What Inspires You?

I love patterned papers because they can inspire your design especially when you have no idea what you want to do. Each of these examples can be found on My Scrapbook Pages & Cards link. I love being surrounded by my creations so I have made a decoupaged "C" for my craft room which reminds me to Celebrate Life and Create! My scrapbook page is of my family at Cracker Barrell a few Easter Sundays ago. Because of the paper colors and where the photos were taken I decided to have them printed in sepia tones so the page looks vintage (I especially love the one of my dad playing checkers with his grandson). My cards were all inspired by papers that I had on hand. I have used some great techniques also - embossing with Ultra Thick Embossing Enamel (+ I used colored pencils and watercolor pens on top of the enamel), embossed a stamped design with clear micro beads, and layered both stamped flowers & silk flowers to compliment a patterned paper. For closeups of these cards + more detailed how-tos please go to the link above.

Here is another group of paper crafting ideas that was inspired by a patterned paper that I just bought from My Mind's Eye. I decoupaged the metal tins, stacked them and added some matching duiponi silk ribbon to tie them together. I love the layers on the card and since 2 patterns were not enough I took one of the patterns and stamped a harlequin pattern with coordinating ink and instantly I had 3 different patterns to use. I scraped the edges with a letter opener (you know the ones - the round/oval ones given out as promotions that have a metal cutting blade in the center). After scraping the edges to create a rough edge I then curled the edges to show the other side of the paper which was a solid dark salmon. I used the same paper to mat the stamped images that had been colored with watercolor pencils. For the little gift tag I stamped "Happy Birthday" in a coordinated color on white and then cut out around the sentiment. I used foam squares to adhere it to the polka dot paper so that it is raised slightly. I also needed a little embellishment and wanted to use a heart but I did not have the right color so I used Staz-On Ink (that was close to the salmon color) to ink the edge of a metal heart brad and then used some of the paper to decoupage onto the brad.