Children’s birthday parties and scrapbooking go hand in hand. But sometimes you have to wait
for the party to come up with your best layout ideas.
When Samuel turned four, he had an awesome artist birthday party. Right in the middle of the
face painting, his mom got a great idea for the background of his birthday scrapbook page. The
inspiration came from the tie-dye shirt that she made for each child.
Now to create the tie-dye look, she used masking fluid. It’s a light blue fluid that dries clear and
rubbery and it’s easy to peel off with any surface.
Here is some of the masking fluid that comes in a tube, I'm going to take off the lid and just
begin to create a pattern. Now it takes about 10 minutes to dry. So I'm going to have to wait for
this to dry. And I'm going to put, it’s important to always put the cap back on. And there's even a
really handy cleaning fluid to use because you don’t want the tip to get clogged.
Now once you’ve created the pattern with the fluid, you're going to want to add the ink. There's a
number of different ways that you can apply that ink. One way is with an ink pad and a brayer.
So I'm going to take and just ink up my brayer in the orange ink pad. And then I'm going to run it
over the paper. You can see I'm being careful to put it in an area where I know that that masking
fluids are already dry. You can continue as much or as little ink as you want. But there's another
way that you can inked up as well. This time I'm going to apply the pink, and I'm going to use a
makeup sponge. And I'm going to just put it directly into the ink pad, and then I can go back and
add my color this way as well. And you can do that with all the colors you want. You can make
the colors perfectly matched the photos or the t-shirts.
And then you want to go back and you need to rub off the masking fluid. So I’ll start right here,
and it's kind of, because its rubbery, it’s like removing your removable adhesive. If you
scrapbooked ever with removable adhesive. Can you see how when the blue comes off, it’s
giving you that nice white? Rub that entire page. And when you do that, you’ll end up with
something that looks like this.
Now this is a page from the book, but first we want to apply the photos. So I’ll bring this up and
you can see here is the color photo. And when I turn it over, there are foam adhesive on the back
that’s going to raise that up so that you get a really nice raised look. And if I go back to the
scrapbook page, I’ll bring this in and you can see here. This just creates the perfect background
for the photos of all the children wearing the tie-dye shirts and doing all of the art projects that
they did at the birthday party.
Another great technique to help you create the perfect background paper for your original
pictures.