The layout I screwed up and how I fixed it

If you want to know my scrapbooking motto, here it is:

There are no mistakes, only unplanned opportunities for additional creativity.

I seem to do this a lot, which is OK. Very rarely do I completely mess the page up. I just have to figure out how to cover the torn stitching holes, or eliminate the accidental stamping, or replace the wet paper (I blogged about that before).

This time, I was scrapping about going to the Twins. We've been three times this season, but I decided to scrap about these two games because they were good games--they won!--and I had forgotten to print photos from the third (oops). I scrapped most of this at my scrap retreat a couple weeks ago.

I first picked papers. Next, I decided I would put the two focal point photos, one from each game, on top, then put a string of smaller photos underneath. Here's where I got a cool idea: I had a ton of the Maggie Holmes photo overlays, so I thought I could use those as a sort of photo mat for the smaller photos. I assembled the page, then thought about stamping. In white.

The best way to do that is by heat embossing, so I stamped and embossed the white circle in the title, then I stamped a phrase to the right of the blue mat, directly above the overlay. That is sort of plastic. Then I HEAT embossed it. Right about now I wondered where my brain went. I had melted the edge of the overlay. and to cap it off, I had already stitched it down onto the page. (Any mistake I make seems to be compounded by my having stitched something down. *sigh*) I then had to do some fixin.'

First, I tore out the stitches on the damage overlay, removed it, then added another, stitching it down by hand cranking the wheel. (Remember, I had a TON of these overlays.) I first laid some stickers over the stamped phrase (it looked bad), but later I realized I'd forgotten to add the game tickets. I always put them on the page. Here's where I got really creative:

I used my exacto to cut a hole in the page, I added a pocket to the back of the page, and I slid the tickets in from the front to the back, holding them in by inserting them in the pockets. And thereby covering the messed up stamping! Awesome. And inspired by screw up.

Here's the final page:

If you click on the second page and look between me and my husband, you can see that we were sort of photo bombed by the jumbo tron. Oh, well.

If I hadn't told you about my trials making it, I'm not sure you could have figured out how badly I'd mangled it.

The detail shots:

Here's where I added tickets on the left side.

You can see here that embossing the circle in the title also melted the overlay above it. I left it and used my embossing gun to melt the overlay on the left side a bit to balance it out. You can see it it detail shot two. If you can't cover it, make it look like you did it on purpose!

 And this is where I added the tickets to cover my embossing mistake! Can't even tell.

Thanks for sharing in my lengthy discourse on my screw up and how I fixed it. So tell me: what are some ways you mask any of your crafting mistakes? Not that we do them often. :-)