Adventures with 'Fabric' Paper.

Hi everybody ! It's Toni here and I've got the pleasure of sharing one of our Inspirational Posts with you and I've chosen to have a little play with 'fabric' paper. There are various methods of making fabric paper and the one I've chosen uses ordinary brown wrapping paper. I chose three types of paper, good quality, cheap 'Poundland 'quality and the type that comes as filler in packaging......

The first thing to do is to screw up the paper. Brown paper is apparently made with cloth. Screwing it up helps to soften the fibres and starts to give it a more fabric-like feel. I then opened out each piece and splodged on some cheap acrylic paints using three colours on each sheet

 This is what I ended up with....

There didn't seem to be much difference between the way the different qualities paper responded. I dried out the sheets of paper and screwed them up again. It's important to dry them out as the papers are more prone to breaking up if they are handled roughly when wet. I then took each piece of paper and smoothed it out before  and stencilling over the surface with metallic paints. The ones I used here are Starlights by Imagination Crafts, they are wonderfully sparkly.

and.......

Once the stencilling was dry, I screwed up the paper again, and then opened it out and swiped a black Archival Inkpad across the raised areas. I dried this with a heat gun. I then smoothed a little metallic wax onto the grey side of a piece of Cut and Dry Foam. I screwed up the paper again nd this time when I opened it up I gently swiped the raised areas with the metallic wax. Here's a closeup........

I was quite amazed how strong each of the papers were. I added a bit more stencilling here and there and and also tried swiping the surface with Versa Mark Ink and adding embossing powders. It's hard to stop once you get going! At this stage, the papers could be used in a number of ways. They would be suited to covering journals or boxes or simply as backgrounds for mixed media. I decided to make a sewn pouch.

 Firstly I used Bondaweb to attach a piece of felt to the back of the fabric paper. If you haven't come accross Bondaweb, It's an adhesive web which is used to bond one piece of fabric to another. It's adhered to the fabric by ironing. Once the felt and fabric paper were fused together, I cut out a simple rectangle  and rounded off one end, using a round dish as a template.......

I then brought up the bottom edge and stitched along the sides to form  the pouch. I used a very close zig zag stitch, with a co-ordinating thread......

Here is the finished pouch, it measures around 7"x 5". I've used a length of machine worked metallic cord as a fastening.........

Hard to believe it's made of brown paper ! Because the fabric paper is bonded to the felt, it feels quite substantial. The great thing is that I've got two more pieces to use up Hmmmm! I feel a journal coming on .......x