The War on Scraps!!

Hi All

Warning ... This is a picture heavy post! As most of you know January of this year, I began " Mission Impossible" .... to use up all my scraps, I have been faithfully crafting from my bag of scraps ( a large bag for life, from Tesco ) ... If I have afforded myself the luxury of cutting into a nice fresh piece of paper, then I have made sure that I have used up every last little bit, so I did not add to the scrap pile. However after months and months, I realized that I could craft for a hundred years and the scraps would never be gone!! I would never be able to move onto the Mahoosive pile of DP's that also need tackled, so I have to admit that I have resorted to some underhand dealings!!

I have asked some of my friends if their children would would appreciate and use a collection of patterned paper, so I have gone through my scraps, found usable pieces and squared them off, I found a few unloved peel offs and stickers, and stamped some images, and created these gift bags:

Even though if I had crafted for a month of Sundays I would never have been able to use all of those papers up ... I was still left with this:

I decided to do some die cutting, and thought I would create a little box of die cut shapes so they are to hand to use as embellishments at any time, In my head this would maybe take an hour or so to do, my scraps would disappear, and then I would do some crafting ....

5 days later, I had to stop at 1500 die cuts as my little box was full:

 Look what I did to my poor big shot:

P.S I didn't count all the punched flowers, decided life was to short for that!!

As the die cutting did not successfully conquer the scraps, I had to think again!! I have done art journal pages in the past, I decided to make an entire art Journal, using some old business cards and covering them with DP :

I think I will get some large jump rings for it, but for the moment I have tied it together with some fibers, from my stash:

Here are a couple of my Fav pages from the Journal, I wont show them all ... think there have already been far too many pictures in this post .... these are the raw product, they are yet to be covered with Gesso, paint and all things inky:

Lessons Learned:

I have descovered that even papers I dont like, when cut into lovey shapes, actually look really cute ... so I need to learn to see things differently. Also with the pages, I was putting papers on that I really had didnt like, the picture behind, I thought that orange paper was cheap looking and hideous, however by just keeping going and adding other things its turned into one of my fav pages ... so it will be good to challange myself to make things with some of my unloved stash and see what I can do with it !!

I have put in so much work, I know that I HAVE to have created a dent in my scraps, however it is not yet visable to the naked eye!! My loft floor is still full of scraps so I will see what I can come up with next time I venture up there.

This is my entry to Pixies Snippit Playground

Thanks for putting up with me and my waffle!!
Hugs Juls