Brushes & Art Supplies

Short answer: buy one placement tool set and one embellishment tin, and you can finish a page without touching anything else. The scrapbooking tool set is the single most useful item on this shelf — a tweezer for lifting die-cuts, a shovel for scooping beads, a cutter and a glue pen, in one $6.99 set. Was the tweezer alone would cost more than the set does.

What is on the shelf

• Placement tools. Scrapbooking Tools with Glue Tweezer Shovel Cutter Pen at $6.99 covers the four things you do on every page: pick up, pour, cut and stick.
• Blending. 5PCS Ink Paste Blending Brushes Set at $5.99 — finger-size sponge blenders for stencils, ink pads and edge shading.
• Colour on the go. Mini Portable Watercolor Palette at $2.99, a pocket-sized palette with watercolour paper, sized for travel and for testing a colour before committing it to a page.
• Embellishments. 50Pcs Gradient Cat Paw Lampwork Glass Beads at $4.99, 50Pcs Assorted Sizes Aluminum Jingle Bells at $2.99, 100PCS Round Wiggle Eyes at $2.99 and 200G DIY Mosaic Crystal Tiles at $5.99. Loose parts, sold by the fifty or the hundred, for shaker cards, journals and mixed-media pages.

How to choose

Two questions decide the whole shelf. First: are you placing things or colouring them? Placement means the tool set and a tweezer; colouring means the blender brushes or the palette. Second: hard parts or flat parts? Beads, bells and tiles are hard and want a lidded box — our organiser boxes are on the Storage shelf — while flat embellishments can live in a pouch or an A6 folder.

What we check

Tools are checked by using them the way a bad tool fails. The tweezer is tested on a die-cut smaller than the tip, because a tweezer that cannot hold a 4 mm sticker is not a tweezer. The shovel is tested on beads down to 3 mm, looking for the ones that jam at the neck. Glue pens are run dry and refilled to check the tip does not clog between sessions. On beads, we look for holes that are actually drilled through and edges that are not sharp enough to cut thread.

Using it well

Work on a shallow tray, not the bare desk — it is the difference between a dropped bead and a lost bead. Keep the tweezer tip clean, since dried glue is what makes a tweezer stop gripping. Load the shovel from a tilted container rather than reaching in with fingers, which is how beads end up on the floor. And for blending, tap the brush off on scrap paper between colours: the brush holds more pigment than it looks like it does, and the first press after a colour change is always too heavy.