WOYWW106 – serendipity squares?

15/06/2011 by UKMA 33 Comments

I made a post on UKS this week, musing on the top 10 things that changed scrapbooking in a big way – you can see it here a few days back as well, but the replies on UKS are interesting.  It got me thinking about a lot of things, like stuff I had bought and never used (see yesterday’s post on making my own spray inks with some MM Scrapbook Dyes!) and old techniques that have fallen out of favour.

One thing that I have done once or twice is take my scraps and make “serendipity squares” – little patchworks of small pieces of paper that you can use as a background, punch out a shape, whatever.  They always look a bit cheesy (or at least mine do LOL!) and as I had a pile of mostly little strips of paper trimmed off various projects on my desk I went trolling the internet for updated ideas.  Well, I didn’t really find much of use, but at some point I stumbled on the SEI blog and this adorable project.  Well I’ll be darned! Serendipity circles!

OK, so I was NEVER going to sew down little tiny pieces of paper, but the idea got me going so this is what is on my W today!

Basically, I am taking my little strips, sticking then to some cheap white cardstock, lining some up, overlapping some, then putting my punch or Nestie circles over the different areas till I find one or two I like. Cut them out and stick them to a metal-edged tag (oh my but there was once I couldn’t seem to do a page without a coupe of them on there – and I still love them) then add … well anything really.  I am making use of some old Wordfetti and some book pages, a tiny butterfly punch (well it was on my W from last week’s birdcage so why not?) and various other bits and bobs.  I think they turned out very sweet, little tiny collages that could be a card topper or embellishment, and make good use of the smallest of scraps.  I feel very virtuous!

Frankly, with the amount of scraps that I have I could make enough to cover the house and still not finish them off, so these are just the beginning of it.

I fancy making a few with kraft or black paper as the base, instead of the metal from the tags as I think they will look sweet.  I can see them all in a line on a card (and so long as I make my starting collage big enough to punch multiple circles from it they will perfectly coordinate)  or as a single or a cluster of embellies on a layout.  And since my desk scraps all tend to be from a colour coordinated project, it seem like making the little collage is something I can do and tuck into a bag, ready for punching anytime I need them – rather than stuffing the smallest of scraps in my scrap bags, I’ll be 1/2 way there to something I can actually use. Yay!

So there you have it – a productive and frugal WOYWW.  Be sure to dash over to Julia‘s and see what everyone else is doing! You’ll be inspired I promise!

Oh, and do let me know how the extra stuff in my sidebar looks on your device!  I don’t know why it puts things in different places on my iPad than my desktop, with the Stampotique projects in the wrong place, so I’d be interested if it looks OK for everyone.  I spent the time to organize my PDFs and some of my videos, and most of my Stampotique things so people can see what they are clicking on before they do it – most important for the PDFs! Who wants to download a huge file and have the project be something you don’t want?

If you managed to read all of this well done! If not, I completely understand LOL!