Sheri Says Just Scrap It: Three steps to making your own patterned paper with random stamping

Have you ever had an idea in your head about a specific kind of patterned papers for a project but couldn't find it in the right colours ... or couldn't even find it at all? I think many of us have. This is when I pull out my inks, stamps and paper and use random stamping to customize and create my own.

Random stamping was one of the very first stamping techniques I ever learned, and it's still one of my go-to techniques when I'm creating. It's easy to do and makes a gorgeous result. Here's how.

Start by choosing your stamps, ink and base page. I usually use White Daisy, but you can use a light coloured cardstock too. Here, I'm using Whisper cardstock with the "Lifting Spirits" stamp set and Slate ink.

STEP ONE: Choose your first stamp and start stamping on your cardstock. I recommend you start with your LARGEST stamp. You want to think about creating triangles with your stamps.

Continue on and cover your entire page with the large stamped images, making triangles. Don't forget to go off the edges too. I like to start in the centre of my page and spiral outwards.

STEP TWO: Repeat with the next largest stamp. You can use images or words/phrases too.

STEP THREE: Repeat changing stamps and colours until you have the paper you want. Twist and turn your stamps so that they are not all going in the same direction (unless you want them too, like I did with the clouds). I also used a sponge dauber and some White Daisy pigment ink to embellish my clouds.

Here is the finished papers:

And here is the layout I created, using this customized patterned paper for my base pages.

You will start to develop your own Random Stamping style. Some people like lots of space between images, some people like to keep them tight. You can even overlap images! Take a look!