Beautimus Repurposing ")

Thanks to Darlene for sharing a great layout and reminding us how to repurpose some of the materials we know we have laying around and in her words...Beautimus!
Deb♥


I have had these same border strips in my stash since the beginning of my scrapping history back in 2008- don’t we all have border strips just laying around? I was inspired by the new strips backgrounds that I have stumbled upon in the blog world, and decided to repurpose my not-my-style border strips to something beautimus. This was my attempt.

I took all of the border strips I could find in my stash and tried to arrange them in a way that flowed well. While in the planning stage of this project, I came up with this zig-zag pattern strips for a sequence of 3 or 4 lines and a straight edged break between the next set of wavy lines, and repeated this pattern to the bottom of a 12x12 sheet of cardstock. Once I had designated where each strip was going to lay, I carefully pulled the strips from off the cardstock and slid them off to the side in the order they would appear.

The next step is to adhere the strips down to the cardstock, making sure to leave some space between each strip. For this step I was not using my head- clearly!- because I ended up using almost an entire refill of tape runner on the cardstock, instead of doing it the easy way and using a glue stick. In any case, the tape runner worked just fine for keeping the strips down. :)

I trimmed the excesses off the edges of my 12x12 paper and that was nearly the effect I wanted, but it was too busy for my own tastes. I took it one step further and I took out some white gesso and white acrylic paints to paint over the entire 12x12 sheet and all the nooks and crannies. I painted in a horizontal and vertical pattern, leaving a slightly color-washed strip background- the colors are very very subtle in real life. I was pleasantly surprised with the finished product. :)

Certainly, you can use this technique on a smaller sized base or just cut the cardstock out into whichever sizes you need for a card, or some other project as well, but I found it to be ideal for a layout as a background.

I decided to keep the design very simple on this to balance the background’s texture. I used a single scrap blue tag laying around, some old chipboard, a bit of tulle, and some fabulous handmade buttons.