Paper Seedlings: SCRAPPY SPOTS

Lately I have been making a truly concerted effort to use up some of my scraps. I have strips and chunks of Designer Series Papers from years back. I just, in good conscience, cannot throw anything away that could maybe be used in a future project. A piece has to be pretty tiny to escape my clutches.

This past Monday, I held my monthly Stamp-In Workshop, and one of the cards the girls created used up a nice handful of my strips of DSP, and gave them cute unique cards at the same time. I even let them have free rein in choosing and using any of my Stampin' Up! ribbons for this project.

Anyway, back to using scraps. A couple days ago I was leafing through an old issue of the Stampin' Up! Demonstrator magazine we receive called Stampin' Success. Each issue always boasts at least one or two good techniques and/or ideas we can use in our cardmaking. In this particular issue, I came across another scrappy idea.

Although, as I already mentioned, it was an old issue, so the embossing folder that was used in the example is retired. The embossing folder featured 3/4" raised dots. The idea in the article was to cover a few of these dots with circles of DSP of the same size.

I grabbed the container of all the strips the girls used last Monday and chose all those that would accommodate the 3/4" circle punch. I then somewhat sorted these strips into color families. The next step was to choose a few prints that I thought would work well together.

My choosing didn't take long. They were three designs in a REALLY old Night of Navy DSP, along with a more current design that was Night of Navy along with Call Me Clover. I've always loved navy and green together, so I grabbed these strips and punched out nine circles.

Once I had my nine circles punched out, I sponged the edges of each of the circles lightly with Night of Navy ink to cover up the white paper core that showed after the punching.

After embossing a 3 3/4" x 5" piece of Night of Navy cardstock, I placed my 3/4" dots around where I thought they'd look good. I left the center blank because I wanted to add a sentiment, which you can see in the upper right corner of the photo. Once I was happy with my placements, I glued them into their spots.

As you can see from the photo below, some of them extended beyond the edges of the cardstock. I simply trimmed them even with the edges with my paper trimmer.

The following photo shows the card from an angle to show off the raised dots. I love the look.

My sentiment panel included the Stitched Nested Labels from page 196 in the Annual Catalog. The center label, which features the sentiment stamped in Call Me Clover, is a shaped label. I cut another label from Call Me Clover cardstock so the stitching would show up once again on that piece. But I left it in a rectangular shape rather than the label shape to give it a bit more interest.