First, let me just say that I am in love with Tim Holtz. He’s just totally awesome – I love everything he makes and I really admire his entrepreneurial spirit. I’ve bought many of his products and have had great fun and success using them. My new favorite is grungepaper, a flexible paper that can be crumpled, stamped, painted, stitched, and otherwise distressed. It looks like this:

As soon as I found out about this stuff, I immediately hit my local craft stores to buy some but I struck out – no one carried it. I finally bought some online. When it arrived, I opened it up, examined it, and then stuck it in my drawer and forgot about it.
A month or two later, while creating a spooky Halloween shadow box, I found myself in need of a tombstone. I looked online and in my stock images folder and didn’t find anything suitable, so I decided to make my own. Hey, grungepaper! I remembered my pack of grungepaper and grabbed it out. I thought it would be perfect for my tombstone and it was. Here is my finished piece and how to make it:
- Take a regular sheet of paper and cut it to about the size of the tombstone.
- Fold the paper in half vertically.
- Draw the outline of the tombstone on one half of the paper and cut it out, keeping the paper folded as you cut. Now you have a template.
- Lay your template over the grungepaper, trace around it and cut it out. Now you have a tombstone.
- Make a wash of black paint by mixing equal parts water and paint in a small dish. Dab or wipe the paint across parts of the grungepaper tombstone.
- Take a distress stamp, ink it with black ink, and press it down across parts of the tombstone to create cracks.
- Flick tiny drops of black paint onto the piece by rubbing your fingers across a loaded paint brush or tooth brush. Let dry.
- Print out the letters R.I.P. from your computer onto regular white or gray paper or hand letter them onto a small piece of grungepaper. Distress this as above and glue to your tombstone. I used matte medium but any white glue will work. Don’t use too much glue or your paper will buckle.
- Take a gray permanent marker and run it along the outer and top edges of your tombstone to add dimension to the shape.
That’s it! You have a tombstone! Add this to any shadow box creation or scrapbooking page.
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