Using Printed Digital Paper

Today, my friend Debbie Seyer from the Spellbinders Design Team posted two beautiful cards that she made using the damask paper from my Inauguration Digital Paper Pack. The cards were fabulous examples of using digital scrapbook paper on paper cards – true hybrid paper crafting!

As Debbie mentioned, printing and using digital scrapbook papers can be super addictive, and there are literally thousands of free papers and embellishments out there in the blogosphere, just waiting to be found. My favorite spot to find them is the Digifree Search engine, an automated search blog that gathers up all the freebies you can imagine and lists them in one place. They update daily, or very close to it. Here are a few tips for printing digital paper:

• Use cardstock: the better quality cardstock you use, the better your paper will look. Most printers have settings that will allow you to print on heavy or thick paper.
• Set your printer quality to “best.” Otherwise, your paper may come out looking dull and less vibrant than on your monitor.
• Be careful not to resize it, unless you mean to. Depending on how you print, some applications will automatically resize things to fit them on a page. With 12×12 papers, they won’t fit onto an 8.5×11″ piece of paper, but if you let the computer automatically resize it, you may end up with something different than you intended, ie REALLY tiny little damask ornaments. Make sure that whatever application you use to print, you do so at 100% of the original pattern size.
• When I’m printing a number of papers or an entire layout, I opt for full size prints using 13×19 Matte Photo Paper from HP. I’ve yet to find 8.5×11″ paper that I’m crazy about. I sometimes use the Wal-mart stuff (Georgia Pacific) but I’m going to try some Neenah Solar white later. I’ll let y’all know how it goes.

Here’s a hybrid project that I did using the same damask paper that Debbie used. As with my last post, this was also a Design Team entry project. I loved putting all the separate little elements into this. It was a blast!

Supplies:

Damask Paper: Inauguration Paper Pack

Red Mulberry paper

Red, cream, white, black cardstock

Green patterned paper: Making Memories

Arrow patterned paper: Scenic Route

Circles, watch face, charm, symbology, doodle dies: Spellbinders

Stamps: K&Company, Stampin’ Up, Spellbinders

Black Paint

Inks, ribbon, staples, jump rings, brad

old sewing pattern

baseball card protector, cut up

Thank you again to Jennifer Furlotte at Pixels & Ice Cream for the original damask pattern that I used to create the red damask paper. She does great work.