet paper is soaked through use your fingers to firmly press the paper down around the image. Use a dry towel or stack of paper towels to soak up the excess water then carefully peel the toilet paper off the stamp and let it dry. When it’s completely dry the toilet paper holds the shape of the stamp and the layers have compacted to form a thicker paper.

I started off by following the video tutorial and using the Beautiful Butterflies set; however, after a few tries I decided that I wanted to try to add color to the paper. Trial and error produced some interesting (and some very NOT successful) results but I finally found a technique that worked for me. I took the stamp and stamped it with dried marigold and picked raspberry distress ink making sure to let them overlap in the middle. I spritzed the stamp with water until the ink was beading on the surface of the stamp. Then I lightly spritzed the layers of toilet paper before placing them, wet side down, on top of the stamp. If you place dry toilet paper over the stamp you get a much more defined edge (which I did with a later card). After pressing out the excess water I let it dry completely. I used the Wet Paint die cuts for the tag sentiment. I cut them in pink card stock and then went over the sentiment with a clear wink of stella glitter pen. I used pink and peach ribbon and silver thread to create the different tags. Finally I used some precut tags from Michael’s to accommodate the larger Birthday Trio dies and butterflies. These aren’t super stiff tags so you’d want to be careful with how you used them but they’ll be really pretty on a gift box!

For my first card I took one of the butterflies and carefully peeled the layers apart. The different layers created a beautiful ombre effect.

For the base I used an embossing folder to create the raised dots. I curled silver thread along the length of the card and then used mini glue dots to attach the center of each butterfly to the card. Finally I embellished the card with sparkling clear Pretty Posh Sequins in 4, 6, and 8mm sizes and then attached the piece to a lighter pink cardstock.

For the last card I followed the same technique with distress inks but I used the markers so I could apply the color a little more carefully. Then I used dry toilet paper so that the edge between the colors was a little more defined and the colors were brighter. I used the Avery Elle Finished Frames die to get the neat design around the edge of the card. Then I used a sentiment from the Happy Trails stamp set and embossed it with platinum embossing powder. Finally I attached the butterfly with mini glue dots.

I really enjoyed this technique…I actually have a whole stack of dried Christmas-y paper cast images that I’m hoping to play with later this week!