Unique Technique! Chalking!

About a thousand years ago I was a teacher in inner city Los Angeles. It was an adventure that included seeing the world in a whole new way for this small town girl. I survived the freeways, speaking my limited Spanish on a daily basis and the riots. I'm a lucky woman to have had so many different types of experiences in my life and I don't regret a single one. While in L.A. teaching one day, a fellow teacher taught me this really cool chalking technique which translates to scrapbooking and card-making beautifully. Excuse the quality of some of the photos today, the bright green paper seemed to really reflect badly in my camera.

I know that a lot of you out there own chalks and wonder what to do with them besides using them to color in a stamped image. I own mine mostly to make little stick kids paper dolls (remember those) but I also use them to make a cool background paper, here's how to do it.

Get yourself a piece of white or off-white cardstock and some paper from your printer, some paper that you've already mis-printed on is fine (like mine)!! It's also good to have some of the same scrap paper to protect your table. Tear a strip of paper off of your scrap paper, in these examples my scrap paper is the green so I'll refer to it as the green paper.

Now, get out your chalks and choose 4-5 colors that go well together. Those are your palette. You need a cotton ball or kleenex or a makeup remover cotton pad, something to smooth on your chalk. Dab your cotton ball in one chalk color. Move your green paper up about an inch from the bottom of the white cardstock. Now smooth the chalk down from your green paper to the bottom of the white cardstock, coloring the inch of paper that's showing, reapply chalk as needed during this process.

When you have colored that whole area, lift up your green paper. You now have a really neat edge of color on your cardstock. Now tear off another strip from your green paper, the more wavy you tear the edge, the cooler it looks so don't try to be too neat.

Now choose a different color. Move your newly torn green paper up about an inch from the first color. Chalk down from the green paper to the next color, don't cover the first color, just go up to the edge of it.

You have two colors with really pretty edges now. Tear another strip from your green paper and move it up on your paper. Choose a new color. Now on this one I used blue but moved the paper back further than an inch on the cardstock. This gave me the opportunity to apply the color only halfway to the light green chalk leaving a nice white line in between, it adds a good contrast.

Rip the next inch of paper off and continue doing this same technique up the paper making sure to occasionally leave some white in between the stripes. You can really see it here with the purple color.

Continue doing this all the way up the paper until you reach the end where you can leave a little white edge. Your paper is now done and ready for crafting. I find these chalks don't smear very much even when being handled for card making and scrapbooking but if you are worried about that, use a finishing spray that you get at the craft store.

I wanted to make this particular piece into a card. For the card cut the paper about 5 1/4" by 4". Trim off a bit with a ruffled border punch if you like.

Cut a card base out of paper which matches one of the chalk colors well. The card base should be 8 1/2" by 5 1/2," then folded in half. Use a corner rounder to cut off the bottom two corners and attached the chalked paper.

I used was Close to my Heart's textured cardstock with has a different shade of paper so I was able to use one piece of paper and still have two colors. Cut a 5 1/2" by 1" strip and dry emboss it (see former blogs for how to do this) and sand the lines so they stand out. Distress a bit with the darkest chalk you used.

Attach the strip to your card about an inch and a half from the bottom. Using your circle cutter or large circle punch cut out a circle from the same colored cardstock. Mine is about 2" in diameter. Dry emboss it in a star-like lines, really cool look. Glue it on your card on the strip about 1/2" from right hand side. Now choose a sentiment stamp (I used one from Buttoned Together) and stamp in matching ink right onto your chalked background, see how great that looks!!

Lastly use your circle cutter or punch again and cut out a 1 1/4" inch circle from your remaining chalked page, glue it to the middle of the larger circle. Choose an accent for the center of that, I used a stamped button from Buttoned Together. You're done! Now the chalked paper can also be a background for your scrapbooking. Treat it just like any patterned paper, a patterned paper in which you choose the colors you need. You can also use it for paper crafting, put it on an altered notebook or decorate a can with it. The possibilities are endless. Any questions? Email me: caldreamin05@comcast.net