Ribbon Organizer

Awhile back I showed you a ribbon holder that my husband made for me - here. After using it quite successfully for awhile, I rearranged my craft room and the ribbon ended up where I kept backing up into it with my chair.  After breaking the dowel holders several time, I finally gave up and removed it.

Then I didn't know what to do!   For awhile I tried something I saw on the net -- putting the ribbon rolls on a pants hanger.  It looked like a great idea, but in reality I had a couple of problems with it.  First, though the picture showed 4 rows of ribbon, I could only get 2 per hanger because the rolls I have are too large to do otherwise.  Secondly, I didn't have anywhere to hang them!  There is no closet in my craft room and no place to install any sort of a rod.  So, for awhile they hung on the end of my table and I tried not to knock them off too often.

Then I found my answer!

Paper Wishes was having a clearance sale on these 36" wide Ribbon Organizers by Simply Renee. They also come in an 18" size. What a GREAT price!  I got two of them as I have a LOT of ribbon.  I love that they hold spools of ribbon but also have clips for holding smaller pieces.  In the past I'd had my pieces in drawers with other embellishments and my spools of ribbon elsewhere.  Now all my ribbon can be together!  Another thing I REALLY like about these is the way the ribbon spools can so easily be put in and taken out, and yet if you just want a little piece of one, it's usually pretty easy to just pull a portion of the spool without messing up any of the others.  What a great product!

Personalize those Brad Buddies

On this scrapbook page I added a couple of Brad Buddies (from Hot Off the Press) for embellishments.  Originally the rocking horse was just a plain tan color and the onesie was a solid blue.  To help the colors blend better and just to create the look I wanted, I painted them with enamel paint.  For the clothes I simply added dark blue features.  For the rocking horse I added a darker tan for the mane, rocker, and saddle as well as some blue decorative features. The star HAD been yellow, which really didn't go with my color scheme.

Journaling Tips 1 - A Full Page

Today starts another Sunday Scrapbooking Series -- this one about journaling.  Today's pages show journaling at its simplest.  When you have a long story to tell, you can dedicate a full page to the journaling and put related pictures on the facing page.  This first page is from a Family Heritage Album.  You can see that embellishments have been kept to a minimum -- the background page serving as a border, a title, and some corner embellishments.  This next page has even less in the way of embellishments.  The journaling was printed directly onto the background page - the varigated colors of the background and the larger/fancier type for the title is all the embellishing that's really needed.

Handling Challenges - Picture too small

For this scrapbook page, all I had was a VERY small picture, and the resolution was such that I could NOT scan it in for a better size.  What to do?  As you can see, I decided to go with a rather wide mat.  That helped, but it still wasn't enough to really carry the page.  Since the page was about a career teaching dance, I decided to cut out a silhouette of a couple dancing (with my Silhouette!) to add to the page.  To ensure that this rather large silhouette didn't over power the picture and fight for focal, I placed the title running across it, and several sparkly stickers near the focal picture to draw the eye. A couple more sparkly stickers help create movement around the page and take the eye to each element.

P.S. for my loyal followers who may have noticed my absence, I do apologize!  I have still been battling illness and fatigue.  Hopefully that is nearly behind me now, and I'll be able to get back to regular posting once again!