Laura Vegas

Once a month, on the Creating Keepsakes blog, there is a Trends Talk feature, with one of the Dream Team members. This month, it's my turn, and I choose to talk about accordian pinwheels.

I've been spotting these fun accordian pinwheels all over the place. And just recently I finally started to incorporate them into my layouts. But there are so many other fun things to do with them, and you can see lots of examples in my blog post HERE.

For those of you that might be new to making these fun pinwheels, I put together a quick and simple tutorial:

You can totally make these without a scoring board. But having one will definately make it easier. Mine is from Stampin Up, but there are a few other brands out there as well. I cut 12 inch strips of patterned paper to make the flowers. I varied the widths of my strips, from 1.25 inches to 2 inches wide. I found that this size works best on my layouts.

I used a border punch along one side of the paper strip, just to give the edge a bit of interest. If you do this, you'll just want to be sure that the punched edge ends up on the outside of the flower.

The scoring board makes it so easy to score the lines along the strip of paper. I made my score marks every quarter of an inch.

I scored along the backside of my paper, since it was easier to see than on the black side. Look at those perfectly lined up score lines, all ready for folding.

Next, you're going to accordian fold the paper strip. Folding it over one way, and then the other way. Back and forth. If you don't have a scoring board, you can start at this point, and just do the accordian folding on your own, without score marks. The folds don't have to be perfect and straight, so don't stress over it if you aren't able to score your paper.

You would continue to fold all the way down the strip of the paper.

Next, you want to adhered the two ends together, using a strong adhesive that is really going to hold. I use glue dots, which hold pretty well. You can even staple the ends, if you're not super picky about the staples showing a little bit.

You're going to want something to adhere the flower too, once you get it into the right shape. I use a circle punch on a scrap of cardstock, and then put some strong adhesive on it. I just happened to have these jumbo sized glue dots, which worked really well.

This is where you have to show your folded paper strip who's boss. Start with it standing up, as pictured above. You'll want to kind of bunch up the edges on the top, and start pushing them down in the center.

As you push down the center, the outer edges will start to flatten out

And poof, you'll have a flower. But hold onto it, or poof, it will pop right back up and you'll be right back where you started 😉

You will need to carefully move it over, onto your punched circle with adhesive. It doesn't exactly go on there neatly, so just play with it, and squeeze the center edges together and push down to secure.

Then you can add some fun embellishments to the center of your flower to finish them off.

For the flowers on my layout, I added die cut cardstock flowers that I had left over from another project. And then a threaded button to finish it off.

 

I'll be honest. National Scrapbook Day came and went, and I didn't do a single thing related to scrapping. In fact, I havn't scrapped a thing in almost two weeks. I wanted to throw something new up on the blog, so I figured I would share my other layout from the Simple Scrapbooks special issue from Creating Keepsakes.

As seen in the Simple Scrapbooks Special Issue, from Creating Keepsakes magazine. Copyright Creative Crafts Group. Posted with prior permission from the publisher.

There are a few articles in this special issue called "Keeping Scrapbooking Simple", and they are broken down to how many supplies you used. I created this layout for the "7-9 Supplies" article, and was asked to use just 7 products total for my page. The catch was that each patterned paper counted as 1 product. I love my patterned paper, so right away, I knew that at least 3 of my products would be patterned paper.

I started out with the die cut paper from Studio Calico. I just loved the cut out circles, and thought it would add lots of interest to what would end up being a "simpler" layout. I layered it over a neutral graph paper, so it wasn't solid white peeking out of those circles. Then for my third patterned paper, I choose a bright blue paper from Pebbles, to pick up the blue in Sarah's shirt. My fourth product was the green ribbon, used to seperate the patterned papers on the page.

My fifth product was the corrugated alphas I choose for my title. I choose red alphas, because I knew I would be using the dimensional butterflies, and a few of them were red. The butterflies were my sixth product. They are layered, with 3 different colors/patterns/papers, and come with the rhinestone brads already in the centers. I wanted to add a few matching rhinestone brads to my ribbon, to mimic the butterflies. So those three brads in the ribbon were my seventh product.

If you see this layout in the Simple Scrapbooks special issue, it will look a bit different. You won't see the computer printed journaling, and instead will see hand written journaling strips. Turns out, my computer font was a "product", and I had to switch it out. Bummer, I know. LOL. I know our handwriting is important to see in our albums, but I also feel like my own handwriting ruins the clean and linear look of my layouts. This is still the version that I love, so it's the version I'm sharing 🙂

Supplies Used: