Makeover Monday- grab some tissue

Hi everyone! How’s your Monday going? It is still Monday, right? Yep. For a few more hours. At least here in PA.

What a day! After numerous errands, a sad little girl who didn’t want to obey, three kids who desperately needed baths after playing in the dirt, cooking dinner, a mountain of laundry, and sharing the computer with hubby, here I am! It will feel good to sink into my bed tonight. But before I do that, I wanted to take some time to share a few things with you. Since today is the first Monday of the month that means it’s time for Makeover Monday!

This month’s Makeover Monday installment is all about tissue paper. You might get it in gifts, or sometimes from new stamp sets (like Papertrey Ink), or even sometimes clothes or other items are wrapped in tissue when you purchase them at the store. Don’t throw it away! It can be used in your paper crafting projects in some fun ways. Of course, if you don’t have any to salvage from the trash can you can find tissue paper in very color of the rainbow everywhere from the Hallmark shop to the grocery store.

Let’s begin with a simple little card I made. I incorporated the tissue by using it in placed of a stamped flower on top of the stamped stems.

After I stamped the leaves and stems I cut a little “V” shaped slit at the top of the stem. Then I crumpled up tiny squares of pink tissue paper and tucked one into each slit to form a flower that I think resembles a tulip. I secured each one on the back with a glue dot before finishing up my card.
You can see a little more of the dimension in this view.

Fun, huh? You could also do this with branch stamps and place the tissue in certain areas around the branch to make it look as if it’s blooming. Or grass, too. That would be fun.

I only had pink and white tissue paper on hand, plus some clothing pattern tissue paper, so that is what I’m using today.
I made several kinds of flowers using tissue. It’s no secret how much I love flowers. I love to make them out of any kind of material I can find. And tissue paper was a fun material to use to make flowers.

First, we have this one.

This one was made using the clothing pattern tissue and a die cut scallop. I made lots of layers and folded them in fourths and eighths and stacked them on top of each other to form this flower. A brad and a gem in the center finish it off. I think one of the most fun things about making your own flower embellishments is choosing how to decorate the center. So many possibilities! Dress it up with gems, casual with a button, brads, circle stickers, beads, etc. etc. I love the way this one turned out in it’s subdued tones.

Then there are the, oh so popular, lollipop flowers. I folded my white tissue paper until I had about eight layers. Then I cut three sizes of circles from the layers. Like this.

My smallest flower was around 2″ and my largest was about 3″. I layered them all on top of each other with the largest ones at the bottom and the smallest at the top, so when you have them all stacked up you should have about 24 layers of tissue paper. Then I poked a hole in the center and attached them all together using a brad. Then the fun begins!
Separate and crumple each layer to make a fluffy and full flower. Then you can either leave as is or spritz it with glimmer mist or a similar product.

I made three flowers and added them to this layout.

That’s my Chloe. She’s so concerned right now about who she will marry when she grows up. Since she can’t marry anyone in her family she can’t imagine who else she’d ever want to marry. Since daddy, her brothers, and her favorite cousin Isaac are out, there just aren’t too many more men left in her world. Hee! The journaling records a recent conversation she had with her daddy on this topic.

Let’s take a closer look at those flowers.

Aren’t they pretty? I think they look like antique roses. The bright pink one on the top is just plain tissue paper. Nothing else. The other two where made from white tissue paper and sprayed with glimmer mist. I used gold mist for the yellowish one and pink bubblegum mist for the lighter pink one.

If you were looking closely you would see that I used tissue paper in two other ways on this page as well. We’ll come back to those in a bit.

Then my mind turned to chipboard and how I could use it with tissue paper. Since I still had flowers on the brain, it IS spring after all, I thought I’d make a unique and different kind of flower. This one was a lot messier and more time consuming, but it’s fun for something different.

I took a chipboard flower shape and layered it with a thick layer of glue. Then I crumpled up tiny squares of the pink tissue paper and smooshed them, for a lack of a better word, into the glue, sometimes using the tip of a scissors to push them into the glue for a few seconds until it took hold. After the chipboard was all covered I trimmed around the edges with a scissors and trimmed any pieces that seemed to stick up too far. Then I stitched a big old fun button to the center. It’s definitely a chunkier and less formal looking flower, but I think it’s cute

There are some tutorials on Splitcoaststampers that use tissue. One is caught crystal or acetate and tissue. Check it out here. The other one is faux silk, and you can see that one here. My next chipboard and tissue project is a lot like the faux silk technique, but without the stamping.

I wanted to layer these snowflakes with my tissue, so I cut pieces of the tissue a little larger than each snowflake, crumpled up the tissue and then flattened it out again so it would be all crinkly. Then I covered my chipboard shapes with mod podge and pressed the tissue onto the chipboard. I love the texture it gave to the chipboard. It’s a great texture for snowflakes.

Take a closer look. I added chunky glitter to mine for a bit of sparkle, but can you see the wrinkles in the tissue paper?

If the snowflakes look like they different shades, they are. That’s because I started with a white chipboard for the large one and a naked chipboard for the small one. The small one also has two layers of tissue. I think both look OK and would work equally well depending on the look you’re going for. you could also try this technique with other colors of tissue and other shapes of chipboard.

Then I though that it would be fun to use this technique to make a background for a scrapbook page. If you looked closely at the page above you may have seen that the background had a bit of texture.
see what I mean?

How cool is that? I simply glued my crinkled tissue paper to a piece of card stock in the same way that I did my snowflakes. I think it kind of lends an old world look and would look super cool all inked up and distressed and stuff.

And the other technique on the scrapbook page? It’s this.

Use tissue to make a pleated border for your page. But don’t stop there. You could gather it and make ruffles too.

There are so many fun things to do with tissue paper that go beyond using it to dress up your gift bags. And there are so many colors to choose from. And not only colors. There are lots of fun printed tissue papers out there as well. They don’t cost very much at all, and if you rescue it from your trash can, it’s even free! You can’t beat free!

So, I hope I’ve inspired you to grab some tissue and get your craft on! If you have any further questions about any technique or product I used here, just ask. I’d be happy to share more detailed instructions on anything i share here on my blog, so please don’t be shy about asking.

Thanks so much for stopping by and joining me for this Makeover Monday edition.
And thank you all so much for your wonderful comments!