Digital Scrapbook Sewing Stitches

Digital scrapbook sewing stitches can go far toward giving your layout a quilted, homemade appearance, even though it is printed from a computer. If you were applying this effect on a conventional scrapbook, you would use a sewing machine. With a fairly blunt needle, you would add a variety of stitches to the digital scrapbook pages, creating texture and interest.

Digital scrapbook sewing stitches are not the same as stitches made by a sewing machine, however. As with much of Digital Scrapbooking, you will have to apply creativity.

Sources of Digital Scrapbook Sewing Stitches

Most software that is used for Digital Scrapbooking offers free stitches if you know where to find them. Digital scrapbook kits sometimes offer paper with sewing stitches. Here are some digital scrapbook tips to help you.

* Line styles: Draw a line or box where you want digital scrapbook sewing stitches to appear. Click on the line or box and select “Format” from your menu. In the format menu, choose “Lines” and “Dashed” to see a wonderful selection of digital scrapbook sewing stitches. In Microsoft Word, the author found 7 styles from which to choose: round dot, square dot, dash, dash dot, long dash, long dash dot, and long dash dot dot.

* Clipart: Find clipart or photo files that show what you want for digital scrapbook sewing stitches. In Microsoft’s own clipart collection, there are 3 hearts featuring stitches. Use them as they are, or get ideas from them. We found clipart online, too, that shows a variety of stitch patterns. These could be pasted together to achieve a line or border to fit the digital scrapbook need.

* Keyboard: Your computer keyboard is another source of digital scrapbook sewing stitches. Dashes and underlining keys are obvious choices. Crate a more complex stitch pattern by using symbol keys such as: the forward and backward slash; the greater than and less than keys; the tilde key (left of number 1), etc.

* Combinations: Combinations of keyboard keys can also create interesting digital scrapbook sewing stitches. Make a row of stitches using an uppercase “X” with spaces between. Then use the line tool to create a “seam” through them.

* Symbols: Digital scrapbook sewing stitches can be unique if you use the “Insert” command from your Microsoft menu, and select “Symbols”. You will find a wealth of possibilities for your digital scrapbook pages.

All of these are freebies, of course. If you subscribe to one of the online clipart websites, you can find even more. The author found one subscription website that offered 688 graphics under the heading “stitches”. Dozens of them could be used as digital scrapbook sewing stitches. A one-week, $17.95 subscription will let you download every stitch they have - and anything else you want of their six million images. You just have to do it all in one week.