Frustrated? Where is the decorative tissue paper you need? This was my dilemma. A botanical or more organic pattern was the object of my search for wedding welcome bags. To no avail, I searched local stores and the internet for botanical printed tissue paper. I found striped, flamboyant, pastel, spattered, glittered, neon, and a variety of types of tissue paper but nothing that resembled the image I had in my mind.
The idea of a little welcome bag waiting for your wedding guests at the front desk of the hotels is such a great idea. The gift bags we have for this purpose are a natural color. You know, they are the tan color of regular paper bags. The plain white tissue paper really did nothing for the look of these bags. It could have come from the local market, right?
Finally, I settled for a package of paper with gold striped, silver striped, gold solid, and gold glitter tissue paper package. When the package was opened, a sudden realization was that most of the paper in the package was plain white! The plain white paper was conveniently hidden between the few decorated sheets. Great… I’d only have to buy fifty of these packages to have decorated sheets for the bags! That’s just a slight exaggeration.
I remembered the Easter eggs that I had created from tissue paper and had stamped with permanent ink. Why couldn’t we do the same thing with this plain white tissue paper and make our own version of decorative tissue paper? There are all sorts of large stamps out there now.
A quick trip to the craft store rewarded me with this organic stamp and an ink pad. The StazOn ink
comes in Olive Green! Perfect! (We are an Amazon affiliate and may receive a small percentage of any sales through this link at no cost to you. Thanks for supporting this website!)
You definitely want a permanent ink, not a watercolor ink. If the ink is not permanent and then gets wet, your guests will have bleeding ink on their hands! We don’t want that!
Decorative Tissue Paper How-To
This stamping project is so easy to do, you won’t believe it. Only the edges of this paper need to be stamped because only the top edges will be showing over the top edges of the bags.
The first thing you need to do is cover your work surface. You don’t want the ink on your furniture! We save the paper that some stores wrap fragile items with to recycle for use for projects like this. It comes in handy at times.
Lay one tissue paper sheet on the covered work surface at a time. Some tissue paper has a waxy surface on one side and the ink won’t bleed through it. Some tissue paper doesn’t have that waxy surface and most definitely will. To be safe, just work on one sheet at a time.
Take the lid and the protective clear plastic cover off of the ink pad. With one hand, pick up the ink pad and with the other hand, pick up the rubber stamp.
Rub the stamp pad over the stamp, completely covering the entire stamp with ink. Starting at one corner, place the stamp along the edge of the tissue paper and firmly stamp the design.
Cover the stamp with ink again and line the stamp up alongside the first stamping. Press firmly, stamping the design again. Repeat all the way around the edge of the tissue paper. I tried to stamp twice with one inking and the second stamping was too light.
FYI there are different sizes of tissue paper. Doesn’t it seem ‘they’ have gotten skimpier on tissue paper? I had three different sizes in my stash. The stamp you use may or may not fit perfectly end to end around the edge. If you only need a portion of the stamp, just apply the ink to a portion of the stamp. If necessary, you can cover part of the design on the tissue paper with scrap paper and stamp to fill in a blank space or allow the excess stamp to overhang on the newsprint.
Imagine a smaller sized stamp for a minute! You could stamp an all over design easily. Seriously, it didn’t take that long to have 100 sheets of tissue paper stamped. My plan is to use 2 sheets per bag. Two blank sheets will be tucked in around the water bottles first and the stamped sheets will be tucked in to protrude from the top.
This is one time you don’t have to be too obsessive about being perfect. This is supposed to be hand stamped decorative tissue paper, not machine printed. Perfection is not expected. After all, it is just tissue paper!
Oh, my gosh! Doesn’t it look perfect? Can’t find what you are picturing? Yep, you can make your own perfectly coordinated decorative tissue paper! We’ll be sharing the contents of the bag and the welcome tag in an upcoming post…
The wedding is getting close and there is still much to do!
Click ‘Follow’ for the newsletter below, or follow me on Facebook, Pinterest, or Google so you won’t miss anything!
