Scrapropos

How do you decide how to embellish? And how do you know when to stop? This question was posed to me recently, and my off-the-cuff answer was, “Just do it!” After thinking about it more, though, that’s still my answer. Just DO it. Don’t overthink it - just have fun. And remember… sometimes less is more.

Tonight, I helped my sister create letters for her daughter, and took photos as we went through the creation process. I hope this helps answer more questions!

1. Decide on a color scheme. Bobbie chose black and white with pink accents. After pawing through my paper stash and not finding anything “just right”, we decided to use ink and stamps instead. It was a lot faster than using paper!

2. While waiting for the ink to dry, we pulled out embellishments, and concentrated on finding pink ones. Bobbie knew she’d want to use flowers and ribbons, but we pulled other things too, in case something struck us as perfect.

3. We started with the flowers, since we knew for certain that we wanted to use them. After placing them on the a couple of different letters, we decided that we liked them on the B best. At first, we had 5 laid out, but then decided that 3 actually looked better. (A good rule of thumb in design is to use odd numbers.) For added interest, we double layered one of the flowers.

4. Next, we pulled ribbons and started tying them around the T, covering flaws in the stamping as we went. At first, we only had pink ribbons, but then I noticed the pink button on the ribbon card, and said, “Hey, what do you think about adding this touch of green?” Bobbie liked the idea, so I tied it on. Then we decided to switch the pink brads on the flowers to green ones, to carry the green throughout the set. After that, Bobbie added brads here and there to the ribbons, and finally, we added one more touch of green with the plaid ribbon. We decided to beribbon only one side of the T’s crossbar; asymmetry adds visual interest.

5. I didn’t like that the I was so much darker than all the other letters, so I lightened it up by adding the white flower ribbon. Because the lines of the stamping are horizontal, I purposely adhered the ribbon in diagonal lines, so that none of the stamped design was lost.

6. We played around with some of the other embellishments, but ultimately decided that we liked the remaining two letters unadorned.

Result? The whole project took less than an hour (including ink drying time), and Bobbie loves it!