How to Make Focus Paper for Scrapbooking

Video Transcript

"Hi, I’m Shelly Cordsen with expertvillage.com. We’ve just completed a 6x6 scrapbook, brag book, gift book, whatever you want to call it. But now I’m going to show you in case you just don’t have that perfect piece of paper or say you specifically need it for a baby gift and you don’t have any focal paper that even resembles being a baby, so I’m going to show you how to make your own focus paper through stamping. Okay we’re going to do some stamping and when stamps are pretty common but they’re becoming a thing of the past and now we have acrylic and in the acrylic you have a different set of blocks and you just have a collection of blocks and your stamps now become this compact. There’s like 35 stamps on here, now can you imagine having 35 of these in a drawer when you can have them all right here and your different size blocks. So we’re going to do a baby theme here and I’m going to find, I actually got a nephew that was just born. So I’m going to take a stamp here that says, “It’s A Boy” and because it’s acrylic I can put it on this block and I can stretch it, twist it, turn it and I’m going to make it kind of curvy, then I’m going to find this little boy face and I’m going to stick it right in the center there. So I now have the stamp that I’m going to use and what’s nice about acrylic is you can see right through it and you know exactly where to stamp. So I’m going to use this color called bris and I’m just going to start stamping, “It’s A Boy.” Now a rule of the thumb, we’ve got to fill this whole paper as we kind of work in triangles, so I’ve got one here, I’m going to do one here. To form a triangle I got to come about down here, twist it anyway you want, now we have two here, I’m going to throw in one there, so you’re kind of working in a triangle format but just kind of sporadic, it does kind of gets them evenly so here I’ve got to form a triangle. Now I want to switch stamps because I want a lot of color, kind of wipe that off, now I can take that off, but I’m not going to take the time right now. I’m going to pull off another stamp off my rubber cover here and put it on the back side, I kind of put it in the corner where I can kind of see through it and I’m going to go with this real pretty green up here and I’m going to start filling in. And see I can still see through there, the stamp, what’s nice about acrylic you can also see that your stamp is inked all the way, so you start filling things in. What makes it nice, of course I didn’t print scrap paper, is to make your image go partly off your paper. Now we’re just going to continue changing stamps and we’re going to fill this whole thing up and in the end we hope to have a page like that."