Home-made scrap wood green greetings cards - stencilled, hand-painted, collage & découpage.

For the past few years we have been making our own ecological greetings cards for Christmas. This not only saves resources and money but it creates a personal gift, which hopefully shows family, friends and neighbours, we took time to create something just for them. From past experience we know that people keep these cards, which being of wood are less ephemeral than the paper varieties and are meant to be hung up and used as small pictures or decorations. By using this method, which combines stencil, hand-painted additions, collage and découpage you can easily produce multiple cards but each design will be individual and thus unique.

As we have rare breed organic poultry and also many beautiful cross-bred chickens, Sue took her inspiration for this year's card 'Chic Chick' from one of the flock but the principle would be the same for whatever you decided to use for your main image.

This is Snowy, suitably named for this time of year, she is a Columbian Cochin bantam and as you can see from above, she has already been used as a model for another of our projects. (This was a wheat-filled hot water bottle alternative, Sue designed, made and named the Snuggly Snowy. You can find how to make it by following the link.)

Materials 

The wood used in these and the other previous year's card designs, which I will share at the end of this blog, is from fruit crates. These come in various woods and qualities but what we are looking for is pine rather than poplar. This latter tends to be thinner and may have already begun to warp in transit. We get our crates from our local organic shop and we sort and store the quality pine for all kinds of wood working projects. You can identify them by the fact that the wood actually feels better quality and you will also see a reddish tinge to the grain.

The paints Sue uses are, for the main colour wash an acrylic water-based varnish. This she tints with a natural earth pigment (if you have never used these before and would like to find out more about them and how to mix them, then we have a post on just that topic here). For the white of the hen's body she used an ecological paint bought from our local natural building store. The rest of the colours were from her watercolour paint box. I'll now leave her to fill in the rest.

You can cut a stencil for the main design from any sort of fairly strong card but if you are going to use it repeatedly, as here, then it is well worth investing in a sheet of oiled stencil paper. I  bought a couple of large sheets years ago and when I have a small item to make as a stencil, I usually end up just trimming a corner off one of my old designs. If you were just to use a plain card to make a stencil and to apply it many times and I had nearly 40 cards to make here, you could end up with at best, a badly defined outline and at worse, a soggy mess!

The rest of the collage items are feathers from a friend's turkey and guinea fowl, bits of decoration, découpage and ribbon, all picked up from a thrift shop and some good old-fashioned jute string.

Finally that inspiration, without which we can never get quite the right feel for any message or expression of sentiment, wonderful old blue black ink and thick writing paper. (The black ink bottle is just the vessel to enable us to dip the fountain pen for refilling)

Tools

A tri-square (or CD case) and a cutting block.  

A saw to cut the fine-grained fruit crate wood,

I find the best options are either a Japanese draw saw (above left) or a tenon saw.

Fine sandpaper to clear up any burrs.

A glue gun if you intend to add collage and découpage elements to the card

A craft knife for cutting stencils.


For the rest, you will need some PVA glue or similar to attach the paper on which to write your greeting, scissors and most importantly one extra item, which in a sense is a tool or rather a useful contrivance if you are intending to use an image such as a chicken, taken from life - something large and juicy they love to eat.

Creating a strong repeatable image

If you are worried about getting the correct proportion and a nice crisp outline, then why not follow in the footsteps of the Impressionists and Pre-Raphaelites and use photography. Nowadays with the computer, we can reinvent the 18th and 19th century silhouette portrait tracing-machine of candles, screen and grid.

Once you have your design you can then photograph it and reduce it down on the screen but for a naive painting, you can just get the gist of the general outline in your mind and thus onto paper.  From this paper template you will now be able to cut your stencil.

As you will deduce from the above photograph, I took this in retrospect, after some 40ish uses of this same stencil. However, as you can see I am only just beginning to lose a little of the definition of my original cut.

Creating and using a stencil brush

The brush I use for stencilling was probably intended for use in stippling effects on a wall, as this is a limited usage, many end up in thrift shops and can easily be converted for stencilling. If you can't find these then an ordinary paint brush used for painting and decorating, given a slight trim, can also be used.

All that is needed to obtain a crisp stencil, is to wrap a good strong elastic band (this one from a bunch of watercress) around the brush. 




When using the above to create a stencil, you will need to work the paint well into the brush and at the same time get rid of any excess moisture which could spoil the outline of the stencil. I have always found that using the paint tin lid or china saucer and tapping the brush into the paint and then just onto the lid/saucer several times before applying the stencil works really well.

Some tips for painting on fruit crate wood

I like to use a broad brush and work with the grain of the wood. I paint one side and the edges and then put the pieces aside to dry, sometimes using the top rail of the wood cooker to speed this up, before painting the other side. 

 


However, because this is thin open-grained wood you can occasionally experience warping, so with the varnish still 'tacky', pile up any problematic pieces and put a weight on them. After a few minutes remove the weight, gently prise apart any pieces that have stuck together and then leave in the air to completely dry. If any slight warping occurs, repeat the process.

 

Creating a unique piece

You are now ready to stencil your image onto the wood,

decorate with additional touches of paint,

thread through your picture 'wire' of string and ribbon,



 

add your collage and découpage,

and append your personal greeting.





Now if you'd like to sit back and watch some films of our previous designs.



If you've enjoyed this article and found it useful please feel free to share it or to comment and/or make observations. All the very best and until next time,

Andy 

© Andy Colley 2014

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Home-made Greetings Cards, Gift Tags & Decorations from repurposed wood.

Easy to source and make cards, gift tags and decorations using repurposed fruit crate wood and scraps of tissue paper, serviettes, tapes, ribbons, string, stickers and all those old flavourless spices at the back of the cupboard! 

Make and give something original and individual. I'm taking this opportunity to say thank-you for reading my blog and hope you'll enjoy this festive project.

Cartes de Noël et cartes de vœux pour le Nouvel An : faites-les vous-même! Des matériaux de récup faciles à trouver pour faire des cartes, étiquettes à cadeaux et décorations en utilisant le bois de cagettes et des morceaux de papier de soie, serviettes, bandes, rubans, cordes, stickers et d'épices. Faire et donner quelque chose d'original et d'individuel.
Je saisis cette occasion pour dire merci de visiter mon blog et j'espère que vous apprécierez ce projet festif.

 
Crear sus propias tarjetas de felicitación. Tarjetas y decoraciones para Navidad y Año Nuevo hechas de madera reutilizados y pedazos de papel, servilletas, cintas, cintas, cuerdas, pegatinas y especias. Marca y dar algo original y personalizado. Estoy tomando esta oportunidad para decir gracias por visitar mi blog y espero que disfruten de este proyecto festivo.

 

Basic Materials, Tools and Cutting the Profiles

  

 

Fruit crates come in various sizes and qualities, some are made of thin pine and some of plywood. Both these can be used in this project but the technique of laying your pattern onto the wood and the tools you use to cut it are different for each sort. You may also come across some made from poplar, I never find these easy to cut but using my home-made guillotine, they make great fire lighters!

When using the thin pine lay your pattern in the sense of the grain. This way you will not risk splitting the wood. 

 

Unless you are lucky enough to be ambidextrous, you may find some of the cuts are difficult to do, so it's a good idea to mark out the profile on both sides of the wood. This way you will be able to cut from both sides.

Use a tenon or back saw to cut the pine, this is fine toothed and will give a cleaner cut.

With the ply I usually square up the ends of the wood first to see how large a piece I have to work with.

Because of the nature of ply, there is no danger of splitting the wood so the pattern can be placed so as to optimise the piece of wood and to save cutting time.

The more interesting pieces with grain or knots I leave to use with the natural decorations such as spices and just cover the tree with a single layer of acrylic varnish.

The ply can be cut easily with a modeling or craft knife and a steel rule as a straight edge to guide the cutting.

The tree can be lightly sanded around the edges with a fine sand paper and then decorated. We started with painting ours with a layer of organic, white, water-based paint. 

Materials for decoration and glues

 

There are all kinds of things to use for decoration. From dried and pressed flowers, herbs and spices to stickers, serviettes, ribbons and tissue papers. For the heavier items and to attach a string to the back of your tree, you will need something like a hot melt glue and glue gun. Something like a PVA glue can be used for lighter items.

For the tissue paper and lighter materials we used a home made glue, which we also use for papier mâché. This is made from flour and water. The recipe and the method for making it is set out below.    

How to make the flour paste:

4 fluid oz/125ml white flour
18 fluid oz/500 ml water

Mix ingredients together in pan until smooth. Place the pan on a medium heat and cook the mixture, stirring continuously until it boils. The mix should be thick and creamy. Boil for 10 seconds, keep stirring, then empty into a glass or plastic container. Leave to cool and lift off skin which forms on top and compost. Cover with a lid and keep in a cool place. If you are keeping the flour paste for any length of time you can add a couple of drops of Essential oil of Tea Tree or Clove to the mix once it is cool.

Some examples of what we made:

and now, if you would like to, sit back and watch the film: 

Thanks for dropping by and please feel free to share this article, comment, ask questions and if you'd like to be assured of getting the next post, then sign up to follow this blog.

All the best, Andy

© Andy Colley 2014

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