Reduce Your Scrap Stash with October Afternoon Challenges

I'm a huge fan of October Afternoon's fun, colorful products, and I'll bet you are, too!  Did you know that they post a challenge on their blog each week?  For the latest challenge, check out http://octoberafternoon.typepad.com/october_afternoon/challenges/.  The challenge for this past week was to create a layout using scraps.  That is right up my alley!

When I pulled my October Afternoon supplies from my stash, I discovered that most of the scraps I had were small.  At first I wondered whether I could really complete an entire layout with such small scraps (below).  But I knew I could do it...if I thought creatively.

I saw that my scraps were mostly primary colors.  That made me think of kids' toys, which are also often primary colors.  I remembered some old photos of my child with a "bead track" toy.  And, voila, I had my idea for my page--I would use my scraps to make a paper representation of the bead track!

I used my husband's draftsman template to trace assorted shapes onto the scraps.  I cut these scraps out, and I arranged them on wavy lines to represent the beads on their tracks.  Here is how it turned out (below).  Thanks for looking!

Supplies: October Afternoon (all patterned paper and both labels), Bazzill (blue and yellow cardstock), American Crafts (white cardstock), Fiskars (circle template), Creative Memories (wavy line template and corner rounder), and Zig by EK Success (all pens).