One of my favorite crafting techniques is altering old paper—like sheet music or vintage book paper—with paint and resin. The paint mutes back the printed text on the paper, and the resin adds translucency and sturdiness to thin or delicate paper.
It die-cuts beautifully, too—giving a simple nested heart shape a bit of texture and shine. And, although the color palette I chose isn’t a classic pink-and-red combo, I think these projects work nicely as a Valentine. (Or, for any time of year!) Of course, you can always swap out the colors I picked for something more traditional.
Note: These heart dies are from UniverScrap, a French company. It looks like they no longer have this specific nesting die set, but you can find oodles of nesting heart dies at places like Frantic Stamper.
I’m using two-part resin epoxy from ArtResin. You can find it here, along with basic instructions on measuring and mixing.
First, start with some old, uncoated papers. Book paper is perfect. Glossy paper, like magazines, will not absorb the resin so I suggest leaving that out.
You can coat your book paper with resin right away, using a kitchen sponge—or first apply some acrylic paint, as I did.
The resin will soak through the paper and make it translucent. I wanted to add some more color to the paper first, so I brayered the sheets lightly with Lemon Meringue and Concrete acrylic paints from PaperArtsy. When the paint was dry, I placed the papers on a craft mat and used a kitchen sponge to coat both sides of the paper.
Safety Tip: Wear disposable gloves and have plenty of ventilation when working with resin!
Let the resin dry—with most manufacturers, this will be about 24 hours. Then you can peel the paper off the craft mat and use it for your project. This includes die-cutting!
Die-cut as you normally would any paper.
For this card, I die-cut three hearts from the resin paper and foam-taped them to larger heart shapes.
The papers are from Graphic 45’s Life is Abundant 8″x8″ paper pack. The “I love you” sentiment is a Script Dazzle sticker from Hot Off The Press. (I use these a LOT!)
The other project is a little library card holder, from a package of cards and envelopes I discovered in my stash when cleaning last month. You may have a similar batch in your craft room—if not, google “library cards and envelopes” and you’ll find something like this Etsy result.
One die-cut resin heart is foam-taped to a larger heart, then both are layered with jute twine. The patterned paper is from the Graphic 45 Life is Abundant 8″x8″ paper pack. I die-cut it into a scalloped square and glued it to a slightly larger straight-edge square, then placed them onto the front of the library card envelope. Inside the envelope is the tag, on which I stamped the sentiment from the PaperArtsy Eclectica ESN23 set. (Another oldie but goodie!)
There you have it—easy to do and great fun to give… whether for Valentine’s Day, or just to tell someone you love them!
