What would a bagel be without cream cheese, a sports car without a racing stripe or a scrapbook page without a few clever embellishments? The answer to all three questions is the same, plain.
Scrapbooking embellishments come in hundreds of different materials, styles and colors. They can include anything from ticket stubs and playbills to ribbon, lace and stickers. If you can glue it to a scrapbooking page, you can use it as an embellishment.
Photo Safety
Nine times out of ten, an embellishment is a safe way to accent your photos and add texture and style to a page. However, occasionally they can be damaging. Here are a few points to keep in mind when using embellishments.
Never use regular glitter. Not only is it messy and gets into every little crack and crevice, but the pieces are also sharp. A small flake of glitter wedged in between a picture and a page protector can scratch the surface, thus marring your photo forever. If you do choose to use glitter, make sure it's a product made especially for scrapbooks.
Large items like buttons or brads look really cute on a scrapbook layout, but when the album is closed, they can leave indentations on the opposite page. This isn't a problem, unless they happen to be pressing up against a photograph. Keep this in mind when designing your pages.
Dried flowers are beautiful accents, especially when they're souvenirs from a wedding bouquet or a prom corsage. They're also loaded with lignin which will yellow your paper and photographs over time. Sealing dried flowers between sheets of transparent plastic will protect both the fragile blooms and your photographs.
Fabric Embellishments
Ribbon and lace come in an almost endless variety of colors and styles, making them a great embellishment to any scrapbooking page. Use them as a border or to frame a photo. Tie them into knots or bows and glue them to the corner of a page or above a journal entry
Silk flowers are also a popular scrapbooking embellishment and like ribbon, they come in a variety of sizes, shapes and colors. Layer small flowers over larger ones, or use them in groups of three as page accents.
When using fabric embellishments, keep in mind that wet glue tends to seep through the material, so stick with a dry adhesive like Glue Dots.
Metal Embellishments
Hardware, eyelets and brads are favorite embellishments for scrapbooking pages, and come in a mind-boggling array of styles. These embellishments include things like charms, dog tags, brads of every conceivable type and eyelets which require an eyelet tool to rivet them onto a page.
Metal décor is often used as an alternative to adhesive for fastening components on a page such as silk flowers, card stock squares for journaling or transparent vellum.
Paper Embellishments
Stickers, Rub Ons and Cardstock Tags provide a great way to personalize a scrapbook page. Alphabet letters are available in almost any size and font imaginable.
Die-cuts are precut images, often used as headings or major layout components. They come in a variety of themes and can be personalized with glitter glue, gel pens or colored chalk.
Ink and Color Embellishments
Stamps, puff paints, multi-colored gel pens and chalk are examples of ink and color embellishments. Other specialty products like Glimmer Mist is great for adding an interesting and sparkly texture overlay to a scrapbooking page.
Additional Embellishments
Buttons are fun in a scrapbook page layout. Use them as accents for titles, small photos, or grouped by threes to define a page corner.
Baubles such as beads, decorative pins or self-adhesive rhinestones and crystals look great in combination with ribbon bows, silk flowers or around photos.
Personalized Embellishments
Make a scrapbooking page one of a kind by including personal treasures like patches or merit badges, personalized wedding napkins and thank you cards or a baby footprint and a lock of hair. The layout means so much more when the highlights represent important life events.
In Summary
Embellishments are fun to use, but they can easily take over a page. Remember that the main point of scrapbooking is to showcase photos and protect them from environmental damage. Every item place on a scrapbooking page should be arranged with this priority in mind.