Turning Layouts Into Cards

We've all been there. We finish working on a layout, and have all these scrap pieces laying around after we're done. Maybe it's just some pattern paper and cardstock pieces. Maybe you have some alphas or chipboard pieces out. Maybe some coordinating ribbon and buttons. But before you decide to put all those pieces away and back into your stash, look at them one more time. They all match, right? After all, those pieces did end up on a layout, so they must have looked pretty good together. They may just be tiny scraps, but I bet you could take a few minutes and turn them into something cute.

One of my favorite things to do with my scraps, is to make a few cards with them. For every layout that I used to make, you could probably find one to two cards to match it. Sometimes, I even take the basic design of my layout, and just translate it to the smaller scale of a card. When I was working on the altered frames for my recent tutorial, I had some scraps of pattern paper left over from the frames. They weren't big enough pieces to stick back into my stash. So rather than just throw them away, I made a few cards. I got four 4x4 inch cards done, just with those scraps. I stayed with the flower theme I had in my frame projects, but just choose random flower embellishments I had laying around. I kept the embroidery floss idea from the frames, and wrapped some around the centers of my cards. These four cards only took me about 20 minutes total to make. And it felt good to use products that I already had out, so that there was less thinking involved and just some quick creating.