As most people these days, I am always trying to stretch my dollar. This is something that I try to do in my scrapbooking too. As I have mentioned before, you don’t need a lot of “stuff” to have cute scrapbook pages.
I think about who coined the term scrapbooking. Do you know? I don’t. But, when I think of the word scrap, I think it must have been someone that knew the value of saving every little scrap of their crafting supplies, and still creating something beautiful. That is really what we do as scrapbookers.
I save every little scrap of paper. Especially the cutest papers that I become semi-obsessed with. I use paper as my embellishment all the time. That way, I can make my dollar stretch even more!
In a layout I recently did, I realized that I hardly used any embellishments, other than paper. That is what got me thinking about this post. I have plenty of embellishments sitting on my shelves, but do I have a TON? Not really. I find that I’d rather spend my money on those adorable papers that are out there, and make that money stretch.
On my recent layout, the only non-paper embellishments I used was one piece of ribbon. Everything else was paper! And, it turned out to be one of my favorites I have done.
To give the page more shape, I used a spool from my ribbon collection like the one pictured below to cut circles out of paper.
Then, I lined those circles up at the bottom to add more dimension to the page. In the upper right corner, I had some paper that had adorable hearts on it, and I just cut four of those little hearts out in a square, matted it, and then placed that as another embellishment. Also, I have another 12 x 12 paper that I love that is all arrows. I simply used that to point to the picture and outlined the arrow with pen to make it pop.
Many times, our fear is that we can’t have cute pages without a lot of stuff, but that just isn’t true! So, if you’re going to splurge, when picking out your papers at your favorite craft store, then look for some that you can use as embellishments as well! Here is how my layout turned out using only one true embellishment:
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