Hi there! Ashli Oliver (soapHOUSEmama) here with my first post as a DT member at A Flair For Buttons. I am excited to be here and even more excited to share a new mini series that we will be bringing you twice a month!
Let me give you a little background information first. When I brought my first package of scrapbook flair home, I had a little trouble getting those adorable shiny circles on my page. Most of the time, they just seemed to be floating there. In the odd chance that I actually was able to "ground" my flair, it still seemed a bit random. Well, I am pleased to say, that I have long since crossed that bridge! Hooray! In fact, I can hardly scrap without flair these days. And that brings me to our new mini series...
"No More Floating Flair!"
Twice a month, we will take a look at different ways to incorporate flair into your scrapbooking. We will discuss using clusters, handmade embellishments, banners, and more! Also, if you have any questions or a special request, please leave a comment letting us know.
Alrighty. Now that we are all on the same page, let's get the first installment in this fun mini series under way:
Using an Existing Pattern or Design Element to Ground that Flair.
There are many ways to do this. You could use a polka dotted paper, circluar stickers, stamps, or stencils. I love using stencils, so that is what we are going to look at today.
Below, you can see my starting point - photos, flair, background paper, and a stencil:
Notice the background paper also contains a circular pattern. I find that this repetition can help combat a floating flair fiasco.
Now we have our pattern stenciled on and the rest of the design roughly laid out. See that flair to the left? The Relax Flair set is a perfect compliment to my photos and it does look lovely all lined up. But, it is floating a bit, yes? It is far away from the other circular elements on the page and isn't touching any of the other page elements...
But what if we layer them right on top of the circles that are stenciled on? Perhaps even over some of the paper elements that are layered over our stencil pattern?
Yep! That is better and would certainly work fine, but I do think we are still floating a bit. The flair essentially covers up the entire painted dot and it is still not showing much relationship to the other page elements. What would be a good way to ground those circles, add color and texture, and incorporate all of that into the rest of the page? Thread!
See? That lovely color of embroidery thread added nice contrast, a repeated circluar element and texture to boot. Perfect! Don't have embroidery thread? No worries, you could also use a small ribbon, twine, stickles, or even try doodling a circle with a pen. To further reinforce this circluar theme, I have also punched some scraps in a circle shape and found a circular die cut to use as part of my title:
Once I had that all settled, I still had one piece of flair left to use and in order to bring a sense of balance to page, I added it next to my title area. This helps draw the eye about the layout as we now have flair on the left and right. A little more embroidery thread and some doodles and we are all done!
Notice that last piece of flair I added by the title isn't on a painted dot and doesn't have the thread around it. Why does it still work? It is grounded by slightly overlapping the circlular die cut element of the title and I have also added some of the thread underneath it for continuity. Floating flair be-gone! Whoot!
So, let's review.
- Use an existing pattern or design to ground your flair.
- Repeating shapes will reinforce your design.
- Add contrast and texture with other materials to create interest.
- Balance your page elements using your flair badges to create movement.
I hope this gave you some new ideas for incorporating flair into your scrapbook layouts. We would love to see what you create! Feel free to share a link to your project in the comments of this post, or if you use Twitter or Instagram, use #NoMoreFloatingFlair to share your work.
See you next time where we will discuss incorporating flair into handmade embellishments. Fun, fun!
