Ribbon organization

Last summer I participated in a craft fair with my mom. Before I went to the fair, I wandered around Home Depot for a while, trying to figure out a good way to display my cards. A very nice and helpful employee took interest and helped me make a card display unit from two shelving brackets and a few dowels. I ended up using it a little differently than we made it in the store (see it here), but it worked to display some of my favorite cards. It's been sitting in my craft closet since then, just taking up space. About a month and a half ago, I put it back together, using the dowels to connect the two shelf brackets. I then stapled all of my ribbon that was longer than 12 inches around the dowel. I hung it on my wall, but some of the ribbon was so long it pooled at the floor, even though the display was hanging at about 5 feet 10 inches or so off the ground. So on the really long ribbon pieces, I folded them around my fingers and then held the resulting "ball" to the ribbon trailing from the dowel with a clothes pin. I think it looks very pretty hanging on my wall, and now that I can see my ribbon, instead of it being hidden away in baggies in a basket on my bookshelf, I'm actually using it more often. I still have a few bits and pieces of ribbon in the baggies, so it'll be hard to remember to use them. As I type this, I just thought that maybe I should hang the baggie rings on the dowels also, so that I have all of my ribbon and fibers in one place.

As I look at this pictures, I realize I need to maybe get a shelf to go on top of the brackets. It'll provide some more storage space in my room, and will make it look a little more finished. I also need to paint the brackets and maybe the dowels. But that would mean taking it all apart, so it'll probably not happen for a while.

Danielle

My Wedding Album, Take 3

I've worked on my wedding album several times. The first time I hadn't discovered scrapbooking yet, so I mounted the pictures on white paper, printed out captions, and called it good. The second time was about a year after I started scrapbooking. Thankfully I decided to leave the pictures uncut (instead of cutting them into wedding related shapes, like I did many theme pages, Easter shapes for Easter, baby shapes for baby pages, etc). For embellishments, I used whatever embellishments I could find for relatively cheap, such as wedding embellishments from the dollar store or huge pages of stickers for $1 at the craft store. Needless to say, none of them matched and the pages weren't very put together. When the new Stampin' Up catalog came out in January, they actually had a wedding stamp set I liked. Not too cutesy, not too religious, just right for what I wanted. I bought it the beginning of February and have been trying to find motivation to use it since then.

On April 29, I started taking the pictures out of the old wedding album and did one page. I only did one page that night because our wedding colors were blue and pink and I'm going to alternate the background cardstock between blue and pink. I discovered I didn't have any light pink cardstock I liked to match the blue cardstock I had picked out of my stash. So on the 30th I stopped by Micheal's and picked up 30 pieces of pink paper in two different hues, one is kind of pearly and the other more a matte finish. The paper was the same price as the single sheet cardstock they carried, so I figured I'd buy the paper since I liked it better than the cardstock. Friday, May 2, I did two more pages. So at least I've started the album : ). I also still have all our cards we were given that are just in a file folder so I figure I'll also include some pocket pages to actually include the cards in the wedding album. I finished taking all the pictures out of the old album on the 29th also.

A page from my second attempt at a wedding album. Two little stickers and a die cut, that totally don't match each other, except for the fact that they all happen to be wedding themed.

Another page from the old album. Again, two little stickers and a die cut. At least I understood that odd number of embellishments work better than even numbers of them to balance the eye. : )

The new album page I did on April 29th. I bought the pink paper in the lower right hand corner in a package of 72 pieces of hand made paper at Costco. It was originally white, so I used a q-tip and an ink pad I have that is called "Satin Rose" and covered it with the pink ink so it'd go better with the colors in the layout. All of the stamped images are from the Wedding set I bought from Stampin' Up. The pink piece of paper on the right will have journalling on it. I am waiting until I have several pages to do so that I can print them all out on one sheet of cardstock.