Quilted Square Scraps

Do you have too many scraps of patterned papers? Would you like to see them come together in a card instead of tossing them into trash? I had been staring at little squares of scraps and pondering how to put them together. I finally made a decision to do it. Follow this post for tips and ideas for you to use up your scraps too!

I cut my scraps into 1 1/4" squares and 2 5/8" rectangles. You may notice that the rectangle is 1/8" larger than two of the squares. This is the measurement I want to use when I was leaving 1/8" between each piece. You can eyeball the spacing between the pieces or you can use a 1/8" strip of paper between each square and then remove it. Instead of gluing them directly to the mat, I used a piece of copy paper and then trimmed it to 3 3/4" x 5" and embossed it, then glued it to the 4" x 5 1/4" mat.

My next cards I decided to omit the spacing between the pieces so the rectangles needed to be trimmed down to 1 1/4" x 2 1/2" to remove that extra 1/8". Again I glued the pieces to copy paper so that I could trim the final image to 3 1/2" x 4 3/4". After trimming it I ran it through the embossing folder and glued it to the 3 3/4" x 5" mat. This left a wider border of the card base.

For something a little bit different, instead of lining up every square for this next card I dropped one square down about half way. This left me with 1/2 of a square at the top and bottom of two of the four columns.

And my final card was designed as a zigzag. I began on copy paper and glued lots of squares together in the zigzag, then decided how to trim it down to fit on a the 4" x 5 1/4" mat. I embossed the entire mat, but before I did I stamped my greeting. I would not have been able to stamp on the embossed mat.

Now see what I did with old Christmas papers from my stash!