Crafts by Carolyn - Using Your Printer for patterns & embellishments

Using Your Printer - for patterns & embellishments
You can spend a fortune on embellishments and patterned paper, but if you have a printer you can make and download all sorts of items to use for card making and other papercraft projects. And can often make them in a colour to suit your project. These suggestions might help you through, and you don't have to be a computer expert. Don't forget to experiment printing on other surfaces too, such as acetate and vellum. Big thank you to Jackie Okey-Dokey for all her lovely examples that she did for this article. I have put a selection of images on this page to give you more ideas and are bigger images, than shown here. Changing Colours If you want to make an image lighter/darker or black & white and you are not sure how to here is a simple way, if you have some knowledge of MS Word: Open a new page, then go to insert --> picture --> from file, and find the image that you have saved on your PC. Then once there hover over the image and right click with your mouse --> format picture--> picture - then change the 'colour' and play with the slider bars on the contrast. Have a go with the many ideas on here.
Patterned papers There are loads of free papers out there – just have a search around – check out the ones on the site - a complete pack from Kanga is included here or lots that have been added to the site here. Many of the ones I have produced have a lot of 'white' in them, these ones work very well on coloured paper/card to give a different colour intensity. So it is always worth an experiment. Some software will allow you to change the colour of pattern paper, see the tip at the top of the page using Word. Picasa is available for free and will let you play about with colours etc. I have included sample of cards in many of the download pages - have a look.				I made this using the papers that Kanga designed for the site.
Embellishments Print your own embellishments, there are already a selection here..including tickets, text circles and some shapes. A lot of them have been created in Word – using word art or the shapes drawing in Word. So you can change them to your own scheme or even have a go at producing your own. There are so many packages around that can do this type of thing – see what is installed onto your computer and have a play. There are selection of links here that are great fun to play with - tickets, words clouds, number plates Here is a card that Jackie made using the drawing facility in MSWord.				Here is
				Puzzles etc There are loads of puzzles on the internet, some will let you build one with your own words or numbers, ideal for puzzle enthusiasts.