Lucy Edmondson: Packaging Materials Tutorial

When the chance came up to do a tutorial using recycled packaging materials I jumped at it! After all, I can hardly cross my craft room floor without the popping sound of bubble wrap under foot! Hope you will be pleased to hear too, that today's project is quite cheap and you are likely to have the materials lying around - sorry, I mean neatly tidied away somewhere!

I have called my wall hanging, 'The Sun breaks through the Clouds':-

These are the packaging materials you will need, and a yellow padded envelope would be useful too, but yellow cardstock will be fine:-

Bubble wrap, clear packaging material, a bottle cap, twine or string, a piece of cardboard box

You will also need:-

An embossing pen, alcohol inks in greens/blues, Distress Embossing Powder in Antique Linen
Pale Blue and White acrylic paints, Crafty Individuals Seaside Background Papers
and their stamps, CI272 and 278

Use other Seaside papers or stamps if you don't have these. I have used a Distress Stain in Vintage Photo but a brown ink pad would be fine, and a round epoxy sticker but you could use Glossy Accents. A copper metallic rub-on, an eyelet setter, and yellow/orange alcohol inks or marker pens, and a one inch circle punch would be useful.

1. Tear the cardboard box into roughly an 8 inch square with jagged edges. Keep some of the scraps for the driftwood later. Leaving approximately a 6 inch square in the middle, lift the top layer off around the edges of the piece to reveal the corrugated layer.

2. Colour with the Distress Stain or a brown ink pad, concentrating on the edges, as the centre will be covered.

3. Add some dry streaks of pale blue paint with your finger, concentrating on the edges.

4. Pick up some white paint on a piece of bubble wrap and 'stamp' it along the top of the piece, and repeat so it overlaps. This will be your clouds. I should have used a bit less of the brown at the top here so that's what I would recommend.

5. Ink up the scraps to use as driftwood on the beach later.

6. Roughly tear a strip of bubble wrap the width of your background paper, i.e. 6 inches, and about two inches deep.

7. Drip different shades of green and blue alcohol ink all over it.

8. Blot it with a piece of glossy card (you will get a lovely piece to use on another project!). Add a touch of white paint with your finger along the top edge of the bubble wrap as this will be the spume on your sea!

9. Stamp, colour, and cut out the bather and the beach huts from CI278.

10. Stamp some shells from CI272 (and the seahorse if you wish) in Jet Black StazOn onto clear packaging material. Turn over and colour from behind with a flesh coloured Pro Marker or similar. Cut out.

11. Take the continuous script paper from the Seaside background paper, determine where you want your beach huts to go and draw a thick line with the embossing pen below them and on their bottom edge and emboss with Distress ep in Antique Linen using a heat gun, and rub off and dispose of the unmelted crystals to give a rough sand-like impression. (Work with a folded sheet of paper beneath you and tip the excess ep back into the pot but not the release crystals).

12. Flatten your bottle cap. You can do this with a hammer or in a Cuttlebug. The sandwich is Plate A, bottle cap flat side down which is important as you don't want it embedded in your A Plate, then any Cuttlebug die on top with the white foam uppermost, then Plate B. Only use new bottle caps as used ones won't flatten properly.

13. Stamp the spiral wording about Ice Cream (from CI278) onto yellow Jiffy Bag or yellow cardstock and punch out with circle hole punch or cut around.

14.Colour your bottle cap with either orange/yellow permanent markers such as Pro Markers or with Alcohol Inks. Glue the circle into the bottle cap and cover with a one inch epoxy bubble sticker (or glossy accents). Cut some matchstick size strips of yellow Jiffy Bag for the sun rays and glue underneath as shown.

15. Adhere the beach huts above the sandy line on your background paper, and then adhere the bather to the left, overlapping the left hand side of the paper as shown. Either rubber stamp a Seagull (CI278) or use a chipboard one, Stamp the wording 'To find a Seashell' and 'Treasures of the Sea' (CI272) in brown as shown. Add the driftwood. Adhere the piece to the centre of the cardboard base and add the sun bottle cap.

16. Glue your shells bottom left on your cardboard piece, using glossy accents or similar.

17. Scrunch the bubble wrap sea slightly as you stick it down to the bottom of the background paper, so it looks wavy and uneven, and has more dimension.

18, Add eyelets at the top, and a piece of knotted twine.

Thanks for looking and I hope you enjoyed it. I certainly had fun and feel like making another one now. Why not have a go!