Why spoil a perfectly good ruler?
A couple of weeks ago I found a spare plastic 12-inch ruler and knew I would put it to good use, having seen a really good YouTube video recently. This person had taken her ruler out into the garden and deliberately damaged the edge of it against a brick wall, rendering it useless as a drawing instrument – after all, apart from measuring things, rulers are jolly useful for drawing straight lines with, aren’t they. What she was doing was creating an edge for tearing paper and creating an attractive deckle edge.
Rather than venturing into the garden and trying to find a suitable rough edge, I got out a few needle files and proceeded to ruin my ruler. I deliberately chose the centimetre side because I rarely use that, and I can still use the inch side to draw a straight line! I tried to make the nicks in the ruler as random as possible, and used files of different profiles. When I had finished, I sanded it o get rid of any rough bits. It’s a bit scratched but it doesn’t matter what it looks like.
Here are some experimental tears done with it – paper on the left, card on the right.
The two little bumps on the right side of the paper strip were where I didn’t press down firmly enough on the ruler. You have to keep the pressure up as you tear the paper in order to get a good edge.
The card gives a better result because it doesn’t seem to stretch so much along the edge, but the torn off piece seems to be better than the edge of the larger piece for some reason. Anyway, I think the results are fine, and this is going to be a useful tool to produce an interesting deckle edge on papers. You can spend a lot of money on a dedicated deckle edge paper trimmer, and this cheap DIY ruin-your-own ruler solution is probably just as good!
More on this a bit later.
Never let a good bit of scrap paper go to waste
I was dying to try out my new spray inks now the storage unit was complete. When I made the labels for the unit, I had to remove them from their original backing sheet and stick them temporarily (they are repositionable) onto a piece of scrap paper, further apart so that when I inked them, the inking would not contaminate the adjacent labels. Once the labels were peeled off and installed on the unit, I was left with these multi-coloured sheets with white squares where the labels had been.
Far too pretty to throw out. The inky patch at the bottom of the left hand sheet is where I cleaned off the blending tool. All these were Distress Oxide ink pads.
I spritzed them well with water. The one on the left changed more than the other one. I got some interesting runs and drips.
It was a shame that this was just scrap printer paper – there is typing on the back of them, and the paper is pretty thin and not very robust for adding a lot of water, but it held up pretty well even if it ended up quite wrinkled.
I got out a sheet of card from which I’d cut a series of swirls several years ago for another project, and used it as a stencil. In my splat box I sprayed the bottom section with Peacock Feathers Distress Oxide spray.
I masked this off with a piece of scrap paper and sprayed the other half through my new Tim Holtz stencil, this time using Old Paper and Dried Marigold Oxide sprays.
This didn’t show up so well.
I continued, using another Tim Holtz stencil, and blotting off the excess inks onto scrap paper, and these are the papers I ended up with.
The final step was to try spattering them with the nozzle from the Picket Fence Distress Stain spray, which came out better than expected.
This is a blotted off piece. Lurvely and grungey.
This piece was definitely the least interesting, but useable for something, I am sure. Amazing how different things can look if you cut or tear them up, add more ink, and use them in different settings.
This is the piece I used to mask the paper, with a blotted off stencil on it – I really like this one!
The DIY stencil left after cutting out the swirls all those years ago, now more interesting with the top being sprayed with Peacock Feathers on top of the brown!
Teabag mini-album redux
After several weeks not working on this project, I was keen to get back to it. The construction of the ink storage unit took a lot longer than I’d anticipated, and although it was creative in its own way, it was more of a DIY project than art.
I had sprayed a teabag with Peacock Feathers Oxide through my Tim Holtz swirls stencil as an experiment, and intended using it in the second teabag mini-album but thought the colour was a bit bright. Putting it in my splat box…
I sprayed it with some Frayed Burlap Oxide. Better – more grungey, more subtle.
I wanted this teabag to go across the the double-page spread at the centre of the signature, so set it aside in order to work on the previous page first. I chose a Chocolate Baroque background stamp and used Hickory Smoke Oxide, and absolutely loved the result! It is great stamping without an acrylic block to give a more random effect at the edges.
I selected a teabag with a faint bleached image on it and stuck it down with soft matte gel medium, and trimmed off the edges. The red thing is a clip holding the page down for the photo.
I think this needs a focal point and I will probably add another butterfly.
Returning to my swirly teabag, I selected a couple of my spray experiments on the scrap paper and tore strips using my new deckle ruler.
With their edges inked with Vintage Photo Distress Ink, and stuck down with the teabag on top, this forms the centrefold of the final signature of the book.
I wanted to emphasise the swirls so laid the stencil over the background and drew through it with a grey archival pen, taking the pattern onto the upper deckle strip.
I felt it needed a bit more pink to tie it in with the deckle strip, so painted on some Victorian Velvet Distress Ink with a fine brush.
I took these photos with my phone, forgetting what trouble I had had editing photos of previous pages. I had discovered that my Panasonic Lumix camera was better for the subtle colours of these teabag mini-albums as you can alter the white balance. Once this album is complete, I shall photograph all the pages with that camera and hopefully get the colours a bit more accurate, but in the meantime this gives a pretty good idea of how it is going to turn out.
It was a delight to get back in the studio again today and simply play… experimenting with my new inks, and making progress on the second of the two smaller teabag albums.
