Girly Ruffles

Hi Dolly here and a quick post today about making girly pages – you know those pretty pastel pages with the floaty feminine feel.

I scrap little girls a lot –we haven’t got many little boys in the family but we have little girls a plenty.

I want to share a page today which has a couple of techniques which emphasise the feminine feel.

 

 

Obviously the colour is feminine in soft pinks, but looking beyond that there are other things that give the page a softer feel.

The main mats on the page are roughed up at the edges to soften the hard lines.

I find the easiest way to do this without ripping the paper is to damp the edges just with a clean paintbrush and plain old water. Once the edges are softened the paper is easy to bend and roll. The occasional tear doesn’t matter, but you don’t want too many.

I also inked the edges lightly to emphasis the shabbiness.

 

The other thing that I feel really softens a page is the use of stitched ruffles.

To make the ruffles cut strips of patterned paper and beat up the edges first as above. Then you fold it so it looks pleated. Don’t make them too even or regular as you want it to look soft and free flowing.

Once you are happy with how it looks (and you may want to use a couple of dabs of adhesive in places) run it through the sewing machine on a simple running stitch.

Once it is sewn you can then be a little rough with it to give it more of a soft distressed look at the edges and then add it to the page.

The same technique works really well for heritage pages too.

Have fun with creating your ruffles and making those feminine pages.

Comments

[Eleanor]

Ha - well fancy that. I've struggled to stitch ruffles onto a page more thasn once before now and ended up with a battered creased mess. Now why didn't it occur to me to stitch the ruffle first, then glue it on! So much easier, thanks. :)
Beautiful page.
Elx

[jayne]

A Beautiful page i love ruffles too & found a way to make an effect of paper ruffles without sewing... Will have to put a post up about it soon. x
TFS