There's No Crying in Scrapbooking!

Let these three truths be evident:

In scrapbooking like art, there are NO rules. There are NO mistakes. And there's NO crying in baseball..., er scrapbooking!

Of course things don’t always go as planned. The ink smears, the paper rips, or adhesive spills on an almost done project. Bummer! But, it doesn’t have to mean your work is ruined. Think creatively. Sometimes, those little mistakes turn out to be quite fortuitous. Make the best of them!

Here's an example. While there’s no expiration date on the packaging, rub-ons DO get old. How do I know? Heh-heh…I found out the hard way. Maybe it’s because I’ve had them for YEARS. Maybe it’s because my house had been without electricity and HOT for weeks at a time in 2005. Maybe it’s just the nature of the material. (Maybe they’ve been improved!) Anyway, some rub-ons deteriorate, and it’s not readily noticeable…until you try to use them.

I simply wanted to use an old KI tattoo letter to “dot the i” in the word “friends” on my layout titled First Friends. I rubbed and rubbed. Some of it stuck. The rest was like powder on the page. As I dusted the “crumbs” off, I noticed that a faint outline of the letter remained, and it looked COOL!

Hmmm…what if I took more of those rub-ons and rubbed them on all over the paper?! Oh yeah…that’s what I’ll do! And I did. The imperfect look of those old rub-on tattoos ended up working pretty well with the designs I had already doodled on the page! :)

No worries, no tears, as an "uh-oh" moment turned into an exclamation of "Oh, look!"