Create Decorative Photo Mats for Use in Your Paperweight Designs

Creating a photo mat for your paperweight designs is easy.  This post will show you how I made a simple mat out of colored paper.  I'll also explain different variations that will help you achieve a variety of looks. The purpose of the mat is to offer a decorative border for your photograph while providing an area that may be used to apply decoration, add a small trinket, or feature text. For this project I used a hole punch...

How Do You Display Your Digital Memories?

While I was setting up for a design piece for my blog this morning, and about to recommend a project involving photographs, it occurred to me that we’re not printing pictures the way we did in the past. Now that film cameras are relics of a bygone era, and everything has gone digital, how do you display the memories you’ve captured in photographs?  How has digital photography changed the way you chronicle your life in pictures? var...

Collection of Low Profile Skeleton Keys from K&Company

One of the many memories I have of my grandmother's house, a small bungalow just outside Los Angeles, is a collection of decades-old keys that hung in a kitchen cabinet, seemingly forgotten.  Perhaps the only thing they opened was a memory or two - a first car, her childhood home, maybe a key she brought with her from Germany when she was a child.  What I would give for those keys now! Skeleton keys are among...

Applying Charms and Accents to the Top Surface of Your Paperweight

I love finding new products to use in my paperweight designs.  The latest is a collection of charms called art-i-cake by Amy Labbe (Distributed by Horizon Group USA, Inc.)  The designs truly capture the look of handcrafted pieces I've seen in magazines featuring mixed media artwork.  The quality is also much higher than many other charms and findings sold in typical craft stores. Amy Labbe's line of charms (pictured...