I'm Distressed! Part 3

Here, in our third installment of "I'm Distressed!", I will be talking about sanding. We're not going to the beach, though. Instead, we're going into the toolbox down in the basement or in the garage and digging out some sandpaper. Sanding is one of the coolest ways to distress your paper - but only if your cardstock has a white core (see last post for that discussion). You can sand a cardstock to your heart's content that is the same color all the way through, but you probably won't see any difference.

In this post, I am going to show you a sort of faux leather technique, coupled with sanding - to really pack a punch! First, let's take a look at a card before we punch it up:

It's cute, right? Well, let's see what a little texture will do for it. First, let's take the gray cardstock background and cut it about 1/2" larger in both directions than we are going to need it. That's because the technique I'm going to show you is going to shrink the cardstock a little. After you've done that, either spritz it with water (both sides) or just run it under the faucet water for a second. You don't want it too wet, or it will rip when you do the next step.

Next, crumple the cardstock up into a ball. You can crumple it a little, or keep uncrumpling it and re-crumpling it until you get as many wrinkles as you want. But be careful - the more you crumple, the more likely it is that your paper will tear.

After you're done crumpling, uncrumple the cardstock and lay it out flat to dry.

Wow, this looks pretty cool already, right? Well, once it's dry, you're going to grab that sandpaper we mentioned earlier and lightly rub it over the surface of the cardstock. Use a medium-grain sandpaper for the best results. A rough grain will just hack up your paper, and we really don't want to do that - we just want to take some of the color away from the raised ridges.

When you're done, your cardstock should look something like this:

Now it's ready for our card! Make sure you trim the piece to the size of the front of your card (depending on how much it shrunk, you may not have to do this at all), and assemble. What a difference!

The added texture adds so much interest to the card, not to mention resembling the actual skin of an elephant! Think how cool this technique would be on a scrapbook page about the mountains or rock climbing! See what cool uses you can come up with - I'd love to see them!

Until next time - Happy Sanding!