*Sweet Stamp Shop* - Double Take | DIY Chipboard embellishments

I’m super happy to be here today for my second installment of Double Take for Sweet Stamp Shop!! The focus of today’s projects is something that I'm really excited about – DIY chipboard embellishments!!!

Making my own embellishments is something that I love doing very often, because it’s a fun way to do something creative when I don’t feel like starting a whole big project. And also, let’s face it, pre-made embellishments can be quite pricey, and sometimes I just want to use some basic supplies and some Sweet stamps and get a similar effect for much cheaper!!

Okay, so when I said I was making my own chipboard embellishments, I didn’t mean the super thick, layered kind of chipboard. I’m thinking more along the lines of some thin cardboard (NOT corrugated), like an old cereal box. One, it is easier to cut and work with, and two, I can layer tons of these embellishments later and my project won’t be too bulky. I’m SURE you have some old packaging or cereal boxes, so grab some and follow along with me!

The first thing I did was to cut out a bunch of basic shapes with my Cameo (You can download the cut file I designed for this project here). You could also use some basic punches – hearts, circles, stars, and butterflies would all be great. Or, you can even try your hand at hand cutting if you don’t have these tools and are patient enough. I like to cut out a shape and then cut a circle around it, because this way, I get double out of my cuts, and it also gives me a bit more variety. As you can see, I have a LOT of embellishments cut out. I’m probably not going to use them all on my projects, but I wanted to have room to play and mess up if I needed to.

Then I grabbed some acrylic paint – white because I plan on adding stamped layers on top after – and I knew I would be using gold in my projects, so I added just a tiny bit of Gold Color Shine (L.O.V.E. that stuff).

I brushed the paint on top of the chipboard pieces, trying to make it as smooth as possible.

I let it dry for a bit (you can speed up the process with a heat gun), and then prepared a whole bunch of materials for experimenting. I grabbed some ink pads, Versamark ink, and a few colors of embossing powder, as well as some Sweet Stamp Shop sets that had sentiments I wanted to use as textures. I used Triangle Style and Wheely Like You, but I can imagine this would work beautifully with the sentiments from Austen Obsessed or a shape stamp like Drops Background.

My favorite effect was the gold embossing, so I went with that for most of my embellishments. You can see in the picture below that sometimes you can’t read the whole sentiment, or that some embossing powder will get stuck in the strokes of paint. That’s okay!! The embossing element is really just for a fun texture, and you’ll be layering them up later anyway, so you don’t have to be perfect!

In addition to these chipboard embellishments, I decided to hand cut some paper leaves to add more variety to the textures and shapes. I machine sewed down the middle of some and watercolored accents on others.

I made another quick cut file to cut out my title and then backed some of the words with gold glitter tape (another product I LOVE).

After layering up all my embellishments, I was done with my layout:

P.S. Just LOOK at those streaks of gold Color Shine... is that not the most gorgeous thing you have ever seen!?!?

Thanks so much for following along with me. Send me to a link to your project if you decide to make some of these fun embellishments! I’d really love to see what you create! :)

Now you can head on over to the post at Sweet Stamp Shop to see the card that I made using my leftover pieces!