A quick re-cap of how to make some simple paper candle covers. I wanted a few interesting ways to have some candles on the back deck table for porch beers with friends. I always have lots of cover stock paper and turning them into back-lit cut paper displays seemed like a perfect table addition.

Here’s the simplest jist of it :

ONE : Cut a standard 8.5 x 11 piece of cover stock paper in your choice of color into thirds or half, parallel to the long side.

TWO : Score and fold into fourths, and draw patterns or a design to cut out within those 4 sides, leaving enough space at the ends to allow for taping or gluing. (I made a template of shapes that I wanted to use for patterns, shows in bottom photo.) Cut out pattern/design with x-acto knife.

THREE : Fasten the two ends with strong tape, or glue together with steady hands and a lot of patience. (tape is the easiest option.)

FOUR : You still need to use a tealight or votive holder for your candle. Place your cut-paper covers around the glass holder, and sit back and enjoy the night.

I’ve been wanting to screenprint business cards for the cloud machine for a while. My excuse? Well, I couldn’t use a cut stencil, I needed new emulsion, and screens with a finer mesh for paper printing, and acrylic ink so they’d be water-proof… small things that I could remedy real fast but never did. But we finally got around to getting all that stuff and Justin re-designed our business cards. They’re much simpler and effective and I truly love them – the website (and this blog) is also re-designed and everything follows the same visual language that our shirts and cards are designed with. Looks good, eh?

To screenprint these cards, I burned a stencil that I could print on standard 8.5 x 11 paper, and cut the cards out myself. I picked up multiple samples of French Paper’s Pop Tone line, and I had a few sheets of chip board that I also printed on. I had printed some samples in black ink with my inkjet printer onto some of the Pop Tone paper, but the idea was that we’d print them in a lighter ink like white or light blue – to emphasize that they were screenprinted and not offset or inkjet printed. So finally getting to screenprint them was extremely satisfying.

I ran into a few hurdles, though. I usually don’t use a piece of glass on top of the transparency when I’m burning screens, but something this detailed needed it – and I didn’t use one. So as a result, some parts of the smaller text didn’t wash out and therefore didn’t get printed very well (mostly the “.com” and a few letters in “goods”…nothing major and some of them still look neat without all the ink.) I’ll have to re-burn the stencil for a longer run of cards, but these were kind of test prints to see which paper I liked. My favorites : chip board, green, and razzleberry.

swedish fish. nutella. babies. love.