Weirdest trends

The whole office supply thing—stapling, paper clips, memo pads, labels from those old label makers with a trigger, typed journaling. Never got that.

Doodling reminded me of middle school folders. Plus I thought it was messy looking.

I think it's the old cutting photos into shapes. I have a friend that still does it. I try not to judge, but it makes me cringe!

Tear Bears.

Paint chip samples. And yes I used them. I'd have dh take me to Home Depot to get some.

The paper doll like kid characters. You could get one for everything from broken bone to lost tooth to first day of school to careers.

A tiny photo surrounded by embellishments. Modern sticker sneeze.

Shaped edge scissors.

Cutting your photo out using a template in a star or heart or oval then using a bigger one to cut the background paper.

Do you remember cutting slits in the page protector so you could stick things out like a photo cascade??

Metal hinges. Well I guess metal everything. I used metal circle letters to make a title, the metal bars, the metal shapes.

Bathroom people icons. 😂

Having to remove a page so you could interact with it

Bread tags, guitar picks, washers, sewing on pages (still popular, but I still don't get it), zippers, hinges, photo turns, big bubble letters. To each her/his own, I guess.

Stitching is probably my favourite thing to do on my pages! I loved it when I was a paper scrapper, and I love using digital stitching now.  I have a ton of pre-made digital stitches, and also styles/actions/brushes to make my own stitching in any shape I want. 

Moustaches were definitely a weird moment, as were chandeliers. I agree with whoever mentioned Junkitz, they had some cool stuff, but also some really strange embellishments. Bread tags I'd completely forgotten about even though I know I had and used some.

There was so much metal in the early days of my scrapping, I remember the MM frames and photo corners particularly.

I also remember that twistel(?) ribbon that you'd have to painstakingly unwind before you could put it on a page.

When I cleaned out one of my drawers recently, I rediscovered my Dymo label maker, and it still works perfectly. I think I'm going to use it! It would add a finishing touch to a pocket card or photo.

I remember getting decorative stick pins in some of my old kit clubs. I'm not sure how we were supposed to use them. I was also not a big fan of 3-D decorations that were supposed to dangle from the page.

I could never get my head around bulky embellishments. Flair buttons just seemed so thick to me! The protection of the photos was always my priority and having thick uneven pages just didn't make sense to me.

But like all this stuff, to each their own

When I read the thread title, bottle caps was the first thing that came to mind.

I saw paint chips mentioned and that made me laugh. I still have a gajillion of those and I still keep them when we are actually looking at paint colors. I only take the samples I need though!

Chandeliers were weird and it seems like mushrooms have been around a few times. I like to eat mushrooms but not sure how often I actually need them as embellishments.

When scrapbookers were using wire for everything, titles made out of wire, etc. One of my friends used them in a baby album (personally I didn't think wire went with baby pictures but that was during the metal in scrapbooks phase) and that album got published in a scrapbook magazine. She admitted to me later that the wire was cutting into some of the opposite pages that it rubbed against and she ended up taking the pictures out and remaking an album without wire. Back then it seemed like people would do anything to try to be unique in order to get published.

I also felt moustaches were a weird trend. I am not at all a literal scrapbooker and could not find a way to use them. While I wasn't wild about chandeliers, I can think of ways to make them work.

Paint chip cards - I totally see how they work with scrapbooking but I thought it was shitty some people would take them by the handful from paint & hardware stores just to use for layouts. There was some other item that people were ordering samples of - paneling or veneer flooring chips or something. I don't remember exactly but someone on LM posted about it and it got so bad the company reached out to the LM owners about all these requests coming from a link on their message board. I guess this falls more into the "not cool" category than weird.

Yes, bottlecaps were too bulky. Those pin badges were a thing too. I found them hard to use. Something needed to be done with the pin part and then I needed a bunch of foam tape to fill in the gap enough so it will stick to the page.

But the biggest challenge for me was naked chipboard. I regret every cent I spent on that stuff. I was completely incapable of turning it to something even remotely nice enough to put on a project. Lots of talented people were able to but I was not one of them...at all. ha!

To me, mushrooms are an organic embellishment like flowers or leaves or branches representing nature.

Maybe I think the mushrooms are weird because I don’t really use flowers or leaves either.

That’s interesting though—I’ll likely look at them a bit differently. I still may not use them, but I’ll have a new appreciation!