Make Your Own Punched Borders

This scrapbook page had a lot of information that needed to be conveyed, so there wasn't a lot of room for embellishments (in the scrapbook, it is beside a large picture of the persons being discussed on this page).  I wanted to dress the page up a bit and help it go with the one beside it a bit better, so I used the same color maroon that I used for the background of the accompanying page and made a couple of borders out of it.  Though the borders look like I might have die cut them, I used a simple border punch to create them.  Here's how I did it:

1. Measure how deep the punch goes -- including the part that is punched off.  You can do this either by punching a part of an edge and measuring near where you stopped, or by measuring from the paper guideline on your punch to where the punch guides end.  For this particular border, I used the Fiskars "Lace" border punch.  It measures about 9/16th of an inch deep.
2. Double this amount and add a bit for the distance you want between punched edges and cut a strip of paper that is this wide and as long as you want your border to be. In this case I cut two strips of paper that were approximately 1 1/4" wide by 10" long.
3. Punch all along both sides of your strip of paper, lining up with the guides on the punch as you normally would.

Don't forget to save the little punched out scraps.  Tomorrow I'll show you what I did with scraps from punched edges and corners.