Distressing

Distressing is not one of my favorite techniques to use on cards or layouts but I decided that I wanted the computer printed history of this church to look "old" so I used distressing on this layout.

Distressing is actually a very easy technique. For  this today, I used direct ink to paper and tearing to get a distressed look.

Instead of cutting my side paper to mat the computer article on the history of this church, I tore it. I started with a 12 x 12" sheet of patterned paper from the Bashful Blue Designer Series paper pack (#112151). Just using my fingers, I carefully tore the paper at what looked to be about 4" from the edge.

I used one hand to guide my tearing even though it doesn't show that in the picture. When you tear towards you, you get the white edge on the back side of your paper. When you tear away from you, the white edge is on your side of the paper. To get the white edge, you must use paper with a white core. Most patterned papers have the white core.

To ink the white torn edge of the paper, simply rub the paper across your ink pad. I used Marina Mist for this part to coordinate with the colors in the layout.

The background paper is a pattern from the Beau Chateau patterned paper (#122357).

To make the background paper, the computer printed article and a picture have the old distressed look, I applied Crumb Cake classic ink to the edges of each of the items that I wanted to look distressed.

There are other ways to make paper look old, such as scraping the edges with scissors or a knife to rough up the edges but that is not a look that I'm especially fond of. If you want to learn more about this technique, you can google "paper distressing."