Whoo-hoo!!! I’m caught up! I finally caught up with Roni’s mini album challenge over on Ink Stains. The next part airs tomorrow, so stay tuned!!
The challenge this week was to use recycled items. The only cardstock allowed was on the collage images, and you could use brads and other embellishments that weren’t recycled. Roni’s background for part 5 used torn pieces of an old book. I decided to deviate a little, and use a technique that was a result of a successful experiment a couple of years ago. Plus, it’s green!
This is what I started with:
This is a brown paper bag from Skyline Chili. If you’ve heard of Cincinnati chili, this is what they’re talking about, but that’s for another post!
I actually had two of these—you can’t tell from the picture, but they are the size of a standard lunch sack. I tore off the printing and threw it away, then took the rest of the bag and tore it into irregular pieces. I then wadded each piece up pretty tight to get some texture, and then pulled out a bunch of ink pads. I unscrunched each piece of paper, and roughly rubbed an ink pad over the high spots. Once I had a bunch of these little pieces of paper, I adhered them to the album’s chipboard base with Mod Podge. After it was dry and the edges were trimmed, this is what I ended up with:
I love the look of this. I used this on a composition book a couple of years ago, and it still looks great!
Here’s the completely decorated spread:
And here are the individual pages:
The flowers are also recycled. I used the new Tim Holtz flower die to cut the flowers out of pages from a phone book. I sprayed them with various ink colors (yes, I finally got some mini-misters!), glued together, then dried with the heat gun. Once they were pretty dry, I sprayed them generously with Wheatfield Glimmer Mist, then dried them again. This time, the paper started to get a little “crisp” but the petals started to curl beautifully. I have to say—so far, this is my very favorite spread!!!
I hope you like it and that you like my distressed paper bag background.
Looking forward to the next installment in Roni’s challenge!!
