handmade recycled paper.

Hello.

Last week [or maybe the week before last] I was at home and running my card ideas by my mum.

Always a great idea to do this because if your mum is anything like mine, you will come away with infinite new ideas & inspiration.

Which I totally did.

One of those ideas was instead of buying water colour paper to make my cards out of [which was ending up way way too expensive] why not make the paper.

Brilliant! Because what I really wanted out of my paper was for it to be a little bit rough and full of texture and looking like a sketch page... 

So after much time in-between that was filled with lots of other stuff to do [which I wasn't too happy about - I just wanted to try it!] I finally got around to making some! 

We used to make the stuff as kids and had a bit of a kit so I used that and some scrap paper I had laying around  [I'm thinking I might be able to source free scrap from college.. they just chuck it anyway - that means FREE paper :)]

Here's a look see at how it turned out [I should have taken process photos.. next time]

I only made 2 pieces to start as I wasn't sure how it would print/look/work but I am totally happy with it [apart from the creasing - not sure where that came from ;) and the dimensions of the sheet of paper are a bit different to my design so I just have to adjust that]. 

I want to also experiment with different fabrics in the middle of the paper making sandwich instead of the standard fly screen stuff... so instead of the squares I can get a linen effect or similar.

The other great thing about homemade paper is you can do any colour, any texture, any additions [such as perfume, cotton, leaves, glitter etc] that you wish and that goes with you're design.. Awesome..!

And of course, you just can't beat free!!

I'm trying to think up of a name for my cards too.. like 'such & such' by Flashbox Creative.

So any ideas are welcome!!