Print Your Own Paper

I think of myself as a paper artist. I love paper. I love to make things out of paper products. I love to print my own tags, paper and embellishments for free when I can. I get most of my printables from the public domain, ebay artists, some from online libraries too. I also use graphic resources readily available to everyone like the line of Dover clip art from the library and vintage prints from The Graphics Fairy. But my favorite all time resource for digital paper is Far Far Hill. The site is no longer being updated and who knows how long it will last but go get them while you can.

This is an older free site where you can download packs of patterns and print out your own paper - if you have the time and patience to put up with their download provider's time limiting games. I sometimes just make a day of it and I have quite a stunning collection of papers from this site already.

I don't have all of them yet but I'm working on it. The site is no longer active but most of the collection is still there free for the picking.

I have a massive collection that I pull off on dvd for backup when my external hard drives get crowded. Yeah, it's awesome. I can design or print just about anything I want for a project, mostly garden, vintage, old world and nature stuff. I print my papers out full bleed to the edge "no margins" on standard 110 lb card stock and they turn out gorgeous.

I have bags and boxes of pretty printed ephemera ready to use. What I've been doing for quite some time is collecting digital paper to print. I have bought paper stacks before but by the time I use the three or four sheets I really want, a lot of it goes to waste until I can try to think of ways to use it up. I have even printed on the clean side of scrapbooking papers that I did not like so I could at least get some use out of the thicker papers. I still have some older Vera Lim designer papers on disk from when she first started designing paper packs.

When I print my own paper, I get exactly what I want and as many sheets as I want. No waste.

I more recently got sets of Foil Quill pens so I can add foil to anything. I have printed out my own Christmas plaid papers with little gold foil lines running through them and up until recently, you just couldn't make your own stuff like that - you had to buy it commercially made in a crafts store.

I manually add gold foil lines to my plaid Christmas paper with my metal ruler as a guide and they look just as stunning as the store bought papers. You can find all kinds of free resources for plaid digital papers by searching the internet or buy them cheap on Etsy from designers.

I can also add gold foil patterns to any paper using my digital Cricut Foil Quill pens. You don't have to buy expensive foil prints when you can make your own. I love this technology. It levels the playing field for the average person to design, create and make high end graphics and papers of their own. I get exactly what I want with no waste. This is why I print my own papers.

Freehand Foil Quilling

I digitize a lot of graphics that I get in the public domain and in library archives. I love to be able to print them out at will. And I love to add foil to them. Up until recently I just had to re-color the shiny gold with a gold flat color to get them to print.

If you scan in a graphic that has gold or silver foil on it already, it will show as black most of the time. I just change the color in my graphic program to a flat yellow gold or a light grey so it would print out right then I would just cover it with glitter to get a little bit of a shine. Now I can actually add gold foil to my graphics and this is how I do it with my Foil Quill pens by WeR Memory Keepers.

Go get some white tissue paper at the Dollar Tree. You get a lot for just one dollar. Lay it over your print and sticky tape it (DSST) to a part of the graphic that you are not going to foil so you can move the foil (shiny side up) between the papers around the edges. I DSST'd the center of this one. Trace the parts you want to foil with a pencil or pen. Then just draw the heat tool right on top of the tracing paper where you drew your lines.

The tool is hot enough to set the foil but not hot enough to burn the paper.

Just foil on the lines with the tip you want - fine, medium, thick or calligraphy. You can see where the tool burnishes the tissue but you can lift the edges and check and see how it looks as you go to fill in the places you might have missed.

Don't remove the tissue until you are finished foiling. Just lift your tissue off the graphic and it should be foiled where you want.

So there are two complete sets of pens, one set for machine foiling and one set for hand (freestyle) foiling.

Now that's foiling freestyle! You can foil anything with these pens. This puts another great tool in your arsenal of crafting goodies so you can make anything and make it look professional!