Overhaul your Stash!

This week over on the Speshals is an Overhaul your Stash challenge. A chance to go back and find out all that stuff that has been sitting in your stash pile for eons, since you first discovered scrapbooking. I bet lots of you have all done the same as me – in a fit of beginners enthusiasm gone and bought anything and everything only to get it home and not know what on earth to do with it. So it got put into a box, then that box got put in the cupboard and a lot even into the kids collage box!

I decided to really go for it and choose some of the oldest stuff I had and to avoid using anything new. Now I have a tonne of old stuff, very naff old stuff. I found these Two Busy Moms printed die cut flowers (which I am sure I didn’t even buy but which got rak’d to me). There are quite a few sheets of these in different colours, but after checking through my photos I thought the teal and blue would go well with these fun shots of the kids playing in the pool in the garden several summers ago (2003 actually – so even the photos are old!). Whilst rooting through the boxes I also found some more printed die cuts from Paper Loft (how on earth I got so many I can’t understand as it’s something I’ve never really used – hmmm, so perhaps that IS why I have got so many!)

In fact looking at what else is on the page, I think the newest item would be the Scenic Route chipboard letters and the Prima flower and they were bought last Summer, everything else is at least a year if not two – or three – old (except the white cardstock). Not that I can swear to that because, to be honest, I can’t remember buying half of it :D


Once I got over the shock, I had a really fun time doing this page and have already ear-marked several old supplies to get back out and start playing with again. I hope you enjoy taking part this week too, remember to check out what the others have done over on the blog and link back to your page on there too.


Supplies

Cardstock, Bazzill
Vellum (unknown)
Chipboard Alpha, Scenic Route
Die cut flowers, Two Busy Moms
Die cut phrases, Paperloft
Buttons, Stickopotamus
Acrylic label holder, KI Memories
Phrase stickers, Making Memories
Acrylic buckle (Junkitz?)
Ribbons, KI Memories (spots) and Making Memories (phrase)
Rub-on alphabet (quite), KI Memories
Flower, prima
Pen, stitching, brads, gem, sandpaper,
Journalling font, Cookie

Techniques

Try as I might, I couldn’t get any patterned paper on here from my old stash, with the bright and busy photos and the very in your face die cuts, adding any more pattern on there was just not working – and I was not going to go into my good paper stash pile, I was determined to use stuff from that box of mistakes!

The die cuts were really bright so I attacked them with sandpaper to tone them down, raised some on foam pads and added a variety of embellishments to the centres.

The ‘quite’ in the title is created from KI Memories outline rub-ons coloured in with pen. ‘A beautiful day’ is a printed die cut tag, that originally had holes at either end to string ribbon through. I cut down the holes and rounded the corners, sanded the edges and attached with foam pads.

I even dug out some pale aqua vellum (can’t even remember the last time I used vellum!) to print the journaling onto (printer setting transparency, ink quality normal, leave well alone to dry, or if you are too impatient, like me, give a quick blast with the heat gun, being careful not to overheat or else the vellum will curl).

I added stitching to the two corners to pull the page together.