Free Craft materials.

Crafting can be quite an expensive hobby. Papers, toppers, stamps, cards, inks, powders, tools.... the list goes on.
I find when I buy papers for instance that I like the look of a few designs then find it difficult to use the rest of a pack. My stash grows but I still need more:)
With the advent of digital papers we don't need so much stuff, but it can still be expensive to buy the disc and it often has quite a lot of stuff we won't use.

In all the stash I have today I couldn't quite find what I wanted, so I made my own by photographing things in the house. Firstly, I had some silk I had dyed in shades of lavender and turquoise, then some jacquard fabric. Several shots later and I had another idea. I had made a flower from silk ribbon. I thought it would make a lovely topper but it would make a card quite expensive to add it directly, so I photographed that too, then photographed it on the silk.

For simplicity I used Picassa to edit the photos, increasing the brightness and softening the focus. These are just one click operations so really easy. Cutting out one of the flowers and layering it over the one on the silk gave a nice effect and I could envisage a design forming.

The last picture shows the basic card which will have a greeting added. It's not quite there - I think the flower motif is too central top to bottom to work really well, but the process definitely works.
So there we have it - free background papers and toppers and it is completely unique.



What do you think? Do you do anything similar?