I buy far more scrapbooking supplies than I use. Shocking… I know. As a result, I honestly don’t even know what I have. One of the biggest mistakes I make is buying paper collections. I am simply not a collection scrapbooker. In the last decade, I’ve used up (mostly) 2 collections. One of them I purposely gave myself a “bust the collection” challenge in order to use it all. So, it was time to choose an old collection and see if I could get a bit of it used.
I am going to be real. I had very high hopes for getting at least 2 papers from the collection out of my stash. In the end, I used part of 1 paper. That’s right, not even a full paper from that collection was used in the end product. I chose that cute grey kitty paper. The other colors in the collection just didn’t work well with the colors in my photos. So, I found the light blue dot paper to match the carrier. I pulled the orange strip and navy block from my scrap bin. The moss green was a 6×6 paper. It always amazes me how little paper is actually needed to make a layout.
This isn’t my favorite layout. Three photo layouts rarely are. I think I prefer it when I have more space to play with. Once 3 photos are on a page, there’s just some small odd rectangles left for embellishing. I am also not in love with the whole orange and blue scheme. It makes sense. Orange cat + blue carrier = orange and blue layout. I know that orange and blue work together in theory. It just has never looked good to my eye. Sometimes you wind up going the direction your photos tell you to go.
I think my favorite part of this layout is using up old embellishments. The only thing on this layout that I purchased in the last couple of years is the blue tag. The flowers are all at least a decade old. As a bonus, I finished off the pack of metal flowers I purchased in my first year or two of scrapbooking. The stickers, gems, brads, doilies, and alphabet stickers have all been taking up space for years. This is why I rarely purge my materials. Eventually they find their way onto a page.
I am making it a goal to embellish a bit more than normal. I am pretty happy with how the embellishment clusters came out. They all include both layering and multiple textures. There’s paper, metal, buttons, gems, stickers, die-cuts, ribbon, and chipboard all represented on this layout. So, let’s call this page a win… even if it isn’t my prized work of art.
Scrappy Escapades 