DIY WASHI TAPES – SOME NEW ONES
Repeating patterns in Krita
I have been working in Krita, the open-source photo editor on my Linux laptop, creating some more washi tapes. There is a useful facility for taking a single image and making it into a pattern, which is ideal when one wants to make a washi tape with a repeating design.
From a single motif, I was able to fill a page with repeating pattern. This was from a sticker in the Graphics Fairy Premium Membership site bundle “Tattered Paper Treasures.”
I printed it on washi paper (53 gsm) and then cut it vertically between the motifs. Many of the downloadable themed bundles from this site include washi tapes but they are usually made up from composite images from the bundle and I am not so keen on those. I shall continue to take individual elements and create custom washi tapes from that resource.
Other patterns
I found it impossible to create very narrow stripes in Krita. You need to be able to view the whole canvas in order to draw the lines from top to bottom, and when zoomed out to allow this, you cannot place the lines accurately against the top ruler as it is too small. This was very frustrating. In the end, I managed to find some free images of striped patterns online to download and was able to use these as the starting images for creating repeating patterns.
I will be able to cut these sheets of narrow stripes into half-inch strips (or wider as required) – washi tapes with stripes running parallel to their length. I haven’t printed these out yet.
Tiles
Repeating tile patterns are a good source for washi tape making. I found lots of images of blue and white tiles and created sheets of strips of them. For this, I used my old desktop publisher, Serif PagePlus, on the studio HP laptop that is still running Windows 11 but disconnected from the Internet.
This is the sheet I created from the tiles in the above image. I arranged them in a strip, reducing the size to fit on the page, and then copied and pasted this strip across the page to fill it. I cut between the strips of tiles to create the washi tapes.
Today’s printing and cutting
I printed a selection of strips, some on the washi paper and some on card.
I am still getting accustomed to how the printer behaves with Linux, and my first prints came out in black and white, when I was sure I had set it for colour! It didn’t matter, though, because the black and white ones can be used as-is, or with added colour.
The flowers at the top (by Tracie Fox) were printed on washi paper as they were part of the same image as the striped washi tapes second from the left (by Crafty by Toni). I decided to leave them as strips as they can be used in this way, or cut into individual flowers if I want for a project. The same applies to Art House Whimsy’s “Perfectly Imperfect Butterflies” on the left.
To the right of Toni’s washi tapes are the narrow film strips created by Margareth of SevenPlaza as part of her “Vintage Photo” collection of downloadable digitals. Some black and white, and some coloured.
This is a good collection of tapes to be going on with. I have yet to put them in my new page protector storage system.
