Making surface patterns is one of my favourite things - I doodle some elements on paper or Procreate and then it’s all about fiddling with the elements on Photoshop until it looks good. There is a bit of creative work, but also a bit of almost meditative mindless manual labour of moving little things around the screen.

I have a lot of pattern files stored in the laptop and external hard drive, but I have had a hard time finding something to apply them to. I really wanted to print fabric with my designs (because I thought I could then sew them into tote bags), but I really wanted something quick that I could do at home, rather than having to order and then wait for it to arrive.

It was by chance that I found a few small paper product designers in Japan who were making small batches of products printed on various see-through papers. I was under the impression that my home inkjet printer wouldn’t be able to print on anything other than plain printer paper, or something that had been surface treated for inkjet printers, but a bit of googling told me that I should just give it a try.

I happened to have a pad of tracing paper at home, which I had bought for making eraser stamps many moons ago (something else I should do more of, actually), fed it in the printer and, to my surprise, it worked extremely well. And this was just plain tracing paper I had bought off WH Smith on the high street.

I was worried the ink might smudge, but it dried as quickly as it would on regular printer paper, and the colours didn’t look too bad either.

Sample number one is below, a white background simple design of swallows holding little gold leaves (very much The Happy Prince).

I was so happy with the result, I cut the A4 paper in two and managed to quickly make two envelopes out of the single sheet.

Next, I decided to be a bit more ambitious and went for a colour background, to see how well the printer would fare, and it actually produced really good results:

I am obviously not producing an industrial amount of printer tracing paper because I don’t have infinite money (I just bought a new set of ink for my printer, and it hurt). But it’s enormous fun being able to quickly design and print something out :)

Now that I've made envelopes, I really want to come up with more things I could make with tracing paper, and more excitedly, I really want to find other types of alternative papers to print on (some stickers, maybe?)

Making tracing paper envelopes