The "little black mat"

At Practical Scrappers, the focus today is on matting your photos with black. I almost always mat my photos on a page, at least one of them anyway. I think matting your photos is a great way to accent them and separate them a little bit from the background, which is especially important is you're using a busy patterned paper as the background or using a lot of embellishments.


I used a lot of bright papers on this page, so using black photo mats helped to emphasize the photos and tone down the page just a little bit. These mats are very narrow, only 1/16" wide, so they don't overpower the photos or the papers.

I repeated the black with some yellow and black letter stickers, and sticker tabs with black "stitching". The photo is of my DGD on one of her very early attempts at eating corn on the cob. That center photo just cracks me up - she is soooo concentrating on that corn cob!

Before I got hooked on scrapbooking, I spent my free time quilting. Several years ago I took a quilting seminar with a teacher who believed that every quilt should have a touch of black or purple because those colors had so much contrast they made a quilt sparkle. I think that philosophy works just the same on scrapbook pages and cards - try adding a little touch of black to your project and see what you think!