New embellishments for old stash that is.
I dare say I am far from being the only one who has an (un)healthy addiction to patterned paper. I find it really hard to resist all those beautiful patterns and colours and I certainly have piles of paper, dating from way back when I first started scrapbooking (2004).
Now, some of those papers I'm pretty sure I can't see me using any time soon (quite a few have made their way into the children's craft supplies), but there are lots of others which I still love just as much as when I bought them. The problem is, with lots of these papers, I never got around to buying any of the titles, tags or other embellishments which accompanied the papers.
Having had a bit of a wander around some blogs for inspiration (namely, the manufacturer blogs), I decided that I could surely make some co-ordinating items myself. The ones I came up with were all pretty simple as, I wanted to give myself some flexibility on how to use them once I come to put a layout together.
The papers I chose to work with were these absolutely beautiful papers from the Urban Couture range by Basic Grey. The distress ink I used throughout was Brushed Courdroy.
This first one is a simple tag shape. I added a punched circle with a smaller circle punched out to thread the wide ribbon through and punched the bottom edge with a Martha Stewart border punch.
This second one is even simpler, I just die cut an inner and outer shape with my Nestabilities and added knotted ribbon and a few stick on pearls.
For the next one, I browsed through my stamps and found this damask stamp (KI Memories) which I thought worked really well with the papers. I used an antique linen embossing powder and die cut again with Nestabilities dies. A few pearls add a little bit of glamour.
I then thought about creating a title tag. I created the text using the WordArt option in Microsoft Word (altering the font colour to a dark brown to tone in with the papers), cut into a tag shape, and stamped a flourish for interest. The pink tag was matted onto brown and a beautiful Prima flower and a few leaves cut out of the Basic Grey paper were added.
Finally, I used a dingbat font called DB Boho Frames 1 (I bought this a long while ago, now I find it is only available as a graphics set, however, the .png files will still open up in Microsoft Word, and it can be found at ScrapNfonts). I altered the colour to brown, printed out onto the coloured cardstock, die cut using Nestabilities dies, inked and added a few little stick on crystals. A quick but beautiful co-ordinating journaling tag!
For more inspiration, you can always have a browse around the manufacturer blogs and come up with ways to make your own versions with stuff you have lying around.
xxx's
Suzanne
