What Is Parchment Craft?

Parchment Craft (also referred to as Pergamano*) is the art of tracing, embossing and/or piercing parchment paper or vellum. The paper is translucent and looks pale gray until it is dry embossed, and it becomes an opaque white. In addition to dry embossing, there are various painting and perforating techniques that can be applied to make a very elegant looking piece of artwork. With these techniques you can make cards, bookmarks, boxes, lamp shades, and even real-looking flowers.

*Pergamano is a registered trade name for a large parchment craft supplier.

Parchment Craft Basics

There are three steps to doing parchment craft:

1. Stamping or Tracing Stamp or trace your pattern in white ink onto parchment paper.

2. Dry Embossing Work from the back side of your parchment paper (the opposite of where you stamped or traced). Use an embossing stylus and soft pad to trace over the white lines of your image, pressing so that when you turn your paper over there will be a raised line.

3. Piercing Cut out your design with the two-needle tool. Perforate along the edge of your card putting one needle into the last hole and then tearing away the waste.

Parchment Craft Stamping

You can achieve beautiful results by stamping on parchment paper. One important item needed for stamping on parchment paper is a good white ink pad. There are several available: Moonlight White Brilliance, Cloud White VersaMagic, Cotton White StazOn, New Canvas Palette, and Memories white ink (Stacey's favorite).

Stamps with simple, thin lines work best. To make the card shown above, first stamp the outside border of the Cutwork Card 423, then inside of that stamp Rose Oval 7020. After the ink has dried thoroughly, turn your parchment paper over and trace the stamped lines with a stylus (remember to use a soft pad under your parchment paper.) You can also lightly emboss the edges of the roses to give them a shaded look.

By etching and embossing the parchment paper, you are left with a beautiful design in white (referred to as white working). As you can see in the card above, white working looks gorgeous over our rainbow paper. Stamps used in the card above are Oval Scroll Frame 424L and Embroidery Rose 7047F