Heart paper tutorial

I did this paper tutorial for I Did it Creations We do it all Wednesdays. It was posted on 2-5-11 but I just haven't had a free day to post it here until today. Enjoy.

Enhancing Paper Tutorial

I took this K & i Memories patterned paper light red on the one side and black on the other.

I was using it for Valentine's card and wanted it to be darker for a bolder look.

I started by inking the edges with Brick Red Distressing ink by Ranger using a Close to my Heart sponge. Sometimes a Ranger blending tool can give too much color and once it's there it's just that. After adding that bit of Brick red I used the same sponge and very lightly added black to the edges since it would be up against the black I thought it would blend the two pieces of paper together nicely.

Next I wanted to make it more for the theme of Valentine so I pulled out my mini letters by Stampin Up and some of them have shapes on the ends of letters, one being a heart. I randomly stamped the heart using Versamark ink on the red circle patterned paper and heat embossed it with white embossing powder by Stampendous using my Marvy embossing heat tool. **One thing to note here is that the Ranger distressing ink does not dry quickly and therefore when I sprinkled the embossing powder on the patterned paper some adhered to that ink on the sides of the red circle patterned paper. I was OK with that since it was going to have a black background but had it been different I may have waited for the Ranger ink to dry or used my heat gun to dry the ink quicker.

After embossing the heart stamps, I took the same sponge from the above step and the Brick red ink and lightly covered the entire piece of patterned paper using small circles to cover the white circles on the patterned paper making them pink. If you would like to add more black to the edges now would be a good time for that. Any black ink will work because at this point you have to wait for the Ranger ink to dry before moving onto the next step. Doing so will make it easier on you.

After the ink has dried you want to reinvent those circles' but with a more artistic flair then they had before. To do so I used my Uni Ball Signo Broad white gel pen around each one. Go around each circle as thin or as thick as you would like to make it your own. One thing to note is the gel pen doesn't go on evenly when the Ranger Distressing ink is still wet so that's why it's important to wait for the ink to dry in the previous step before using your gel pen. For a variation to your project you could use different colors if you had a variety of gel pen colors , which I don't, but you could make the circles multiple colors for a different look or multiple circles within one circle with different colors. But I just have white so here's what the paper looked like finished:

This paper came out in 2007 and I'm sure everyone has paper that old or older in their stash. With a few simple steps you could customize your old paper to a given event, holiday or project in no time at all. Below is the card I made using the "new" paper and one Robyn's Fetish sentiments for Valentine's day.

Supplies: Other patterned papers by Scenic Route (no longer in business): card base and white cardstocks by Recollections from Michaels; ink by Tim Holtz Distressing inks by Ranger and Black Memento ink pad by Tsukineko; heart stamp (retired) by Stampin Up; Black paper and red circle paper by K and i Memories; white gel pen by Uni Ball.