Creating Polished Stones Out of Paper by Gabrielle

I'm often asked how I come up with some of the idea's I used on my layouts, and the answer is that I'm often inspired by products, photo's, print ad's and in this case TV! When I was working on this l/o there was an episode of America's Next Top Model on TV and the girls came out wearing these huge polished stone necklaces. And I thought, ...hey, I could make that out of cardstock to decorate my page! Above is the result and here is how I did it....
You will need the following items:

~ Some bright blue cardstock (sky blue, bright blue or turquoise)

~ Circle punch or scissors (for other shapes)

~ black in pad

~ black fine point pen

~ white gel pen (like Inkssentials or Signo Unibal)


Step 1

Punch out circles of blue cardstock (or you can cut out odd shapes that you've seen polished rocks come in....I used a scissor to cut out the rounded diamond shapes on the left side of the layout). Now take your ink pad and rub around the edges of your cut pieces, creating a soft shadow that will give your 'stone' a 3D effect......


Step 2

Take a fine point black pen and randomly draw on black veins. Try to keep them running in one direction, although they can slightly wrap towards the top and bottom. Go lightly with the veining towards the middle of the 'stone'.


Step 3

Now to give your faux stone more of a rounded look and some shine add a slightly curved thick line of white with you white gel pen. ....Easy-peasy! You've made your own faux polished stone!


To add a different look to the stone you can mount it on a 'metal' base as I did in the l/o above. I did this by simply painting some plain black cardstock with some metallic gold paint, stick the faux stone to it and following the edge of the faux stone cut around it leaving a small edge (approx. 1/8 of an in or smaller)

Here are a couple close-up pic's of the faux stone in my l/o.....



You don't have to stop with turquoise polished stones. Try using cardstock in other colours (pink, green, purple), or perhaps try spritzing some dark wine colour cardstock with a gold glimmer mist to get a 'gold fleck' stone look (just follow the above instructions without the 'veining', just give it some shadow and highlight) I thought I would give pink cardstock a try in order to get a pink granite look. Below is a card I made up using the same method as above but with pink cardstock.....



There you have it! a quick and easy way to add a fun design element to your scrapbook pages and cards!

(CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT GABRIELLE)