Paper Pieced Embellishments - Part 1

When I can't find the perfect sticker or stamp I am forced to get creative and create my own paper pieced embellishment. I'll be honest, usually this happened when my boys are into a certain character or hobby where there are no scrapbooking supplies even remotely close to what their interest is, or there is such a limited supply of stickers I've already used them. So come see what I've come up with, and get your creative juices flowing as to what you can do with your layouts!

Tree Hunt

Every year I have the traditional pictures of picking out the family Christmas tree, and it's always a challenge to make the layouts look unique. For this particular layout, I made Christmas tree embellishments, inspired by a photo I had seen in Creative Keepsakes Magazine. This was one of the first times, I made my own embellishments and I was very pleased with the results.

Christmas trees are an extremely easy embellishment to create. I took scraps of patterned paper and trimmed them down to various size rectangles. Using a pencil and a ruler, I drew an angled line from the middle of the top, down to the bottom corners, and using my trimmer, cut along my pencil lines. I cut scraps of brown cardstock into rectangles for my tree stumps and glued them at the bottom of my trees. When I adhered them to my layout I layered them, and even popped some up off the page for added dimension.

Christmas tree embellishments can be super quick and easy to make - all from items in your scrap pile!

Pokeball Piñata

My younger son, Zachary, loves Pokémon. (Even though I've watched numerous shows and movies with him, I still don't get the appeal or even the story line - but I keep trying!) One year he wanted a Pokémon themed birthday. I had already made a layout with a Picacho die cut and was running low on inspiration and available supplies. Even the Pokeball piñata I had made for the party was less than stellar - #Pinterestfail - we couldn't hang in, so I had the kids throw it. (In the cartoon they throw the Pokeball so Zach thought I had planned it that way. #Momwin)

I decided to create Pokeball embellishments! I got out my circle dies and die cutting machine and cut a whole bunch of red, white and black circles in various sizes.

I carefully cut the larger white circles in half and adhered it to the red circles. To cover the seam, I glued down a thin strip of black. The final step was to layer a smaller white circle on black circle and glue that in the middle of the circle.

This was a super easy embellishment to make and it enhanced the theme of the layout better than anything I could have purchased. It only took a few extra minutes and a handful of paper scraps.