Embellishments -- the fun little details!

I have fun doing this layout for my friend of her beautiful granddaughter. I thought this was the sweetest picture! I was trying out some techniques that I had read about on some other great blogs, my thanks to Gabrielle at "Such a Pretty Mess" for these ideas. I wanted to share my experiences with this creative adventure.

One of the things I tried with this layout was to add sparkle to the flowers. I know there are a number of products you can use to do this, but I had "Diamond Stickles" in my supplies on hand so I added this to the ends of the petal of my mid sized flower. After stacking three blooms together, the Stickles gave the bloom a nice shine.

I also experimented with adding a butterfly to my layout that was taken from a photograph. I had looked into purchasing inkjet transparencies as that is what has worked so well for others. However, at my local Office Depot they only sold these in boxes of 45, and that made the cost a bit pricey. Browsing the store I did find some vellum that was for inkjet printers. I like to use vellum for a number of things so I thought a package of this wouldn't go to waste even it I didn't get the effect I wanted. I looked through my photos and clip art but didn't have just what I was looking for so I did a search on the internet and was amazed at the wealth of butterfly photos and clip art that is available for free. I opened a text document and just started saving pictures I thought would be useful. When I had a page full I decided to give the printing a try. My HP printer was a little fussy with the vellum paper. I had to change the settings so that the printer would not try to "automatically" determine the paper size and manually set it to plain paper before it would feed the vellum without jamming. Once the setting were modified, I loaded just one sheet of vellum and it printed fine. I then carefully cut out the butterfly I wanted for my layout and decided to add it to the center of a flower.


I added Stickles to the petals of this flower and used some glue dots to adhere the flower petals and the butterfly. The vellum is light weight, so not as sturdy as a transparency, but the effect was still pleasing. If you want butterflies on a budget, this is an option.