DIY Patterned Doilies

What can I say? I adore doilies, with their pristine white, delicate laciness. (Yep, totally made that word up.) Often, a doily is just the finishing touch a layout or card needs - that extra little layer that softens up the finished page.

But on a recent trip to the craft store, I saw something that made my heart go pitter patter. Printed doilies! There they were, in the party supplies section, oh so gorgeous and larger than life. Literally large - they were placemat size, and way too big for a scrapbook page. But seeing them got my wheels turning, and I knew I could come home and recreate the look with some of my plain white doily stash. Today I'm going to show you three variations of patterned doilies that I made, as well as the projects I used them on.

Now, I am working with the inexpensive 4 inch white doilies you can get in the cake decorating sections of many big box stores. They come in  packs of 35 or so for a couple of dollars (less if you use a coupon). These are thinner and more delicate than the ones you can get specifically for papercrafting, so you will want to be gentle when working with them.

Printing
The first technique I tried was printing a pattern directly onto the doily. I'm going to show you the step-by-step tutorial for this technique. For the other two, visit my blog and watch the tutorial video.

1. Select your pattern. I had this pattern in some of my digital scrapbooking files, and it was just the color blue I wanted. You can do a Google images search for patterns you like, or try searching the clipart in your word processing program. Size the image to be just slightly larger than your doily. In this case, I set mine to about 4 1/4."

2. Draw an empty box over your background image. Make sure to set the fill to white, then print.

3. Using repositionable adhesive, place the doily inside the box, then put the paper face down back into the printer.

4. Delete the empty box, revealing your background image, then print. 

5. Remove your doily from the printer paper.

I just love the way this one came out! I used it on this layout about the prismatic pools we visited in Yellowstone this past summer.

Distressing
Next, up, I tried distressing with distress ink and a background stamp. Below is the finished doily.

And here is the card I made using it. I love how the blue pops against its complementary color, orange.

Embossing
And last, but not least, I used an inked embossing folder to create this patterned doily.

And here is the card I made with it.

I hope you got some great ideas about making your own patterned doilies today. Be sure and stop by my blog for full instructions on all three techniques.

Till next time, cheers!
Lisa

Scrap Your Scraps Design Team Member