How to Make Beautiful Ribbons of Paper! ! In the Junk Journal! Paper Outpost!

Hello everybody it's Pam at the Paper Outpost and today I opened a little drawer I haven't opened in a long time. It's a snippet drawer and I have a combination of material snippets and also like fabric snippets. But I also have this these paper snippets which I I really haven't done much with. I've used them occasionally in journals but I thought maybe we could work on some fun ways and easy ways to amp them up a little bit. So these were made pretty pretty simply. Basically I just ruffled some paper and ran it through the sewing machine with the zigzag stitch. This is just plain white leftover paper. A whole bunch of it just here's some coffee dyed paper. I just sewed papers together and so I've got these rolls and let's see I think there's um I think that's a pin to hold it together. Back in the day when I was organized. Now it looks like here I ruffled and then put down a piece of paper and then sewed it. This was with a straight stitch. So I've got some stuff here to work with. So let's just do some fun and easy ways that you can amp up what you have already. And let's see if I have another. Maybe at the end of this I'll show you how I make one of these just so you if you have never made one you can easily make one. Okay and I think I can show you a with and without sewing method to do that. So first let's just jazz these up. Here's a very basic one. Why don't we start with that one? Okay so here's just ruffled paper sewn together acting as a snippet and so what can you do with a snippet? You can use it as a page trim. You could make it cut them apart and use them as journal tag toppers. So if you didn't have material or thread you could just put one of these up there. It's already ruffled you could do that. You could put it down a spine if you wanted to and you could you know do 101 million decorations with embellishments with them. So let's try this. This is a sanding sponge or a sanding block and this. So right now the edge is very sharp. Okay maybe we'll bring this in for an alternative. I thought maybe what we could do is just rough it up a little bit. The idea is to make it look a little bit more vintage. A little bit more worn out. Not so perfect on the edges. All right and you can sand paper. Yes yes you can. And I think I've already shown you the trick if your journal pages don't quite fit in your junk journal. Let's say a bunch of them are sticking out at the top. You can come along and sand them so they sit down lower. What I would do is open up your journal, hold your block of paper, your signature page like that and you get in here and you sand. And it gives it this nice suede like feeling. And you can also do it on this side and I won't do it here because I've already placed page tabs. And you can also do it on the bottom. So a little tip there if your pages aren't exactly even there are ways around that. All right so let's just we'll do a section softening it up a little bit. It does give it that suede like finish. That suede like feel which is kind of cool. Just like it does in the signatures. Okay I'll do this section here. So I hope your day is dandy and you're doing well. All right there so I've roughed that up a little. Let's see this looks more clean. This is like a little rumplier. Okay and then what I might like to do is take some brown ink of any color will do. I'm gonna get my brown dauber, down tusty dauber. Give it an old rub-a-dub and just kind of ink the edges of this. And that's going to make it really pop. And when you sand the sides of paper it makes it very feathery and porous and it grabs the ink really easily. If you use distress oxide ink it grabs it even more easily because there's just more to play with and oxiding everything. Because I prefer it over the regular but I have a ton of both. So I'm just going to use what I got for everything. Okay so so let's say I have this now. Now we've got something that looks like that as opposed to just the white strip. And you can use both. Nothing wrong with that but this just gives an alternative. So that would be I would say stage one. And then if I want to level it up a little bit more I can actually run my dauber right down this and just knock the whiteness out of it and give it a little bit more color. Okay so now I've got something that I gotta be careful I don't get this on everything. I had a piece of parchment paper to work on here. And let's see if I can find that paper. So now it's going to look something like that. It takes on a new look to it. Then if you want to level it up even a little bit more you could bring different colors in. So let's uh maybe we'll bring in some yellow and maybe some blue. How about that or how about this wild honey color too. Let's see if I've got some daubers that match in this. I cleaned out my dauber door so it's not so it's easy to close. Very happy about that. Had to make some tough decisions in life. Which daubers to keep which ones to retire. Um let's go with I'm going to go from darkest to lightest. So I'm going to try the blue next. Here's my blue dauber. All right and and you can do the edges. You can run it down the center again. However you want to do it. Let me just spread that a little bit. That's just regular water I spritzed on there. And um there we go. Gives it a nice multi-dimensional multi-color kind of look to it. I like that. I think it's really pretty. You can come and do sections if you want. Okay like that. And then you can come in with another color like maybe this wild honey. Whoa look at that right yeah. Okay. Trying to find a dauber that's gonna be. Oh here's something. It looks yellowy. Let's try this. Oh yeah there we go. Okay just every once in a while. And uh old paper weathers and and has little colorations discolorations oddities to it. Um it's picked up stains and smears and smudges from what have you as it went through life. Okay and I think I'm going to need a I'm feeling the need for a baby wipe. So it's actually just a wet wipe but I guess a wet wipe isn't that adult wipe? I don't know. There's baby wipes and then there's wet wipes. Yeah there we go. Okay so we have something like that now which is really pretty. And then um I pulled out a few other things. This was okay we're going into the scary zone now. Um I found. Where is it? Oh here it is. Uh this is icing color in pink. Icing color. Uh what's that say? Wilson. Yeah. All right now this stuff is very concentrated. You don't want to be getting this on stuff you don't want to be getting it on. You know what I mean? So be be careful. Maybe you want to put gloves on. Um maybe you want to wear a hazmat suit. Uh hang on. I have to close my q-tip drawer. Our little stinker bottom gets in there. Okay so I think there's enough in there. So now I think I might be able to. Can I use it directly? Looks like somebody bled on it. Um let me smear it a little bit. Let's not so somebody bled on it. But this is very intense color. Um but let's see maybe we can do something like this. Put a little bit there. Add a little bit of water to it. And make more of a wash as opposed to a flat out dye. So I could literally just roll this across and just give it some pinky pinky color as I'm dragging it through everything. And then blot off. You could blot off if you don't want it so intense. Okay let's see how intense it is. Very intense. Very concentrated. Concentrated. It's gonna last forever. Okay I think I better clean that up for some reason. I just feel like there's going to be. I hope it doesn't soak through. Okay we're good. I'm gonna get rid of that. And I'm gonna close this up because this is super concentrated. Okay so if you're looking for that pink icing color, Okay um yes. So and then you can go multi-color which can look really pretty. Careful it's not on your fingers Pam. In your journal. If you wanted to whoops put that on any page that's going to look really pretty. Um I'll show you what it looks like. On a pink page it looks really pretty. On a white page it looks really great. It just looks like. It looks plum pretty. Okay so there we go. We have that and um now of course we all know. We all know that there are other things you can do. For example you can take rubber stamps and you can rubber stamp on these and that that would be a lot of fun. So let's go ahead and do that. Should I try gray? This is a hickory smoke which is gray. So instead of black. Blackity black black. We'll try hickory smoke gray because I rarely use that one and maybe I should venture off into these other lands of color. So let's try. Hopefully this is going to go well. Usually the first one doesn't go so well. And after that it's pretty good. So they're very faint. Oh you probably can't see it's too far away. All right. And you could just randomly put these down here. This does not add any bulk which is kind of fun. Okay. Just subtle. Um and if I think I do want to crank it up a bit. Where's the black? Okay I'm I'm capitulating to the black. Gotta find it. There it is at the bottom of the stack always. Um let's try this now. See if that stands out more. Yeah I think that's showing up a lot better. All right. So off to the sides. In the middle. Random as we go. It's all good. Yeah. All right. So that that definitely stands out a lot more. Okay. So now you can take it up another level because you're just totally committed to having maximum fun. You could also use Rit dye. I pulled that out. Should I try it? Oh I'm scared. Okay. This is liquid. Now I'm really scared. Let's go get all over the place. Okay. Probably should be. Look how intense that is. Yeah. Rit dye is a great um dyeing medium too. You can put that in a spritzer bottle with like dilute it with water. This is straight up. Let me back it up a bit. Actually let me reorient this here. Okay. And so this is just the process of wait this is like super dark right? Yeah. And these are just dots. There's the randomness of the dottedness of it. So I'm just like heavily decorating it just for fun. How far how far can I take this little piece of paper where it still looks kind of cool and weird and fun and it looks a little bit like bloody dots all over it. It's okay though because I've decided this is a great resource. I mean you're going to get a lot of bang for your buck if you use Rit dye for your dyeing purposes. Just make sure you cover your entire universe in plastic like a shower curtain or something before you start spraying Rit dye all over the place because you you completely color your house. Okay. So now let's take our good old friend. You know who it is. That's right. Liquid pearls, tickles and nouveau drops. Any of these will do. I'm trying to think what I would like to do because I don't want little bloody red dots on my pretty artwork. So I think I'm going to put a contrasting dot in the center. Maybe this color might be nice or white would be too white. I'm just rummaging around the old drawer here. That would be pretty. Maybe this frosty white or this gold. Let me try try them both on different sections and see how it goes. This is nouveau drops in bright gold and this is liquid pearl in white opal. Dimensional pearlescent paint. Okay let's hope it hasn't sealed shut. Okay. Let's try a few little dots here. Oh yeah this one's working friendly. Working friendly. So I'm just putting some random wherever those little I think I did some leaves too but that's okay. So just some to mute it down a little bit. Just a little bit. Now let's try the other color. Let's try the gold and see what that looks like. Plus you could you could co-mingle them. You can because it's what we do. We just have fun with our stuff. There's a little less contrast but still super pretty and just more of like a goldy appearance and this is more like almost what when you mix white and pink. I kind of think of a candy cane or peppermint stick or something like that. So you could definitely tailor these to the holidays if you wanted to use some greens and blues or maybe you're making a pink journal and you just want to have a little extra bling. So this is just plain old paper turned into something really pretty and really cool. Could you see that going down the spine of a journal on the outside? That would be really pretty. So never let lack of a craft supply stop you. So if you have any of these things kind of keep your eyes open for them because you may have fun doing something like that. So let me show you the folding technique and then we'll make one of these without sewing. Okay because basically I just folded these up and then ran it through the sewing machine. But I know a lot of people don't sew and I just want to show you an alternative. So it's pretty easy. Let me just take some strips of paper. They don't even have to be the same size paper. They could just be random. These are just strips from I cut off from my shipping labels. And you can go over here now. All right. And what I do is I just take them and I start doing like a little back fold. See that? Like that. Okay and further another one and you can do these like this. You can also feed these into your sewing machine if you're using the sewing machine. But if you're not using the sewing machine you can still do this technique. It's a pretty easy technique. It's just a fun little trim. Just something you know you've got a bunch of scraps around you don't know what to do with them. Make yourself a little snippet paper roll and you can attach them to each other which is kind of fun. All right so now the longer paper yields a shorter paper. And now to get it to stick without the magic of sewing here's one way to do it. Okay let's see. Hang on I gotta find the thing. Hold on. Okay what you can do is you just take it could be a piece of paper or a piece of twine or fabric or yarn or something decorative like a lace or a trim and you run it down the center like that with first of course glued with some Fabri-Fix glue which glues fabric to fabric fabric to paper and paper with paper. This is my favorite glue. Maybe I'll just use it right out of here. Look at me being bold. I think it's got a smaller schnozzle. Okay I know I know. And just run what looks like somewhat of a straight line. Okay and then affix your chosen string of choice. Like I said it can be paper or fabric. And that is going to hold down all the little pieces which is a quickie and easy way to make a nice little um whoops come back here ruffle without sewing. So just turn this off here. I have these cute little scissors. I always forget I have them. Aren't they cute? They're like faux antique scissors. They're just cute. They're just so cute. Okay make me feel like a Victorian seamstress. Um so now we have the basic structure of the snippet in question and here's the one we decorated so you can see for comparison purposes. And now really it's just a matter of us decorating it. So I guess with the first one I did a little bit of sanding of the edges just almost you can't really be too rough on these things. They um you can but uh you can really get in there and sand paper. Don't be shy. Just get in there and rub a dub. Somebody was asking me about the grit on the sand sanding sponges. I think you can get ones that have different grit on all sides or just generic ones or you know just I'm sure firmer grip ones and grit ones and um look I went right through there. So cool. Um softer grit ones and things like that. Okay so now we've softened it up. We're going to come in with our beloved brown. All right maybe we'll do something a little bit different with this one. Okay all right and now the brown again just makes it look a little bit more vintage. And you can come along and add some color. Knocking it down a little bit. Not necessary but totally an option. And this one had pink. Maybe I'll go with blue as a background color. I think I did put some blue in there but I you know what it was the um the colorings that have overtaken that world so that's why it looks more pink and yellow. But okay maybe I'll just focus this one being a little bit more blue on the blue tones in life right. This reminds me of an old map or like a pirate piece or I don't know something expedition like almost. Yeah that's kind of cool. All right so we got those and then maybe just a little bit of yellow and I won't do the pink. How about that? Um so I was using wild honey and I had my little dauber. I probably have enough on here. Let's just see what we have. Um yeah I'm just gonna try and run it down the center. Just give it a little bit of a central hue. Yeah there we go. I'm gonna get something like that. It's kind of cool. So you can see they transform quite quickly. Very very basic supplies. Um you could also use raffia. That's another thing. And it keeps yep that's what happens when you don't wait for your your stickles and your nouveau drops and all that fun stuff to dry. You get that. Okay but here I have some of this colored twine. That's kind of cool. Maybe we can add this in addition too. Like maybe that would look kind of cool on there. Why not? What the heck right? It's only paper and a little fabric today. Move back up a little so you're not making you blind. Um let's see. So I'll make like little train tracks. Going for a different style. Okay and mine mine's got a little bit of a curve in it. But you can make these so they're perfectly straight too. It's just my my inefficient crafting today. Um where'd my pretty little scissors go? Start moving everything and maybe they'll. There they are. Under my inks. Well let's not wait. Let's just go ahead and put this down because the glue waits for no one. There we go. All right and then we can always snip these off with the edges. There we go. Reorient that little guy and get him on there. Now let's say maybe you don't want to use stickles or something this time. Maybe you want to do something different like maybe buttons. Okay so I got a handful of little buttons. I'll put them down here. Maybe I want to glue them. I could glue them anywhere. Um but maybe what I'm going to do is I'm going to not get anything out of there because that's closed. I'm going to put some places to put buttons. Maybe not. I'm going to follow a pattern. Center, side, side, side, side. Okay so let's see if I can stay focused here. Okay I have to remember where I put the glue. That's the biggest quandary one. You could do blue buttons or shell buttons. Those are kind of cool. White little shell buttons. One in the middle where that could be like a little gold button or something if you wanted. Pretty. Here's a little blue button for your side. A little white button for you. And what do we got here? A little oh I still got to do side ones. Well let's just do these. Yeah that's kind of cool. And you can put as many or as few as you want. You're going to crust the whole thing or just sparsely do it. It's all good. Okay that's fine. Did I do that right? I don't know. I don't I'm not sure where I put the glue. I can't really see it. I don't have my glasses on. Let's put these guys down here and I think we need a couple more. And you can put different sizes. They don't have to follow any rhyme or reason. Okay so now I have something that looks like this. Okay so now that okay that's a thread. That's okay. If you wanted to put that here. Put that here. Whoops. Come back here. Oh I lost a button. Not that the glue hasn't dried yet. But you could put that at the top of the page. You could make this a pocket. You could even make it a side tab if you wanted. So there's lots of different uses for those little guys. But very fun. So let's see. Okay so if you quickly if you do want to see me sew one I'll try and show you without moving too many things here what that looks like. And if I accidentally click off I'm sorry. It means I accidentally clicked off because I have to move my camera and my sewing machine and I might mess it up. Okay let me move these so they can dry. Okay yeah I feel better about that already. Okay Move that over here. A little green light. Sewing machine over here in the field of view. And let me reorient you. Hold on. Okay let me back you up. Back you up. Way over there. There we go. Okay that little area. And I'll get a strip of paper. A couple strips of paper. Nothing fancy. Here we go. I turn this little guy on. It's my brother Project Runway limited edition. That's the one I've been using forever it seems. So I'm just going to get it. Let me see. There's a way to do. Okay I'm going to do this differently. I'm going to put this feed it in first. Put the little foot ski down. Okay and now you can take this and fold it up and shove it under the feet. Now you have to be careful not to sew yourself. Okay don't sew yourself. I'll use the zigzag stitch. Okay let's see if I got my ends. And as it's going in you can just keep like making a few of these. Pretty easy right? Don't sew yourself. And then when you get there you can just come along and you know you could glue it. But you don't have to because you're sewing yourself. So just kind of go like that and keep going. Oh did I lose it? Nope I'm still there. Everything's okay. Just keep going. Fold. Fold. Fold. Like maybe three. And it's a little fuddly but it can be done. And there's probably better ways to do this if you know better ways. I mean I know there's the if you sew it and then you pull the string somehow you can get it to ruffle. I'm not very good at that. I've done it a couple times successfully and then I sort of forgot how. So that happens. But so with this little guy I mean look how quickly oh you can't see his squat. Look how quickly that came together. Oh I found my regular scissors. There we go. Looking for you. So literally that's how you do it if you're gonna if you're gonna use the sewing machine. It's that easy. And another thing you could do is if you had some pretty lace or trim just basically do this little folding. I don't really measure it. I just sort of eyeball it. I want it to look a little haphazard as part of the vintage look of this. Okay and then you could take this pretty strip of trim. You could glue it on there if you wanted to do something like that. So these are just fun little ideas that you can do. And you could rough up the edges and color this and do all that kind of fun stuff. Now sure I'll do it all over my mat. Why not get my fingers in there and get all dirty. All right there we go. I'm gonna get this on here. Okay I can't tell what side's up. I think it's this side. Is it? Is that the right side or is that the right side? I think it's this way but either way I'm going to put that down there and that just becomes a very pretty little element that I could use on any page. These things are such simple things to do and you can sit there and crank out a whole bunch of these at one sitting. Okay I have nothing to put this on so I'm just going to show you. You could use that as a page topper. Again you could do it as a page tab. You could use it as spine art, cover decoration, so many things. So yeah so these are the little guys that we made today. And then I will get Mr. Snuffles and he will have his moment in the sunshine. Moment in the sunshine with sunshine that's what I should call it. Okay hold on be right back. I found somebody hanging around the ankles. Hello everybody this is Sunshine Junica Pappaporter and I am hovering around the ankles. I'm about ankle height and I'm about the size of a foot. So if you have a um well mom your feet are a little big. So these are I'm a size of mom's foot in its entirety from nose to tail. I am foot size and I'm small but I'm mighty and I would like everybody to know that size doesn't matter it's mightiness. Yes I and I can also be demure. Look how demure I am and then I can be mighty. Yes I take you on guard. Haha yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah. Okay maybe that's pushing it a little bit. Maybe I'm more like somber and cute. Yes this is my somber cute mood. Mom you're having a lot of fun with my ears today. Don't do the rabbit mom. Not the rabbit. Oh yeah. I know. I know. I'm sorry I can't help myself. Um you are like my little sock puppet lamb chop or something. I think so. Um so anyway I know Sunshine that you're having a nice snooze while the rest of us are uh looking for inspiration and um motivation. Um so anything else to snore at us? No I think I pretty much covered it unless you want to do the one up one ear down just for a big finale. There it is folks. Ta-da. Okay that's all I got mom. It's a sleepy day. Can you hear me snoring? I'm looking at y'all. Okay I'm going to sleep now. And and I'm gone. All right everybody enough of that silliness. Get back up and keep crafting. Mom not with the ears. No ears. Mom. Mom. Okay. Cannot help myself. Okay everybody. Um I have Christmas bundles. They are ready. They are full of really cool Christmas items old and new. There's Christmas postcards, stencils, wrapping paper, um uh Christmas postage stamps. There's so many fun and cool things along. It's I would say it's very heavily Christmas weighted with a little bit of everyday play fun as well. Well over a hundred items uh packed to the gills uh and it ships free priority mail shipping to you. Limited supply. Grab yours now while they're still available. And if you don't know I have a free monthly emailed newsletter. You can if you sign up for that you're going to get a free digital image emailed to you every month. A checklist of supplies to keep your eyes open. Free supplies um 500 of them um that you might like to incorporate in your junk journals that maybe you haven't just haven't thought of. It's a great resource. Um also a page list of ideas and a note from the bookmaker which explains what a junk journal is and how to use it. And I like to tuck that in the beginning of my junk journal to explain to folks the recipient what on earth they just received. Yes um you can change the wording the font whatever you like or use it as is with my blessings. Also I've decided to add to my Facebook group the Paper Outpost Facebook group. I do a weekly challenge in there with you guys and um every week there's a new challenge and uh it's always posted in the features at the top if you can find that so you don't have to scroll through the whole thing if you don't want. But you can also look to see what people are posting to see what they did with the challenge which is really cool and inspirational because you guys have the best ideas really. Um uh I'm attaching a free digital image to the weekly challenge so if you're interested in that I guess there's almost about four weeks every month so you're going to get four um uh unique images that you can download and use in your artwork over there if you join us over in the Facebook the Paper Outpost Facebook group page which is different than the Paper Paper Outpost Facebook page. Um so check that out and there's links and stuff down below or you can just go to my master link um which is this link. I found the paper finally because I cleaned up. That will take you to all my links if you can type that in and that's also linked down below on the video. Um and it'll give you a page of hyperlinks too. Newsletter, Etsy shop, Amazon shop, merchandise shop, all those social media links um and the Facebook and the Facebook group page. So also um I have an Etsy shop if you like journals and bundles and kits and funnels I have those available in there. I also sell digi kits which are printable downloadable images all sorts of different kinds based on themes for Victorian birds, butterflies um you name it mushrooms, celestial, postage stamps, book uh tea time um uh yes and if you don't like to print or don't have a printer I offer a printing uh printing service so I will it's called the print and mail option. You just buy the print and mail option and then send me a list of the 10 digi kit names that you want through Etsy message. I only need the first two or three words to know which ones you're talking about and then um I will ship I will print those out on nice lightweight cardstock. You'll get 50 printed pages total and I um free priority mail shipping with that as well. Now if you come over to my merchandise shop it's also linked down below you can check out t-shirts, sweatshirts, zip tooties, mugs totes or water bottles uh with cool phrases like create with reckless abandon or everything is a craft supply until proven otherwise. Okay there's that little guy okay and um what else can I tell you? That's pretty much it so I'm gonna let you go um remember that fun can be simple with just simple things like paper and some buttons and glue and scissors and stuff like that and uh create with reckless abandon everybody I'll see you next time. Bye.