Every month when it's time for the Papertrey Ink senior design team challenge, I am always amazed at how the last month has seemed to fly by. My girls have 4 days of school left before summer break and it doesn't seem possible that the school year has come to an end!
This month we were all inspired by our fellow team member, Michelle Wooderson, who has been making lots of awesome embellishments from supplies that she already has instead of going out and spending the money on the premade embellishments that you can buy out there on the market - I especially have spent lots of time looking at this post.
I took on the challenge and incorporated it into a project that I have been working on the past couple of weeks (and actually something I started last fall!) I follow Ali Edwards blog regularly and last fall she posted the guidelines to create a "Week in the Life" album. You can see links to all of the postings that she shared about this project here. I took the pictures and wrote lots of notes last fall during the week of the challenge. I finally got back to the project a couple of weeks ago and am so happy to have finally completed it! You can see my whole album here. Let me share what I did to create the embellishments for my album...
For the first set of embellishment cards, I used some patterned paper (from Crate), New Leaf saddle stitch ribbon, New Leaf vintage mix buttons, super scalloped circles punched from Dark Chocolate Bitty Dot cardstock, and Dark Brown flowers die cut from felt using some flower Cuttlebug dies.
I layered the ribbon and flower shapes onto my cardstock base and then machine stitched down the middle of it to hold everything in place. Then I stitched on the buttons with the button twine.
I stamped the the vine image and thank you sentiment from Beyond Basic Borders and other sentiments from Journaling Linesto finish off my embellishment cards. Nichole did a cost breakdown for all of us on what our embellishments cost us to make...
(I forgot to let Nichole know that I used a felt square instead of cardstock, but they work out to be the same price - and you really could use cardstock if you didn't have felt!) SO affordable and, really, so easy to make.
I also did up a card with one of my embellishment cards!
Onto a few more embellishment ideas that I used for my album...
Remember all the polka dot paper that I have been making using this technique? I punched circles from a piece of it and layered it onto this punched scallop square (Stampin' Up!) punched from kraft paper.
I stamped on a monogram "N" and "08" for the year. I stapled it onto more Crate paper and used it several other places in my album.
Next, I pulled out some metal tags I had bought a while back (I think from Walmart?) and covered them with white acrylic paint (this is the Blank Canvas color by Claudine Hellmuth - my new favorite acrylic paint.)
After the paint dried completely I stamped sentiments onto them with True Black ink.
I used a piece of hemp twine to tie the tag onto a length of ribbon (this ribbon is from a cute little yarn shop near Two Harbors, MN called Playing With Yarn), and attached it to another piece of Crate paper.
Here's one last embellishment made with some plastic, felt flowers I had in my stash, more circles punched from my premade polka dot cardstock, and some brushed silver brads.
Here's a peek of a couple of the completed pages from my "Week in the Life" album. The embellishment cards worked perfectly in my album. I really followed Ali's template and ideas and then really made it my own with my custom embellishments.
I am thrilled to have completed this project. Again, you can find the full album here (these are just the pages from Monday of that week.)
I know that you will want to see what the other designers created for this challenge: Nichole, Michelle, Becky, Lauren, Lisa, and our guest designer Kelly is playing too! I know that I am inspired to create more custom embellishments for my projects - and I can't afford not too!
Thanks for stopping by today! Happy June!
