MFT Creative Chat - Embellishments

It's time for the MFT Creative Chat. The My Favorite Things Design Team Creative Chat is a monthly feature, where we are challenged to explore our creative spaces and share valuable organizational methods, tools, and shopping strategies with you. You'll be able to peek into our creative spaces, ask questions, and share your own ideas in the MFT forum.  This month, we were asked the following questions: 
  

Show us how you store your embellishments.

What are your absolute favorite embellishments?

Any tips or tricks on how to use embellishments on stamped creations?

*********************************

I hope you've all been having a wonderful time with friends and family during this festive time of year, I know I've been loving every minute of having Shanan home for the holidays! I'm popping in today with this month's creative chat. I have a few photos of how I store my embellishments and a couple of tips.

 

 

We move around a lot, so everything in my stamp room is modular - and cheap! I like to spend my stamp budget on the fun things, not furniture. This is the top of three small bookcases I've stacked to create cubbies. Because I use my embellishments to decorate my room, they are spread out all over the place. I love glass jars so I can see what's inside.

Most of my older embellies are all jumbled up together, I like hunting through them to find just the right thing for a card! Here I've sorted them into metallics, brights and pastels to save me a little bit of time.

Some of my newer embellishments are hung on this board I picked up for $10. This way I can keep them in the orginal packaging, and can store a lot in a small amount of space. 

Here is one of the cubbies I mentioned earlier. I like to look in thrift stores for bargain jars and bottles for cute storage - this set of bottles and the carry tray cost $1 and house all my Basic Grey brads. If items come in cute packaging, I leave them in there to be displayed. Right in back there I have some American Crafts jars that were too cute to ditch.

Kitchen items make great storage! I picked up this spice rack recently. The bottles have wide openings perfect for lots of little treasures. I have this one right on my stamp desk for convenience.

I think my favourite embellishment would have to be buttons! I have jars and trays of them everywhere. These are my faves, just a few from my Grandma's vintage collection displayed in one of her old butter dishes. It's so fun to hunt through these and the rest of my vintage stash looking for the best fit for my card, and it's decorative too!

 

My tip for using embellies on your stamped creations would be to "audition" items first. Try a variety of different embellishments by laying them on your card to see which ones look best. Don't stick them down till you're decided! Also, I love to layer. Layer a button over a bow or flower, layer brads and grommets together - more is more in my book!

Visit Kim's Blog for a full list of designers that have taken up the challenge and get ready to delve into the minds of our creative team.

Thanks for stopping by!