Putting the Scrap Back into Scrapbooking - again

This was an exercise in thinking outside the box. In my scraps box was most of a sheet of ledger paper which I intended to use for journalling. It was Christmas paper and I have been taking it out and putting it back for the last 6 months so I was determined to use it this time as part of my summer challenge to empty my scraps box.

Suddenly, for no particular reason, I looked at the Christmassy A side and, instead of the Santas and unusable (for me) American postmarks, my eye was drawn to the pretty woodgrain doilies.

I punched them out and used these butterflies I bought from Tiger for £1 (for 4) to make some paperclip embellishments.

They looked great with this DCWV green woodgrain paper and some brightly coloured scraps to complement M's jacket. The flowers were a Dovecraft pack I think.  

There was no real story to this photos of my kids, I just liked them so I didn't do any journalling and settled for a title i could spell with leftover Thickers.

I'm still trying tyo decide whether I need to add something more in the top right hand corner. Maybe some little strips of the patterned papers. What do you think?

Putting the Scrap Back into Scrapbooking

What do you do with your scraps?

I mainly use mine for cardmaking and that means I have a habit of saving even tiny scraps and eventually they get out of hand.

My scraps box was full to overflowing so last week, when P was out for the evening, I emptied and sorted all the pieces into 9 'kits'. They are not kits in the true sense as there are no embellishments or cardstock but the papers co-ordinate in colour/tone/style. I added in all my partial alpha sheets too, the ones with no vowels, thinking if they are together I'm more likely to use them for a mixed-font title or something.

A few weeks ago I shared a layout in which my background was entirely made of a patchwork of scraps. My blog friend Sian commented that there was a potential Blog Hop in there. Well, I'm not really confident about organising a full Blog Hop, but I'm happy to open this up for you play along.

For the rest of the summer (apart from a few themed layouts I already have started) I want to use these kits as much as possible. As I pull each one out, I'll add embellishments and ribbon, tape etc. I'm not going to make things difficult for myself and ban shopping for extras. It's just about using what I have. I'll make cards for my stash as I go along too so, hopefully, I won't have too much left.

The first I pulled out to tackle was this kit of dark reds, blues and greens in vaguely vintage tones.There were a couple of A4 sheets but the rest were little scraps. I went hunting for photos which would work with the colour scheme and found 2 of the fireplace in our French house.

I choose this sheet of green linen effect cardstock by DCWV for my background and then arranged the papers I had. The two strips of red were exactly that size straight from my scraps kit. I cut the doily paper into 3 pieces. I wasn't worried about the gap in the centre as I knew it would be covered by my matted photos.

The papers for the double mat were also in the kit, as were the doily and the alphas. The embellishments were cut from papers in the kits and I just added some stitching, buttons and washi tape. I wanted this to have a cosy, domestic feel and I think I've achieved that.

But I didn't stop there. I found this owl amongst the papers and I love owls. I have used an owl motif on all of my Harry Potter pages, so I went to my HP kit to see if I could use him there. I'd forgotten the B-side of one of the themed papers I bought from Scrap the Magic was 'Owl Post'. I added Glossy Accents to give him some strength and attached him over the printed owl on the paper.

Again, the papers for matting and the letters came from the scraps kit. The other embellishments are from my HP kit.

My last project from this kit was a quick card. All I have left is this:

I cut the remaining pieces into even blocks, through away anything smaller than 3x4 and put the remainder at the bottom of the green scraps file, from whence they originally came. I haven't blitzed the kit, but I've certainly reduced it in volume, and I enjoyed creating in this way.

If you would like to Put the Scrap Back into Scrapbooking and make a dent in your own pile of scraps, why don't you join me? Set aside an hour to sort your scraps into 'kits'. They can be themed by topic (Outdoor photos, vintage) or by colour. Make sure you keep the tones matching, unless you really like using bold and pastel colours together.

There are absolutely no rules for how you use the kits, but I'd love to see what you come up with so please link back to me in your posts and leave me a comment so I can pop over and visit. Happy Scrapping!