Featuring Brand New Scrapbooking and Altered Art Supplies from the Clear & Chip Line by Clear Scraps!

This little beauty of a project is part scrapbook, part altered book, part mixed media art project, part dictionary, and part sparkle and shine! I created it using a BRAND NEW product line by Clear Scraps called "Clear and Chip". This fabulous product line combines Clear Scraps' 2 specialties: clear acrylic and raw, unfinished chipboard. You can use it in unlimited ways to create customized scrapbooks or other projects!

Here's a quick pic of how the chipboard and acrylic look when you first take them out of the package, before finishing:

As you can see, the possibilities for finishing this are pretty limitless. Seems to me like you could buy 10 of these and never get tired of making them up in different ways. I think I'd like to get a few more of them myself, considering I have even more ideas for them that I would like to try out.

Like quite a few of my projects, this album combines brand new materials with recycled materials. The papers in this album are mostly very old. For the longest time, I have had a falling-apart antique dictionary from 1919 that I couldn't bring myself to toss it because it has so many interesting pictures and ideas in it. I used it in this project to cut out words and phrases that I find meaningful, that relate to my life in some way. I also used a sample book of Strathmore papers that I have had in my stash for quite some time. One of my former colleagues was going to throw it away and I rescued it, but couldn't think of anything interesting to do with it until now.

If you'd like to create a similar album, here are some suggested supplies:

• A Clear & Chip Set by Clear Scraps
• Patterned Papers or Cardstock of your choice
• Walnut Inks or other inks and paints of your choice. I used Tsukineko Walnut Inks to achieve the vintage-y, aged, distressed browns and sepia tones you see in this book.
• Thickers Letter Stickers by American Crafts. The ones I used are the shiny Foil Tinsel finish, but there is a different set of Thickers for every imaginable mood, theme or color scheme you could imagine, so don't feel like you have to use the same ones I did. Just choose a color and font that coordinates well with your papers and design.
• Korker Ribbon.
• Zip Dry Paper Glue, or other Adhesive of your choice
• Zig Painty pens. They write on both acrylic and chipboard (and other surfaces too!) I love these and use them constantly on my clear albums.
• The green and multicolored flower above was created using a Clear Scraps flower, a masquepen, and alcohol inks by Ranger / Tim Holtz. Alcohol inks and the Masquepen are a fantastic combination for decorating any of the clear acrylic pieces in the Clear & Chip set. I think you will really enjoy using them.

One more thing I'd like to share: a quick recipe that is one of my favorites for coating raw chipboard. Take some Pearl-ex, mix it with a little mod podge, and paint it right on the chipboard. Let it dry, and you will have a shimmery shiny chipboard page or embellishment. On the front cover of this project the little flowers were embellished in this way. Some of the interior pages were done this way too. The letter stickers are Tinsel foil Thickers by American Crafts, and they are already shiny so no need to worry about them! Love 'em! Sorry that my photos don't really do justice to the "shinyness". If you are going to be at CHA in Anaheim, California any time from January 24th-27th, I invite you to visit the Clear Scraps booth #1441 to see this mini album in person! Hope it will inspire you!