How to Make a Paper Rosette Scrapbook Layout

Anke works from the May 2026 Hip Kits and leans on three metal dies: the concertina rosette die that cuts the pleated strips, a nested circle die for the caps and photo mounts, and a blooms and leaves die for the greenery.

The circle die is the one people underestimate. It sizes the front caps, the back discs and the cropped photos, so everything on the page shares one measurement and lines up without fuss.

Run the rosette die three times for each flower, working through yellow, orange, pink, light blue and dark blue cardstock.

What comes off the plate is a flat strip with a scalloped edge and the fold lines already pressed in. That pre-scoring is the whole reason to use a die here rather than a ruler and a bone folder. Cut all your strips in one session so you are not stopping to re-cut mid-fold.

Concertina each strip along its score lines, alternating the direction of every fold, then glue the three strips end to end and bring them round into a ring.

Fold the full length of all three strips before you glue anything. Even pleats are what make a rosette sit flat and round, and a strip that has already been glued into a curve is much harder to correct. Press each fold firmly as you go.

Cut circles from the same cardstock with the nested circle die and glue one to the front of the rosette and one to the back.

The back circle is structural. It pulls the pleats into a flat disc and holds the ring closed, and without it the rosette springs open. The front circle covers the join where the pleats meet in the middle and gives you a clean surface for a photo or a sticker later.

Set all nine rosettes on the base in a three by three grid before any glue comes out, then shuffle them until no two of the same colour touch, including diagonally.

Grids expose colour repeats in a way a scattered arrangement never does. Two pinks side by side will be the only thing you see once the page is finished, and by then they are stuck down.

Die-cut leaves from light and dark green cardstock and slide them into the diamond-shaped gaps where four rosettes meet, letting the tips poke out past the edges.

Two greens rather than one is what stops the leaves reading as a flat filler layer. Slipping them underneath the rosettes rather than laying them on top keeps the grid crisp and adds depth at the same time.

Crop two photos into circles the same size as the front caps and mount them on two rosettes set diagonally opposite each other.

Matching the photo to the cap size is the trick. The picture reads as the centre of the flower rather than something dropped on top of it, and the scalloped edge of the rosette frames it. Anke backs each photo on a scalloped circle in a contrasting colour to lift it off the pleats.

Treat each of the seven plain caps as its own small frame. Anke adds a word die card, journaling tags and puffy stickers from the May and March embellishment kits.

Vary the weight across the grid. A couple of centres carry a phrase, a couple carry a small icon, and some are left plain. Filling all seven equally flattens the page and leaves the eye nowhere to land.

Fussy cut two butterflies from patterned paper and set them across the rosettes, one near the top and one lower down on the opposite side.

Bend the wings up slightly along the body before gluing so only the centre touches the page. A flat butterfly on a dimensional rosette looks printed on; a lifted one looks like it landed.

Pierce a looping line of holes across the bare cardstock and hand stitch along it to make a flight trail behind each butterfly, then scatter puffy dot stickers to close the page out.

The stitching earns its place here. A grid this tidy leaves large blank corners, and a stitched curve fills them with movement without adding another layer of paper that would compete with the rosettes.