a couple tricks up my sleeve--

Like I said in my last post, I don't really like things that end up crooked on my SB pages. (Unless they're 'crooked on purpose' that is, but again, like I said, I haven't really fully embraced that style). For me, one of the 'fiddliest' parts of making a scrapbook page is laying down the letter stickers- questions like: how much space do they take up? will they fit where I want them? are they straight? ...you know, that kind of thing. I do have a 'tool' I bought years ago that sort of helps with that; it's a non-stick ruler: you place your letter stickers on the edge of the ruler, get them straight, and then transfer them to your page. Problem is, you can't really see through it, so you don't get a good sense of what your stickers will look like (design-wise) once they're on the page. So, this is my ingenious (and free!) solution to that problem:

I used the plastic from the sticker packaging! High tech, right?? lol!! (and free!)  I wanted to make sure the smaller letter stickers were going to fit in the space above the main word, so I laid them out on the clear plastic packaging left over from the larger sticker letters. Then, I moved the clear packaging around on top of the page, so I could gauge what they were going to look like. From there, I transferred them onto the page itself. (and then, of course, I messed around with them endlessly to make absolutely sure they were straight- lol!) But using clear plastic is a good way to help figure out where you want your sticker to end up without having to stick them down on your page (and possibly un-stick them again to move them).

I also tried an experiment last night, to 'copy' a new product that's trendy right now. Vellum is popular again (go figure, right? it was popular years ago, then fell 'out of favor' but it's back again now!) so manufacturers have been coming out with some really pretty patterns. One of them is a beautiful gold polka-dot vellum, shown here used on a SB page (not mine, btw- the link to the page is below): 

(page image borrowed from the scrapbook.com page gallery)

                                    

This gold vellum is beautiful, especially how it shows the pattern underneath it-- but it's over $1 per sheet, and since it's popular, it's unfortunately out of stock at a lot of places. So I decided to try making my own:

Since vellum is translucent, all I had to do was place a sheet of large polka-dotted SB paper underneath it as a template and draw in the polka dots onto the vellum with my gold leafing marker. Looks pretty good, doesn't it? (Ariel thinks so, anyway!) It's maybe a little more 'handmade' looking than the manufactured paper, but it'll work just fine for me! Now, I just need to come up with a layout to use it on, lol!