How to adhere toothpick flags

I recently purchased these toothpick flags:
But in my haste excitement, I never stopped to think how I would adhere these onto a layout. So, as I usually do, I went trolling online to see how others are doing it, and found a few ways:

Tiny Attacher
This is probably the most ideal thing to use to attach the flags. I know Marcy uses this pretty often, and I'm thinking I would love to get one as well. I tried to use my stapler instead for a card I made, and while it held, staples are too wide, and didn't keep the flags firmly in place. I'm thinking would be a better alternative.

Sewing

Not sure if you can tell from above, but Tina Aszmus simply used thread across the toothpick to keep her flags in place.

Pop Dots
In my layout, I used pop dots to adhere the envelope to my layout, so I simply stuck the toothpicks into the foam. Easy!

Just use the flag!
Or, you can do what Nicole Harper did, and just use the flag part! Just take the toothpick out (it's super easy) and then use whatever adhesive you want.

Have you purchased (and used) these? How have you adhered it?

My stamps & dies books

Several weeks ago, inspired by this post, I made a couple of books to help me keep track of my stamp & dies inventory. I thought I'd share them with you, today.

The books are basically the same... They are both 6"x5.5" made with plain white cardstock and chipboard covers, attached together with a binder ring.

For my stamp book, at the front, I have a list of my inks (note, I'm expecting an order of new ink and once I get it, I want to redo this list, in the order of the rainbow.)




The following pages contain all of my stamps, stamped into it with black ink. I have my sentiments stamps sets...


And my images...


I find that this book really helps me when I'm looking for a certain stamp, or just basically reminds me of what I have.

For my dies book, I have my alphabet dies...




...my shaped dies & punches...




... my embossing folders...


... and my impression plates.


Again, this helps me to keep track of what I have. On each page of the book, I've labeled what everything is.

Another cool thing that I can do with these books is use them together, to see what stamps fit with which dies...

For instance, I was thinking of using the top image of my SU! Bliss set...


And wondered if it would fit on my Mat Stack #5 die.


So I took the page with my die and layered it over my stamped image, like this.


And could see how well it would fit.



Thanks for looking!

An inking tutorial

Hey there, Leigh here, with a little tutorial on using ink to change the colour of patterned paper.

A few weeks ago, I was working on my Paris Album, for which I used primarily MME Lost & Found patterned paper and kraft cardstock. I was trying to incorporate some scraps for my journaling, so I cut a tag out with my Cuttlebug (using my Tim Holtz Styled Labels die) from a piece of Pink Paislee patterned paper. I printed my journaling onto the tag and added a stamped image.

However, when I added it to my layout, I thought that the journaling tag was a litte too "white" and didn't seem to go well with the other papers.



So, I took my Ranger craft sheet, my Ranger blending tool and my Tim Holtz Distress Ink in Vintage Photo.



I placed the tag on my craft sheet and inked up the blending tool. Then, using a circular motion (& starting on the craft sheet and moving towards the tag), I blended the ink onto the tag, working my way all around it.



I also thought the tag looked a little plain on its own, so I decided to add some stamped swirls behind it. I masked off the patterned paper that was on the layout using a post it note and stamped my image a couple of times. (You'll noticed I flubbed a little-- a common occurence when I stamp!-- but I was covering that part with the tag, so I decided not to worry about it.)



Then I removed the post-it note and added the tag.



And here's the completed layout:



Thanks for looking!

Fall Sketch #6

For this week's sketch, I chose this one from Pencil Lines:



And here's the layout I made with it at SSD last weekend:



Remember, if you complete a layout using one of the sketches, post it in the MSS gallery and link it to this thread in the forum for a chance to win a prize!

I also wanted to point out a stamping technique I used on my page.

I covered a chipboard snowflake with white ink and then pressed a handwriting stamp into the wet ink. (And then I waited the rest of the day for it to dry at SSD. But the result was worth it!)




Thanks for looking!

Another back to back layout

I wanted to share another set of layouts I made back to back.

It started when I wanted to punch a red butterfly from a sheet of Fancy Pants patterned paper for this layout.



Since I took it from near the top, I decided to cover the top part of my layout with another piece of patterned paper and create this layout:



Then, when I flipped over my completed layout, I felt that it would be a waste to let the pretty striped paper go unused. So, I made another layout on the back. The problem? The negative butterfly near the top (which was now a red floral from the patterned paper on the back). The solution, add a whole pile of butterflies soaring upwards.



I used up almost five full sheets of paper making three layouts, which I thought was pretty thrifty.

Thanks for looking!

Camouflage with journaling cards

One of the great things about digital cameras is the option to edit photos before you print them. And one of the things I almost use to edit my photos is the crop feature. It's super.

However, sometimes the crop feature still isn't enough to get rid of things in your photo that you'd like to leave out.

Enter in scrapbooking and the art of camouflage.

Example #1:

In these photos of my son and I at the Teddy Bear picnic, there was a pink bicycle parked beneath the tree he was climbing. I used a diecut journaling card and placed it over the bike in the photo and voilà! No more bike!



Example #2:

In this next picture, I liked the composition of my daughter and son practising soccer together, but once I had it developped, I found the people sitting around them distracting. So I used my paper trimmer to cut off part of the left side of the photo and another journaling diecut to cover up some of the people on the right. This way, the focus is more on my daughter.



Example 3:

In this layout, I had taken a picture of two of my kids at camp and wanted the sign with the name of the Bible Camp in the photo with them. However, in doing so, I also got a parking sign in the shot. Once again, I used a journaling card to cover the item in the photo that I wanted to eliminate.



Do you have any tips to share about using camouflage techniques on your layouts?

Fixing a mistake

I was working on my Congo album the other day and made a layout about our church's commissioning before we left. I thought I was done and set it up on my piano so I could take a picture of it. But something didn't seem quite right. I finally figured it was the letters I'd picked to do my title-- they weren't showing up really well on the kraft cardstock background.



Because they'd been stuck down for a while, I didn't want to pull them up, figuring I'd wreck the background and not be able to reuse the letters anyway. I had the same letters in my stash in black, so I decided to layer the black letters over the green ones, leaving a little of the green showing.



And here's the final result:



I used Bazzill cardstock, Pink Paislee and Facy Pants pp, October Afternoon letter stickers and Basic Grey buttons.

Thanks for looking!

Quotes

When I first started scrapbooking, quotes were very popular. I remember often scouring the web for the perfect quote to include on a layout.

I find that I still like to use quotes on my layouts, but nowadays, they're quotes that come directly from the mouths of my children, instead of someone famous from long ago.

I love scrapbooking for the purpose of memory keeping, but I find it's not only the events that I want to look back on fondly, but also the little moments and the cute things that my kids have said.

Case in point: Last summer, when we were walking around the lake in Denver, my then six year old son, Jonah, kept stopping to point out views for me to take photos of. Each time he did, he called it a "centrepiece." A perfect title for a layout, don't you think?

(I used Bazzill cardstock, Little Yellow Bicycle pp, October Afternoon letter stickers and Basic Grey and Autumn leaves buttons, all from the Shoppe.)

A little tip....

I was working on a layout last night and needed just a little something as an embellishment.

I remembered that I had recently purchased some Prima paper flowers (called "e") in pink and teal blue. The blue on my layout was more periwinkle, so I knew the teal wouldn't work well....

.... when it suddenly occured to me that I could flip the flower over to the plain white side!

Maybe it was just because it was late at night, but this struck me as an ingenious solution and felt I had to share its brillance with you . ;)

Here's the completed layout, which is part of my Congo album.


(I used Bazzill cardstock, Fancy Pants pp, the aforementioned Prima flowers, October Afternoon letter stickers and MOD buttons, all from the Shoppe. The yellow pp is SU!)

Instead of being overwhelmed....

... with all of the photos I took on my trip to the Congo and the thought of scrapbooking them all (I took almost 500 and then the four men I travelled with all shared copies of their photos, too), I spent some time on the flights home trying to think of how I could make the album:

1. something I'd enjoy creating (& if it consisted of lots of double page layouts, then I knew I wouldn't enjoy it very much)
2. something that would make the process seem less daunting
3. something different than anything else I'd done in the past.

I kept thinking back to Ali's 365 project and how I liked how she was using the divided page protectors for it. I remembered that Marcy had mentionned getting in some divided page protectors from We R Memory Keepers and I wondered if this is something that I could make work for me.

So here's what I did:

1. I stopped at the Shoppe and purchased two packages of the page protectors. At $7.49 each (for 10 protectors) I figured that it was less than a sheet of cardstock & a regular page protector. I also picked up a package of kraft cardstock.

2. I ordered my pictures online, ordering all of the pictures that I wanted to include to tell my stories. I didn't worry too much if some of the pictures wouldn't get used. I ended up ordering 274 prints (so far... I still want to order a few more yet.)

3. After picking up my prints, I sorted them into event type groups and stories I wanted to tell and placed them in piles in chronological order.

Then, I started putting them into either 12x12 page protectors with a kraft cardstock background, like my first couple of pages here:




Or sliding them into the WRMK sleeves.



The pages above tell different stories and I'll treat them as separate layouts. However, sometimes, I picked a few pictures to "scrapbook" on a kraft background and have a page of photos in sleeves beside it to help tell the story.


Sometimes it was a little tricky to make all the sleeves work with my pictures and making sure that back to back worked chronologically. But I felt a certain amount of freedom to add a story here or there to balance the pages.

So now when I feel like scrapbooking, I can pull out a photo from a kraft cardstock background and scrap it like these two:

Or I can take a page of sleeves and add some cardstock/pp for the title and journaling, like I did here.




And I love that all of my pictures are housed in an album where I can flip through and decide which story I feel like telling and not have to worry about how it will all come together in the end.

Thanks for looking!