Altered Paperclips Swap

I joined another swap this time for altered paperclips.  Another first for me.  I signed up for three categories...Flowers, Halloween and Beach/Summer theme.  This swap took awhile for me to decide what I wanted to do.  Flowers was pretty easy.  But the Beach and Halloween ones, I wanted to be "different".  I had all these little shells that I collected from my trip to Florida and also sand that I brought back from Honeymoon Island.  I wanted to incorporate them into the Beach theme.  

For the flowers, all I did was wrap ribbon around the paperclip, then glue a flower on top with a jewel in the middle.  It looked like this..

For the Beach ones.. I took a piece of burlap and wrapped it around the top of the paperclip.  I then adhered a Prima flower on top and also put a brad through the middle of the flower.  I glued some sand on one of the petals and then glued a few seashells onto a petal.  I found a pic on google saying "Keep calm and go to the beach" and printed it off.  After cutting them up, I then used a toothpick as a pole and glued the sign on that and then glued the stick to the back of the flower.  I was really happy with the way it turned out...

Next was the Halloween one...  I had a great idea and hoped I could pull it off.  I had a bunch of Tim Holtz mini bottles, so what I did was use colored embossing powders, orange, purple and black..  I filled each bottle with each of the colors.  I then cut up chalkboard labels and put them on the mini bottles and wrote "Poison" on each one.  I cut up small squares of cardstock and glued them on to the paperclip.  Then I cut a couple of pieces of ribbon and adhered them to the back of the cardstock.  I then glued the mini bottles onto the front of the cardstock and placed a witches hat on the top and voila!  Here's my finished product...

I received a few private messages about these ones.  They made me feel, finally more confident in my work.  Doesn't mostly everyone feel that way?  That our stuff isn't that good, wish I had done it this way, wish I was as good as "that" person.. I sure did.  Sometimes you need a little validation on what you create to make you feel that it's really good, not just adequate.  My husband compliments my creations all the time.  He thinks I'm the world's greatest scrapper, but he's biased.  It's all said out of love.. he has no clue, other than what I tell him, of the scrapping world.  So to hear praise from the scrapping community was a thrill for me.  It gave me that boost that I needed to feel more confident in my creations and not be scared to post them for all to see.  And it's strange.. because I'm really confident in real life.  I don't take crap from people, I'm outgoing, have no problem making friends or talking to strangers, not insecure anymore about my looks or what I drive or where I live or what I have or don't have..  being in your 40's is great... but when it came to scrapbooking, I was still that little girl that wanted to hear I was good enough or someone liked it.  I felt after I received those words of praise from other scrappers, that I finally "made it".