Today is a huge day for all attendees and teachers of the Bead&Button Show - class registrations just opened! For more information on classes in general and to browse, click here. For my class, Cobblestone Path, click here.
Speaking of classes, I have updated my website to show all classes I'm teaching from now until the Bead&Button Show. If you're interested, click to find out more: Quadrille at Knot Just Beads; Simple, Stitched, Stylish at Knot Just Beads; Double Decker Daisy at Knot Just Beads; Stamped Dominoes at the LBS Retreat; It's Got Legs at the Madison Art Glass and Bead Show; and Cobblestone Path at the Bead&Button Show. Goodness, am I going to be busy! I'll have a booth at the Madison Art Glass and Bead Show, too, and I'll have a table at the B&B Show Meet the Teachers reception. There may be one other show, but I haven't received word on if I've gotten in. More on that later (hopefully)!
Yesterday I showed you a number of pages that Steve made for his coworker's new baby. Steve's coworker came back to work today after a vacation, and he loves the gifts! Yay! Let's hope the baby's Mama also loves them and that the hat fits the baby. ::cross fingers::
One of the things I mentioned about the album were that the embellishments were too tall for me to scan the pages. I thought I'd discuss that further and give a few tips on what you can do to "shrink" them down a little. I also want to show you some neat embellishments Steve made.
It seems to me that embellishments are getting thicker and thicker all the time. There are stickers, of course, which have no height to them at all, but there are other, fancier embellishments that use adhesive foam to give a more 3D look to your pages. Those are prettier than regular stickers, so I picked up a number of packages for Steve to use in this new album.
It didn't seem like he was using too many per page, but the album got thicker and thicker with each page he added. He added the only post extensions we had for that brand of album, but it still looked like this when he was done:
Do you see how the spine is thinner than the edge? Ideally it should be more like an equal sign (=) than a greater than sign (<).
Here's another look at the album:
That's fully closed. Do you see the white rectangles in the middle near the top? Those are for the embellishment I want to show you.
Here's a look that page:
You can see the shadow on the right side - the page protector can't lay flat because of the embellishment at the top.
That doesn't look too bad, does it? Let's look at it from the side:
It's two layers of the same embellishment, and there is foam on the back of each layer, plus the pie is raised, too:
It's cute, but unless you use embellishments like this sparingly, your album gets too thick too quickly (as we found out).
But what can you do? The embellishments are too cute to not use, so that's not an option. Each page should be as cute as the others, so you can't skimp too much. They're pretty expensive, so you really shouldn't buy too many (unless you hit a sale like I did).
One thing Steve did was to split one of these double-layered embellishments up so he had two instead of one. He was able to rub off the little bit of adhesive residue from the front of the bottom layer with his finger, but he also could have used UnDu. Since the picture is the same on both layers, he was able to make a cute header:
If you don't need both layers, you can still split the embellishment up to reduce the height.
If the reduced height is still too tall, you can take the foam adhesive bit off altogether and use your own adhesive. I did that with the pacifier on the card I made. It's still cute, but it's not bulky.
I mentioned that Steve made some neat embellishments for one of the pages. Since he used an 8"x8" album, he had strips of paper left over from each of the pages he made. He took scraps from this page:
and cut out some of the words. He used some foam adhesive I had to give them just a little bit of height and put them on this page:
So cute!
Yes, he could have just put the words on the page without any added height, but they really do pop out. Like everything in life there has to be a balance. Knowing what we know now, I think we're going to do some thinning out of embellishments on future albums.
That will be it for scrapbooking for a while. My grown-up looking hat is done, and I'm a foot into my grown-up looking scarf. I'm going to go work on it now, and hopefully I'll have something to show you soon!
No comments:
Post a Comment