Clear Scraps Project Post

Hello My Crafty friends! And thanks for stopping by today!
Today is a very special day for me…so I am sharing a very special project.
Today, January 14th is the day that I became a Mom for the very first time. What a beautiful and amazing day that was 29 years ago!
Unfortunately, this day was forever changed for me, when it also became the day that I buried my son. I struggle every year to try to focus on the good things about today, rather than the bad. While it isn’t easy, crafting DOES help…a lot. I had planned to use the chipboard Wings for this Clear Scraps project today. I was going to create a beautiful tribute to my son. When I received my order, however, the wings were not in it. I had to pivot, and honestly, I think it is exactly what God intended!

With this being the tenth year since my son has been gone, I have struggled…a lot. My heart misses him so so so much, and the tears become more frequent around this time every year. However, my mind knows that I can’t stay in that place…so I consciously make myself trick my mind into happiness. With the project change, I realized that I had 3 very fun shakers in my stash. Alone, they are just a Mini Top Hat, a Mini TeaPot, and a mini Tea Cup. However, TOGETHER, they create the iconic Mad Hatter’s Tea Party which my son LOVED. He was constantly telling everyone to have a very Merry UN-Birthday!

When I pulled the shakers out of their packaging and assembled them, the ideas started swirling! I was so grateful for Susan, and that the order was missing those wings! No wallowing in my sorrows! I found some cardstock that had fun designs and I set to work decorating each shaker with bright colors.

Once the shakers were completed, I had to figure out what I wanted to do with them. I thought about how much I love mounting the shakers onto the#10 acrylic tags. I have been doing that so often lately, but I wanted to do something different. A Slimline album! That way I could stack the shakers and actually create the look of the Mad Hatter’s Tea party! I pulled the front page from the Acrylic Regular Slimline Album and mounted the shakers.

Once I got the 3 shakers securely mounted onto the front page of an acrylic slimline album. I decided that I loved it SOOO MUCh, that I wanted to make the rest of the album chipboard…so that the front page truly is the highlight of my project. I ended up choosing the Scallop Slimline Chipboard album for the rest of the pages. I covered all those with various printed cardstock, but then went back to decorating the shakers!

The Mad Hatter’s Hat is my favorite of all! I used shades of purple and red along with mini cards for the shaker filler. I also added flowers and a few mini cards to the velvet ribbon hatband.

The Teapot was so much fun! With multi colors candy shaped shaker elements inside and flowers and mushrooms and bubbles of tea spilling from the spout, how can this be any better!??

And finally, the Tea Cup. It holds the croquet flamingos, the cards, flowers and more…and of course…all of Wonderland. Once all of this was finished, I assembled the album and took a look the see what I thought….
Not bad! I am kind of loving it! The acrylic from cover is perfect! But, I felt like something was still missing.

RIBBON!!! I needed to add lots of brightly colored whimsical ribbon to the binding clamps! I dug through my stash and came out with lots of fabulous choices! Of course I had to use them all!

And that is exactly what I did.
Lots and lots of ribbon on this Mad Hatter’s Tea Party Themed slimline Album was exactly the perfect finishing touch. Thank you all so much for stopping by today.
Hopefully My slimline album was exactly what you needed to gain inspiration! All the links are clickable. SOOOoo.. you can go grab all the things you need to create your own Merry Un-Birthday Album!