Weekly Scrapping Tips: Customizing your own embellishments

Today I wanted to share some ideas for customizing and creating your own scrapbooking embellishments.  Sometimes as you sit down to create, you may realize you have something that's the right style and shape but the wrong color. Or maybe, you want to add some flair and tie the embellishment in to the style of your project.  There are some fast and easy ways to do this!

Here is a board book I created for a client (yes, I DO make things other than board books LOL).  This book incorporated a lot of KI Memories' Love, Elsie stickers, so it had a really playful look.

I loved the idea of having a smattering of stars on the cover, so I used some of these American Crafts Playhouse Chipboard Stars, along with a star shaped punch (for the small orange star on the top left).  The stars were the perfect assortment of shapes and sizes, but the colors didn't all match the Love, Elsie color scheme , and they lacked the playful detailing that I was looking for.

Dressing them up proved to be really easy and fun. For the topmost star (originally pink colored), I simply swiped the star with a layer of Tombow Mono Multi Glue, then adhered a small scrap of green paper to it. I then trimmed the paper as close to the edge of the star as possible, and used some sandpaper to sand off the excess. This gave it a cool distressed look as well. Then I stamped a star onto it with brown ink (purposely letting the design run off the edge), and to finish it off I used my trusty White Signo Pen to add some faux stitching around the edges. The little orange punched star and the little green chipboard star also got the white pen treatment around the edges, and I also highlighted the heart sticker and the scalloped sticker with the same pen to give it more pop.  Yes, I really do use that pen on almost everything!

The big white chipboard star was fun to alter as well. I started with using one of my Colorbox Cats Eye Ink Pads to ink the edges. Their unique shape and small size makes it easy to really get all the sides on small embellishments like this. Next I adhered a round blue/brown Love, Elsie sticker on the star and trimmed off the excess. The orange circle on top is one that I punched out of cardstock and embellished by first stamping a design in brown ink, then adding white detailing in using the Signo Pen.

So hopefully you enjoyed this installment of weekly scrapping tips, and you have some new ideas on how to make premade embellishments work for you if they're slightly different from what you need! It definitely took longer for me to write out the steps and post this than it did to actually customize the embellishments!