I know what you’re thinking: There’s no way in heck that a fast scrapbooker like me could consider sewing on a scrapbook page, could I?
Well, yeah! I actually love the look of stitches on scrapbook layouts. I rarely use my sewing machine, namely because I don’t have it out and set up (wish I had the room!). Instead, I usually opt for hand-stitching. Here are a few of my faves:
In the layout above, I used tiny hand-sewn stitches to anchor the journaling strips to the page, both physically and visually. Here’s a close-up:
Here’s another one:
Can you see the stitching? Take a closer look:
It’s ribbon! Isn’t that cool? 😉
Here’s a quick round-up of ways you can add hand-stitching to layouts quickly:
1. Make a little go a long way. As in the samples above, I used stitching only as accents (In a moment, I’ll show you a hand-stitching page that nearly killed me).
2. Stick with straight lines. The more complicated the stitching is, the longer it will take. (In a moment, I’ll show you a hand-stitching page with curved lines that nearly killed me).
3. Pre-punch your holes. With a paper piercer, or an eyelet setter hole punching tool, sketch out your design and pre-punch your holes. It will be much easier on your fingers, and much quicker, too! (In a moment, I’ll show you a hand-stitching page that would’ve killed me if I hadn’t pre-punched the holes).
4. Have your needles pre-threaded and on-hand. I tend to use a lot of the same basic colors, so I keep needles around that are threaded and ready to go (In a moment… aww, darn, you know what I’m going to say!).
5. Use thick thread, yarn or several strands of floss together. If you’re going to stitch, you might as well make it obvious! Using just one strand of floss is not going to give you much visual impact (Insert you-know-what here).
So here it is, the page that almost killed me:
Yeah, I almost died on that one. It wasn’t pretty. but it looks awesome, don’t you think? 😉
P.S. Your challenge for this week: Stitch on a page! Yes, you can use rub-ons if you really, really hate stitching. 🙂 Someone just may win a small collection of my favorite colors of floss. Upload your page to our Flickr Gallery by Tuesday, 10/19. Use the tag “STITCH10.”