Ready-witted Parents: Homemade Design Paper: an illustrated tutorial

Tip of the Day

While we were making cards in the network of our project "Homemade Cards and Gifts", our readers were sharing their tips and ideas with us. For example, reading about this card Nadezhda told us how to make design paper in home environment.

Homemade Design Paper

"Tear soft colour napkins, tissue paper into

small pieces (or as you like) and put them in a bowl .
Pour a little water into the bowl (to get a dense mixture of water and the pieces of napkins) and add some glue.
Cut out a square of the required size from a mesh (for example, from a mosquito screen).
Put the mixture from the bowl onto the mesh with your hands. Spread it carefully about the mesh.
You can also put some threads, leaves or whatever you like to decorate the paper.
Hang the mesh with clothespins for it to get dry.
When the paper has dried up, separate the mesh from it.

You can use design paper for making cards, decorating boxes, etc".

Of course, Soniya and I could not but make such design paper following Nadezhda's instructions. We hadn't got a mesh. So, I was thinking for a long time what to take instead of it and finally found the bags which potatoes and onions are sold in (not the best variant but it is fine for the first try).

We made all the stages of the process together with out little daughter (22 mo old).

We put the mixture onto the mesh which was lying on a plastic tray.

I arranged the tray with the mesh vertically leaning it against the wall (my initial attempt to hang it was not successful as the paper started falling down from the mesh).

Finally we got colourful construction paper (for a thinner result, I guess, we should have made a thinner layer of the wet pieces of napkins on the mesh and also, may be, tear the napkins into smaller pieces). And it's just occurred to me what else one can make from such design (construction) paper (after I've read Jean's article on Easter egg suncatches).

For example, one can cut out Easter eggs from such design construction paper and give them to relatives and friends on Easter or decorate some Easter gifts with them.