Using Paper Napkins to make Embellishments & Paper for Scrapbooking and Cardmaking

[Music] [Music] hey everyone it's karen with yes please paper crafts and in this video i'm going to show you guys how you can take decorative napkins like these and turn them into embellishments and paper that you can use on your scrapbooking and card making projects so a few months ago i posted a video on my channel where i was sharing some items that i had purchased from tuesday mornings and i love tuesday mornings and one of the things i love to look for when i go there are decorative napkins because they have a huge selection at my store and they will often put them on clearance and so when i was there the last time i was able to pick up a couple of different packs of these decorative napkins and i had this one here which has these kind of patriotic images and when i was sharing it in the video i said wouldn't this make cute embellishments for a scrapbook layout and mention that i had a technique that i have used in the past where you can fuse paper napkins to card stock and then use it on all kinds of different projects and so i said well if y'all are interested in finding out more or learning about the technique i will create a video and i had so many people leave comments saying that they wanted to see a video but it just has taken me a little bit of time to kind of get my my everything together to kind of show y'all how to do this project it's been a long time since i've actually done this technique and i i haven't i didn't create this technique it's out there on youtube everywhere there's a lot of people that have videos showing you how to do this and i think the first time i ever saw it was probably about 10 years ago and i saw someone do this in a youtube video and i can't remember whose channel it was but i was using it to make cards and uh doing this technique and using it on cards is super awesome i never really thought too much though about using it for scrapbooking until just recently but um i just got back into scrapbooking probably about three years ago so i was mainly doing card making for probably about 10 or 15 years and then i switched back over to scrapbooking about three years ago and uh but anyway i haven't done this technique in a while and i kind of had to play around with it just to make sure that i could explain it to you in the video but it's a lot of fun and you don't really have to have many supplies to do it probably most of what you need is already in your kitchen and then you just need some decorative napkins and some cardstock and an iron okay so i wanted to kind of talk a little bit about the napkins first and then we'll get into how you actually do the technique to fuse the napkin to your cardstock so when i saw this i thought wouldn't that make cute die cuts and uh so i think that the this would be perfect for that so i decided to go ahead and uh use this napkin and i did some fussy cutting and i'll show you guys what i made okay so these are all the die cuts that came from one of the napkins and some of these are a little bit interesting because my dog bella helped me fussy cut out a few of these so she loves paper and i think a few of them had fallen on the floor and she decided that maybe she would add her own touch there but i think most of these came out pretty good the ones that i actually fussy cut i love these little barbecue sauce bottles and i just thought this was so cute because it has such a retro feel and it's kind of old-fashioned looking and distressed but that's really uh just because that's what the napkin looks like so let me go ahead and open up the napkin here so y'all can kind of look at the entire thing so this is all of the different images that are available on this particular napkin and i was able to take this and fuse it onto a 12x12 cardstock paper and then cut it out okay so some napkins make really good cards and i'm going to show you all one of those so some of the napkins have what i call a repetitive pattern and when you open up the napkin you'll see four different pattern designs repeated over and over again and so this napkin right here would be perfect for making cards because you would be able to make four different cards from this one napkin so i think that's really cool so when you're looking at the napkins you'll see uh some like this which have the repeating pattern and then you might find some like this one here this one has it kind of has a repeating pattern but it can also be used as a design in and of itself because the overall design of it is such that it looks like a cohesive design and you don't have things that look like they're upside down so i was able to take one of these napkins which i think is gorgeous i just love the colors of this napkin and i turned it into a piece of 12x12 scrapbooking paper how awesome is that so this is just the most gorgeous paper and one of the things i love about this technique is that when you fuse the napkin to your paper it makes your paper feel like it's fabric which i think is super awesome so it gives a lot of texture to the paper and i think the colors that you can get are just gorgeous and now one of the things you might notice is that my paper is curling up a little bit and i'm going to talk a little bit more about that when i show you the process and there's a reason why i was having trouble with that it has to do with my iron not working right okay so you can make you can make 12 by 12 paper uh you can make the fronts of cards greeting cards you can make embellishments and die cuts so there's a lot of things that you can do with this technique so one of the other things that i wanted to mention was that i think with scrap picking a lot with scrapbooking is um is kind of capturing memories and recording the story and so i was thinking about it i thought well wouldn't that be cool if you had napkins that were for a special occasion like a wedding or a birthday or the birth of a baby and a lot of times people will have things printed on the napkins it's like custom napkins and i was thinking that would be super awesome if you wanted to incorporate that into your scrapbook layout you could take the napkin and do this technique i don't actually have any napkins like that um at least not any that i have on hand i have had them in the past and i think i have them probably somewhere with my with my memorabilia uh but i did have this one here which just has this foiling on it that says happy birthday i tried this one out just to see how well it would work and it worked perfectly so this is really cool and i think it's kind of neat that you can incorporate napkins like this the ones that are personalized into your scrapbooking using this technique okay so some of the other ones that i have here um i wanted to show y'all when if you have a tuesday mornings close by you and you love napkins y'all need to go and check out their napkins because this is one of the ones i found at tuesday mornings and i think this is the most gorgeous colors isn't this pretty i just love this one now this is one that's repeated four times but i still think that you could use this either in scrapbooking or in a card um four four card and uh so i think that's just gorgeous and then here's another one that i got at tuesday mornings a lot of these did come from tuesday mornings now one of the things i like to do is um i like to use these for entertaining and so i will purchase the napkins and then i will take out maybe 5 or 10 of the napkin depending on how well i like the pattern and i will put it with my crafting items and then i will just use the rest of it in my kitchen when i entertain this is another one that i found at tuesday mornings i just think it's so pretty and uh this one's kind of interesting because it's almost like a it's like a repeating pattern but it's a repeating pattern this whole pattern down here repeats on the other side over there so i think that's really awesome so depending on the napkins that you purchase um you know it might have an overall pattern a repeating pattern that's just twice or a repeating pattern that's four times okay so let's talk about the supplies you need to make this project you're going to need some parchment paper and also some plastic wrap and you can use either the cling wrap like i have here or you could also use the press and seal so any plastic wrap no matter what the brand is should work and you're also going to need an iron or a heat press and you're going to need an iron that gets very hot because you're going to be using the iron on the linen setting or the highest setting that you have on your iron okay so the parchment paper you could possibly get away with not using that if you're using an iron that you don't care about but if you're using your good iron you definitely want to use the parchment paper because it protects your iron from getting any of the plastic wrap on it okay so the first thing that we're going to need to do is to choose the napkin that we want to work with and then we're going to need to figure out how many layers of the napkin there are so that we can peel all the layers until we get to just the layer that has the printing because you you want only one layer when you're doing this otherwise the napkin is not going to stick to your cardstock okay so let me go ahead and show you one where i thought i had it down to the last layer and i didn't and i'm going to show you what it looks like okay so here is the napkin that i was working with and i had this napkin peeled down to i thought was the last layer and then i realized when once i pressed it down and fused it together that just the layer the underneath layer stuck down to the cardstock and the napkin just peeled right off so you do want to make sure that you get all of these extra layers off of the napkin before you try to fuse it to your cardstock now one of the things that i think is very interesting about napkins is that they come in what's called a two ply or a three ply at least i think that's all the different ones that they have and when you look at the packaging for the napkin it should actually be listed on there how many pie it is and i never really knew what that was until i watched that youtube video 10 years ago when the person explained that the different plies are the layers of napkin so this napkin here which is just a basic pink napkin is a three ply napkin and what that means is that there's three layers there's two under layers and then the top layer and so if you have a three ply napkin you're going to need to peel off two layers before you get to the actual top layer and if you have a two ply napkin you would only need to peel off one layer so that's kind of important to know now if you have napkins and you have no idea of how many uh layers there are then you can just uh just keep trying to peel the layers off until you get one that looks very transparent it should look almost see-through like this where you don't really have any white or color showing through okay so let me go ahead and pick out one of these napkins which one should we do um let's go with this one here because i think it's so pretty let's go ahead and see if we can use this one and i keep doing this with my arm because my iron turns itself off and i just want to make sure that the iron stays hot uh while i'm doing this video okay so i'm going to show y'all a trick uh that um i kind of uh learned from someone watch i watch somebody's big video her name is i believe it's ingrid blackburn i'll put a link to ingrid's channel in the description below and i hope i said her name correctly but basically if you look at the back of a napkin you will see all of this embossing and it's usually around the edge of the napkin and so um if you try to just sit here and try to peel this napkin apart um it might take you a while to get that apart but she shared a trick that i thought was so clever and what you're going to do is you're going to just rub your finger over the embossing and you can also use your bone folder or embossing tool or anything that you have but you just want to rub your finger over it and be gentle because the napkin is very delicate and it can tear but you're just going to rub over the neck can and kind of break apart that embossing so you can see the difference between the place where i i haven't pressed in and rubbed over the embossing and this corner where i have kind of rubbed out all of that embossing that embossing is what holds the layers together so if you take away the embossing then the napkin should just come right apart just like this isn't that awesome i just think that's so cool okay so um one of the things you'll notice here is that i actually have a three layer napkin you can see this is one layer and then there is a second layer here just kind of giving me it's actually separated but i'm just having trouble with my hands here getting it getting a hold of it um what i like to do is don't really try to pull both of these layers off because you you have a bigger chance of tearing your napkin you really want to tear this one off first and it should come off fairly easily and then work on pulling away the second one now um you want to be very careful and you can see there's a lot more resistance in these two layers and if you're having trouble peeling this apart you can just rub your finger over any area where it's kind of sticking together and it should come apart much easier but just be really gentle with it and just be very slow and just take your time and you can just peel off that layer all right so now that we have our napkin here i'm going to grab my ironing board and we're going to go ahead and fuse this napkin onto some cardstock okay so i have my portable ironing board here this is just one of those little mini ironing boards you hang over the back of a door and uh i have some parchment paper and this parchment paper i have been using over and over and over again so the parchment paper you can just keep using it and you don't have to throw it away every time eventually if it gets really worn or it has a lot of uh adhesive on it and it may be sticking to your project you can go ahead and get yourself some new parchment but you don't have to replace the parchment paper for each napkin that you fuse okay so the other thing we're going to need to do besides having our napkin we're going to need to cut a piece of the plastic wrap a little bit bigger than the napkin so what i like to do is i like to to make the plastic wrap bigger because it's going to shrink up and if you make the plastic wrap exactly the same size or slightly smaller than your napkin the edge of the napkin is not going to get fused down to your cardstock okay so the first step for me is i like to iron the napkin first because i like to get these creases out of the napkin and sometimes if you do the fusing at the same time as ironing out the creases um the glue kind of binds the creases together and so you know it just stays wrinkled so if you want to get the creases out of the napkin you can go ahead and just iron it a little bit first and it doesn't have to be perfect and this one in particular i'm not really sure i would use this all as one piece you especially want to iron your napkin if you're going to use this as one sheet of paper okay so i'm going to be using the present seal just because this to me is a little bit quicker than using the plastic wrap and it could just be the brand that i have but this plastic wrap takes longer to melt than my press and seal and so i'm just going to go ahead and use this press and seal and i just think it works a little bit better at least for me but um either the cling wrap or the present seal could work just as well so i'm just gonna eyeball this and make sure i have enough there and we shall cut this off [Music] okay i think the most challenging part of this entire project is trying to get the plastic the size you need especially if you have to cut it with the scissors because it's kind of a pain other than that this is a pretty easy project to do okay so now i need a piece of card stock and um one of the things that i have been doing you could use uh cardstock or you could use patterned paper uh pretty much any paper you could use to but i was using up some white really thin white card stock that i had um just left over i think from some album so you know how you get a less expensive scrapbook album like the hot buy albums from michael's it comes with a piece of white card stock inside of each of the plastic sleeves and that white card stock is super flimsy and i don't ever use that for scrapbooking but i use it to do other things like making patterns or just a scrap paper so i have this paper here and that i've just been collecting over the years and you can see that it's a very very flimsy white card stock and it's very cheap so i was using this and i have quite a bit of it so i could continue to use that but i had this idea when i was uh using a napkin i thought well a lot of my paper like single-sided paper has a white background i wonder if i could just use a piece of white paper or pattern paper and just use the back of it so i have a stack of what i call my ugly paper it's like paper i've had for probably 20 years a lot of it is just really old and it's kind of uh you know deteriorated and it's also out of fashion i think it's funny that scrapbooking kind of follows the same as fashion and home decor things go out of style and it looks old-fashioned it looks old okay so i have a piece of ugly paper here isn't that the most ugliest paper you ever saw i don't know one time i was making a video and i pulled out a piece of paper and i called it my ugly paper and one of my friends got she kind of got a little bit mad at me and she left me a comment says i just use that on the scrapbook layout and i like that paper so i guess i have to be careful what i call ugly but anyway so the back of this paper is white and it's just a very um you know lightweight paper so we're going to use this paper we're going to turn it into a beautiful paper so the back of the paper is white we're going to put our cling wrap down and i like to put the sticky side of the cling wrap down because it just makes it a little bit easier because it sticks to the cardstock or paper that you're going to be using and you'll notice that i don't get all the wrinkles out you don't have to get all the wrinkles out and you can just leave those wrinkles here to smooth it out as best you can and then you're going to take your napkin and you're just going to put the napkin there so that it is surrounded by the adhesive now i do i probably if i was doing this and i wasn't making the video i would probably cut off a little bit more of this but that would take me some time with the scissors it's kind of hard to do so i'm just going to leave it on there it's not going to hurt anything because i'm going to have the parchment paper to protect my iron okay so you're kind of making a sandwich and we're making all of the different layers so we have our cardstock we have our plastic wrap then we have our paper napkin okay and we're going to take two pieces of parchment paper we're going to lay this out over one of the pieces of parchment paper and then we're going to put the other one on top okay so now that we have our sandwich complete and the next step that you're going to do is just take your iron and you're just going to lightly press over this entire area and then you might be asking me karen window i know it's done [Laughter] well that's just going to depend on a lot of different things it's going to depend on your plastic wrap it's going to depend on how hot your iron is and i don't know it just depends but you're going to know when it's fused and you can keep checking it so as you go along you can keep checking it and one thing that you do want to be careful of you can just set it and leave it in one spot for a while it's not going to hurt it so look while i'm pressing that let me go ahead and show y'all uh something that happened when i was doing some testing here i'm going to move this down and this is something that you can do and maybe play games on your phone or watch tv because it will it can get a little bit boring to sit here and just you know you know sit here with the iron and fuse this but you'll notice here i tried to do this happy birthday napkin and i had uh it all laid out and it was all flat and i didn't have any creases or wrinkles in it and then when i was moving the iron back and forth i managed to wrinkle the the napkin and then it just stuck there like that and so it created those wrinkles so you do want to be careful especially when you get started that you don't accidentally cause the creases in your napkin okay so we're just going to keep moving it around and you can go ahead and check it so how you check it is you just go ahead and lift this up and just see if the edge of it lifts up or if there's any places where it's not adhered and you can see here that i still have places over here where it's still not stuck down you can see that but over here it's completely stuck down okay so we're going to put this back on top and we will just work on this corner up here and we'll see if we can get that to get glued down okay so while that's getting hot there i'm going to show y'all a couple more examples here so here's another paper that i made this is with a floured napkin and uh i haven't trimmed it down yet but you can see here i used an ugly paper on the back and here is the finished paper and my napkin was actually a little bit bigger than the 12 by 12 paper and so i'll just need to trim this down so that it's a 12 by 12 paper isn't that gorgeous though i love this one it's so pretty i think that's going to make a really awesome scrapbook layout i also uh did this one now this is a little bit smaller of a napkin and so it did not create a full 12 by 12 sheet of paper and it kind of has a repeating pattern but it also kind of looks like it could be [Music] one design so i thought that one was really pretty as well okay let me go ahead and check this again and see if it's all stuck down and that's looking pretty good so um i think i think this one is done now if you ever do find that um you have a place where it's not well actually i see this one corner right here if you see that right there it's still not stuck down so let's go ahead and just work on this one corner and then uh that should be good so let's go ahead and put the yarn there in that corner i wanted to also show you guys something that happened with another one that i have here see if i can find it okay so if you look at this one here i was fusing this one together and i was thinking oh it's it's good it's it's fused at the edges but if you notice in the middle it's kind of bubbling up i don't know if you can see that see if i can turn it to the side you can kind of see how it's really not fused here in the middle and then here on the edge it just needs a little bit more time and uh one of the things i definitely recommend is putting your iron on a dry setting and making sure that you don't add any water to it so on my iron here i have this dry setting which i have set on dry but when i was working with the iron i had this reservoir completely full and even though i had my iron in the dry setting it was pouring steam out of it and so i was getting a lot of curling with my paper my paper was curling up and so that's one thing that you want to make sure that you uh that you uh do is to turn your iron on a dry setting now one of the other things i wanted to mention is is if you're having trouble with a napkin bonding and you're really careful you can just put the iron right in the middle where it's not touching any of the plastic and it does get a little bit more heat because you're not going through the parchment paper but this has a lot of adhesive around it so i'm going to go ahead and use my parchment paper and we'll go ahead and you know fuse this one together a little bit better okay so while i'm doing this i thought it might be fun to do a little bit of a secret giveaway in this video and so i have a collection uh quite a few napkins i'd like to share those with you guys so i'm going to pick one winner from this video if you would like to leave me a comment with the word napkin i will randomly pick one winner and i will send them one or two of each one of the napkins that i have and uh i think that would be fun to share this with you guys so if you want to try this technique and you don't have a lot of napkins and you would like to have some go ahead and leave me a comment so in order to enter this giveaway you will have to be in the us and have an address in the united states you'll need to be 18 years or older and also be a subscriber to this channel and then just go ahead and leave me a comment with the word napkin and then um i was also going to say i'll probably leave the giveaway open for a couple weeks so i will pick a winner let's see um let's pick a winner on january the 10th that'll be a good day i'll just take that day out the top of my head so i'm gonna have to add that to my calendar make sure i remember to pick the winner um but i have probably about 30 different napkins so it'll be quite a few that i'll be sending out right i'm trying to think if there's anything else that i wanted to share with you guys but yeah this is a really easy project to do and it's really a lot of fun and i think you can make some really gorgeous paper and embellishments with this oh that was a thing i wanted to share with you okay so i wanted to try something i have this solid pink napkin and it's this one right here and i thought it would be really fun to use this one and make little mini bows because you can make paper bows but i thought it would be kind of fun to see if i made bows with this if it would feel like fabric if it would look like fabric and so i pulled this napkin apart and it comes apart in three layers uh well i fused the first layer onto the cardstock and it was such a light pink the color of this napkin comes from the fact that there's three layers of pink and so what i ended up doing was i fused on the first layer then i added more plastic wrap i fused on a second layer i added more plastic wrap and then i fused on the third layer so that i got the exact same color as this napkin so that if you're going to be using a solid color napkin you're probably going to have to fuse more layers if all of your layers are colors if your layers are white then it's probably you know not going to matter if you don't include those but you do want to include any that have pink okay or the color and let me show you all the bows that i made with that they are so cute okay so here's the paper so i made this paper this paper almost feels like velvet it's super cool this is just a white card stock and then i fused three layers of that pink napkin to this white cardstock and this was the original napkin so you can see i did get the exact color of the napkin by fusing all three of the layers and then i created these bows look at how gorgeous that is and i don't know if y'all can see this on the camera how pretty this is but it feels like velvet and it's just super cool a little bit of something on there but super pretty and then here's one that i made out of a another die that i have and i'll probably put like a little gem or a pearl in the middle but it did make a bow that feels just like fabrics i thought that was super cool okay so that's all i have and i hope you enjoyed this tutorial and if you did please give it a like because it helps me to know what types of videos you all like to watch and if you would like to see more videos please subscribe i would love to have you join my channel i also have a short video clip of my two dogs bella and lilly bell at the end of this video if you all want to stick around for that but that's all i have so make sure to leave your comment with the word napkin to get entered into the giveaway and i hope you all have an awesome week so you all take care i hope to see you next time bye now hi miss ben what you doing you look so cute with your little red bow you're all ready for christmas you look like a little christmas present uh-huh can you be my christmas present can you be my mama's christmas present you'd make an awesome present no you're not a present you're a dog you're a yorkie yeah you're a yorkie uh-huh can you tell everybody in the youtube world merry christmas you said hi but can you say merry christmas you don't know how know you could do it come on say some merry christmas you did it awesome you are awesome uh-huh you're so sweet you're going to come over here louisville and talk to me miss let it go hi little bell what you doing are you gonna be mama's christmas present too because you got a little red bow i'm so happy i got your hair cut because i can see your little face i didn't know how much i missed y'all's little faces until i got your hair cut y'all look adorable well you do you look adorable y'all got anything else you would like to say to the youtube people i guess not hi miss lady [Music] look at that sweet face you have a sweet face too miss bella yes you do y'all are super sweet and i love you [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Yes Please Papercrafts

Views: 2,437

Rating: 4.9478259 out of 5

Keywords: PaperCrafts, Yes Please PaperCrafts, Yes Please, YesPleasePaperCrafts, Karen Yagel, Scrapbooking, PaperCrafting, Scrapbook Paper, Cardmaking, Paper Napkins, Fusing Paper Napkins, Fusing Napkins, Scrapbooking Ephemera

Id: bVXb9oD9Uy0

Length: 34min 41sec (2081 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 30 2020