Something from Almost Nothing

No, I'm not talking about my blog, although 'almost nothing' is what it's been for a good while. I came into this year all determined to post regularly, and here we are nearly at the end of March. Oh well, at work I live on an April-March year so let's just assume I meant that, right?

The real topic of the day however is the latest scrapping class from Shimelle. I'm mildly addicted to her classes (even though I've never totally finished one yet) and find them full of inspiration. This particular class, Something from Almost Nothing, is all about using up those huge stashes most of us scrappers have quietly built up. Focusing on a different kind of supply in each prompt, there are lots of fabulous ideas for getting them onto a page.

Prompt 1 is all about metal. At first I didn't think I'd got *that* much. Plenty of brads, sure, but I use them fairly regularly, albeit usually only 2 or 3 at a time. Not much else though. Hmm, how wrong could I be.

Just to show you what we're working with, this is my metal stash.

In here there are: lots of brads, lots of eyelets, random bits of hardware, bookplates, photo corners, photo turns, charms, Chinese coins, an escutcheon, a wire word, metal plaques, clips, tabs, metal-rimmed tags. Oh, and when I say this is my metal stash? What I meant was this is *most* of my metal stash. See that jar of brads near the back? Those are all Basic Grey brads. The muted colours. I have another jar the same, with the bright colours. Plus two more of the divided boxes, one with all my glazed brads, and another with jewelled brads, large brads and shaped brads. Somewhere in my room I also have a stash of bookrings and binding wires.

After that, my attempt to make a dent in the metal seems pretty pitiful:

To be fair, I didn't actually set out to do that. I was actually doing a page that I'd had in my head for a while, and just happened to have read the class prompt the previous day so I had the whole "stash-busting" thing in mind too. In turn that meant that after I'd done my usual - a flat, barely embellished LO - I thought, what else can I add? I pulled out some buttons, and added those. Ok, that's a start. But I wanted more. So out came the eyelets, and as luck would have it, I had colours that almost perfectly matched the dotty pattern in the middle paper, and just the right size too. I can't remember the last time I had to get out my hammer to set eyelets, but I confess it was rather therapeutic! And added, to my mind, just enough extra interest to the page. The fact that I used up 40 eyelets was really just a bonus! (Even if that was just a very tiny dent in that stash.)