Happy Valentine's Day to all my Sweethearts!

A week or so ago when Paul was sick and needed entertaining, we made paper to use for Valentine's Day. The heart at the top was cut out of that paper and used to make Ben's Valentine's card. This is a fun project since it's so easy, requiring only the skills of tearing paper and tissue and painting with a mixture of glue and water.

First you hunt up some pieces of plain muslin fabric.....finding them is the hardest part for me. You cut or tear them into whatever manageable size you want; I used 11x14". Then you find some white tissue paper like you use in gift boxes and tear that into strips whatever size you want. Mix up equal parts of white glue and water and paint that over the strips onto the muslin. Think about what color scheme you might want...like red and pink if you're making paper for Valentines....and find some scrapbook paper, tissue paper, printouts of images on computer paper, and other interesting papers, and tear them into strips and pieces. Put down a layer of those and paint the glue over it. You can build up layers until you like what you have or get tired of the process. But you want all the muslin covered, preferably with several layers of glued down paper. You can spray on colored paints or stamp on bits of color paint. We sprayed on some red paint but when it came out in dots instead of a nice even spray we smoothed it out by rubbing it with paper towels. We also stamped on some pretty gold paint with a makeup sponge. And we used some paper that we had previously stamped with red hearts; that made a nice effect.

When you're done, the muslin based pieces might curl up like you see in the second picture, and they probably will look wet and messy and unpromising. Not to worry. Just let them dry and then iron them out flat. Since there's so much glue, I covered my craft table with plastic sheeting and then lined that with freezer paper. As the glued pieces dried, I flipped them over, wiping up the glue residue before setting the pieces back down again. It took about two days for them to dry completely. When I ironed them, I used my Teflon applique sheet just in case anything on the "paper" came off in the ironing process. It got pretty hot, so after the paper flattened out a bit, I removed the Teflon sheet and used paper towels as the barrier.

Once you have a flat piece of paper, you can cut it into shapes to apply to cards or use in whatever way you want. The result is unique and pretty and the process is easy and fun, and is good to do with kids, if they can handle "painting" with the glue/water mix.

This technique is described in detail by Kelli Perkins in her article "The Paper Quilt; Quilt, Collage, and Painting in One" in the May/June 2007 issue of "Cloth Paper Scissors" magazine.