Design Tip: Using Hand-Stitching to Add Custom Elements To Your Scrapbook Layout
- Allison
- May 21, 2020
- 2 min read
Hand-stitching may be one of the more time consuming techniques, but it's also one of the best techniques for adding custom elements.

After our first day during our first trip to Disney, both boys couldn't even wait until we were out of the park to call their Grandma and tell her all about their day. It was so cute! Jackson was a hard-core Grandma's Boy!
To match the phone call theme, I used my trusty stitching supplies to create some cute hand-stitched telephone cords around my title.

I even included a little heart in the curled cord design.

I've yet to find another product or technique that gives me the ability to add customized details like this. It's one of the reasons of why I like using stitching so much.
For this phone cord detail, I simply drew my design onto the layout, pierce my holes, and stitched. If you aren't confident in your drawing skills I recommend practicing a few times on a scrap piece of paper first. It's also helps to have a high quality erase nearby too!
Here are a few more customized hand-stitched details you can add to your layouts:
• add stitched details on sports balls like on a basketball, volleyball, baseball, or softball
• add stems to flowers
• add garland to a Christmas tree
• add loops and wavy lines to create falling snowflakes or leaves
• add loops and wavy lines to create wind
• add lines to create falling rain
• add lines to create a sunburst
• add antennas to TVs, bugs, butterflies, or monsters
• add windows and doors to a house
• add lines to create the vines on a leaf
• add stitched flourishes to create vines around flowers
• create fireworks, snowflakes, flowers, stars, or hearts
There so much more than I could ever list, but this will kind of give you an idea of what I mean. Basically, anytime I am building a custom embellishment and I run into a road block of how to create certain details, I turn to stitching.
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Gianni Agnelli, former Head of FIAT link and Italian industrialist was famous for his flamboyant link style. Nicknamed 'The Rake of the Riviera', Mr Agnelli link was always wearing his carefully selected timepieces over his cuff.
The link movement, as is customary for grande et petite sonnerie calibers, has a selector that allows the wearer to choose either grand strike (automatic hour and quarter strikes), small link strike (hour strike only), or link silent mode, in which no chiming takes place. As is traditional in chiming watches, the repeating and sonnerie works are under the dial, but a quick glance will certainly serve to confirm de Carle's point about the necessity for being calm, cool, and collected when working on one!
On the flip side, with more and more brands "going in-house," additional competition has link built up at link these new price points. So what do you do if you're a smaller independent brand? The brands I listed above broke into in-house (or manufacture) link movements with the help of larger entities within the watch world. But what if you're all alone?