A Last Look At Pleating For The Week

I call this technique accordian pleating. In a prior post's comment, ErinM pointed out that she had made an accent for one of her cards using this same technique a month or so ago. I must have stuck that into my subconscious somehow. But last week I was scrapping with my friend Ronda and she had these cute little accents on one of her pages. I asked her how she did it, realized it was pleating, and the whole idea for this week's blog came together. This one is really easy and you can get some really unique looks, depending on how long your strip is, how tight you pleat, and what you use. I used one 12 inch strip, but you could glue two together and get an even tighter look. This technique does need to have a bit more precision, but I'll show you an easy way to do it!

1. Draw a line every 1/4 inch along the strip, a cutting mat is very helpful in this process.



2. Start folding back and forth, it should look like an accordian.



3. Put a dab of glue (again, I used Scotch Quick Dry) on one end of the accordian pleated strip.


4. Attach the glue end to the other end. I tried it first this way, trying to keep the circle flat, but I found it was quicker and easier to attach them the second way, making a ring.




5. Now comes the fun part. It got kind of humorous to get the circle to lay flat, best advice is to tackle from the top, pressing inward and downward. Lightly direct the bottom outward. You can leave it with a hole in the center, or squish the center tightly together, it just depends on the look you want.




6. Here's a really easy way to do it, if you have a way to score paper, like the Scor-Pal, you can just score your lines. Here I scored every 1/2 inch, but I have also done it every 1/2 inch then moved the strip over and ran another score at the 1/4 inch as well. Either way, you have easy easy fold lines now. You can click on the picture to see the details better.


7. Another example of how this works, using a wider strip of paper:


8. Another example of how this should turn into a flat circle:


9. Attach the accordian flower to your project with a nice juicy dollop of glue. It only takes a bit of pressure to make it stick.



The final result:


The surprise? I noticed that the tearstrip from the Sassafras paper I was using had NEARLY even scallops on it. I decided to fold at each scallop and got this, isn't it cute? So using the scallop technique I showed in the first tutorial, you could do something similar. Now I want to try different edges to see what I get. That's the fun thing about experimenting. If it doesn't work, I play with it until I get something that does.