Technique of the Week: Stripe Inlay

This technique is from Jennifer McGuire, and I absolutely love it! This is a great way to use up your scraps of paper.

Here is my first card, and I love how it turned out.

I already save strips of paper, but if you don't have any, cut any of your scraps of paper into random width strips.
I especially save strips from my watercolor or Nuance projects. I absolutely do not throw them away, and now I'm very glad to find a great use for them. I sorted through my strips and pulled out all of the blue ones (there were a lot).

To start I got a piece of printer paper (text weight paper) and cut a piece 3.75" x 5". I wanted this to be the size of my panel. I covered one side of the paper with Stick-It adhesive, and pulled the release paper off the back. I set the panel on my table with the sticky side up and started laying the strips onto the sticky paper diagonally, with each strip snugged up the previous. I chose the strips completely at random.

Once the panel was completely covered, I turned it over and trimmed off all of the excess strips from the 3.75" x 5" piece. I took the striped panel and die cut it using 2 dies: Impression Obsession DIE311-R Santa's Sled and Memory Box die 99545 Snowdrift Breeze.

Once the piece was die cut, I covered the back of the panel with score tape. You could also use Stick-It, but I wanted to be sure the adhesive was very strong. The advantage of applying tape to the back is that it stabilizes your die cut piece; and also, when I turned the panel back over to the front, all of the open die cut areas had adhesive in them.

Next, I die cut the 2 dies out of Neenah Solar White 80# cardstock. These pieces are for inlaying into the areas that the blue pieces came out of. This process is not very difficult, and actually goes surprisingly quickly since there is already adhesive in all of the openings.

Once the white pieces had all been inlaid, I added some Stardust Stickles to all of the snowflakes and Santa's hat. I then mounted the panel onto a piece of So Silk Fair Blue cardstock that was cut to 5.25" x 4". The piece was then mounted onto a base card of Neenah Solar white 110# cardstock.

I had so much fun doing this card that I made another one out of pieces saved from Nuance projects that are red, pink, gold and green. I used the Impression Obsession Merry Christmas DIE439-J, and Curious Metallics Super Gold cardstock.

I will make additional cards with the pieces that I cut out of these panels. Check my Backporch blog in a few days for those (link above under "Blogs we love"), or come by the shop and see all of the cards in person. The photos do not actually do them justice.

To see photos of all of the steps making the first card, please visit my blog here.