Many thanks

The card in my post today is one I am entering into a couple of challenges - the Helping Hudson challenge #9, and the Pink Elephant ribbon and sparkles challenge.



The Helping Hudson colour challenge for this week is to use one colour (as many shades as desired), plus a neutral colour (I just realised that technically I used two - black and white... oops!)

The polka dot paper is my first foray into printing digital papers and I must say, I'm now hooked! I bought this digital paper set from Lilly Bimble on Mygrafico, and recoloured the polka dots paper using PSPX2 to make it suit my needs.

I find it's best to use heavier weight paper than ordinary copy paper to print the pattern onto. I use cartridge paper which is 110 gsm (copy paper is 80gsm so it's just a little bit heavier). I find that it prints better, and doesn't buckle as the ink saturates the paper. My printer is an inkjet but from what I know about laser printers I don't think this would be a problem.

The beauty of printing your own patterned paper is that you only have to print as much as you need for a particular project, and you can have the cake and eat it too (that is, you can use the paper, and print out more when you want to use it.)
I'm sure I'm not the only one guilty of buying beautiful patterned paper and then not wanting to use it because it's soooo beautiful, and it must be kept for a SPECIAL occasion. Well that isn't an issue with digital patterned paper!

And you can't go past the convenience of being able to change the colour to suit your project/colour scheme! How fantastic is that?!

I got started with printing my own paper a short while ago when I was reading a post on Lucy's blog and saw that she was using digital patterned paper and it looked like the bought stuff!
Lucy has some excellent videos on all manner of things digital on this page.

I've just started making the tissue paper flowers featured on this card, and I've taken a couple of photos on how I do it so I'll post a little tutorial tomorrow (edited to add - the tutorial is here). I was going to do it in this post but it became a little bit long-winded with my digital paper ramblings. ;)

Size of card: C6 (top folding)

Supplies:
Card/paper - Quill white cardstock, Cartridge paper (Lilly Bimble Carolina Patterns digital paper from MyGrafico)
Ink - Printer
Extra - Papercraft rubon, ribbon, tissue paper flowers by me (tutorial is here)
Tools - Fiskars paper trimmer, Canon Pixma printer, Helmar tape runner

Challenges: Helping Hudson Colour Challenge 9 / TPE80