Scrapbooking with a Kit: Inaugural Messy Box from A Beautiful Mess
Hi hi! Today I'm sharing a couple of scrapbook layouts and embellishment techniques created using the new subscription scrapbook kit: Messy Box. The inaugural Messy Box shipment was on my doorstep Thursday afternoon, just in time for some weekend crafting. I opened my box as soon as the UPS guy rang the doorbell and I was thrilled with the content.
Messy Box is the new scrapbook kit from Elsie & Emma of A Beautiful Mess. I've been an Elsie scrapbook fan for the last decade. I still have a couple of sheets of 12x12 patterned paper from the Love, Elsie scrapbook line for KI Memories that came out in 2007. So when I heard that she would be partnering up with Studio Calico and putting out new scrapbook products, I was super pumped.
The box comes with a mix of patterned paper (in a super cool 9x12 size), journaling cards, and embellishments. Washi tape, chipboard letters, vellum hearts, tissue paper circles, and brads rounded out this month's shipment.
Thoughts:
For me, this was old-school scrapbooking. It made me feel nostalgic and I loved it.
I love this 9x12 size. I want to scrap larger than 8.5x11 but I don't really like square layouts, so this is a great development. I need to get back to scrapbooking larger size layouts -- it makes me feel good about myself.
The kit style is right up my alley. Patterns. Blacks and Whites. Bright colors. Very simple, but super fun.
The thing I enjoyed most was playing around with the embellishments. The embellishments in the kit were super basic. It felt comfortably retro to be crafting paper piecings and making tissue paper flowers. It brought me right back to my scrapbook origin days -- hanging out in the crop room at my local scrapbook shop on Saturday nights (it's where all the cool kids hung out).
The first embellishment I made were layered 3-d hearts. The kit came with a package of 'wonky hearts' vellum die-cuts. The hearts came in a few different shapes. I matched up a larger and smaller heart of the same shape and then added a staple to the hearts along the vertical center. These got attached to the layout with a medium size glue dot.
The second embellishment I created were tissue paper flowers. The kit came with a package of pink and orange tissue paper circle die-cuts. I thought they had sort of a mod look to them and would make an excellent background for a layout.
To make the flowers: I first sorted the die-cuts by size. I then scattered a few around the left side of my cardstock. When I was happy with their placement, I used a liquid gel glue and added a small dot to the center of the circle and stuck it back down on the cardstock.
To create the layers in the flower, I repeated the previous step 3-4 times -- putting a circle of the same size and color on top -- until I was happy with how it looked. I trimmed the edges of the flowers so they were flush with the edge of the cardstock.
I then finished off each of the flowers with a cardstock circle center. The larger flowers got a a white brad (from the kit) in the center, and the smaller flowers got a penned-in white dot.
This was the most fun I've had scrapbooking in a while. Granted, it's spring and the days are longer, I've been feeling more creative, and I printed some excellent pictures -- all things that make scrapbooking more fun to begin with. But I'm definitely going to make a bunch more stuff with this kit and I'm super excited to see what's in next month's kit as well. Thanks to ABM & Studio Calico for some really great products.
