Make your own Patterned Paper

I thought I'd show you another experiment with the gelly pens. If you read my blog regularly, you know that I love to make mesh designs using a motif from a Cricut cartridge and the Design Studio software. Many people wanted to know how I make these and we have a new class on Let me Show you How to Do that for Full Page Designs (click the link to go to the LMSYHTDT blog for details on registering).



I tend to take these designs to the limit and sometimes I find that I can't successfully cut a design because it is just too intricate. Sometimes it will cut well but be nearly impossible to lift from the mat. So I thought I could try using the pens to draw one of these extremely intricate meshes.

I started with the element highlighted on the screen shot of the keypad above.



Here is the element in preview (it is one of the "tiny icon" images on the Storybook cartridge so I am sure you couldn't tell what it looked like from the screen shot - I just wanted to show you the key location).



Here is a screen shot of the preview - you can see how dense it is!



I loaded up the mat with pale green paper and put the dark green gelly pen in the holder. Once again, I don't really understand how the software directs the cutting/drawing process - first the outline is drawn and then the design is filled in but there is some skipping around until the design is complete. This one took a long time to finish - but it finished!



Here is the final drawing on the mat - there were just a few tiny spots where the line was not continuous but they will be easy to fill in. I certainly would not want to try to lift a cut of this design from the mat!



Here is a close view of the drawing. I have created a simple piece of custom patterned paper. I have a plan in mind for this paper, however, you will have to wait a day or two to see what I am going to do with it since I am away from home and my Cricuts (no room in the car to bring one along!).

If you want to see some other gelly pen projects you can click HERE for the prior posts about these pens.

Here is a link to the US site where you can purchase a set of pens and the holder:

Scrappy-Go-Lucky


What a hot and muggy day it was today - we had some torrential rain (catching the edges of a near hurricane). It took a long time to get the car loaded for the trip to NJ and we were all dripping! The trip went smoothly and we are relaxing at my sister's house before the college move-in tomorrow.