HI K.
I'm not a big one for bling, so I would probably use cardstock for my base pages and the glitter papers for accents. Sketches are a great place to start if you want to design a couple of basic pages that you can use through out the album. There are several places to find sketches.
www.pagemaps.com is my favorite, but there are others. You can also scale down 12 x 12 sketches to use for 8 x 8 pages.
HTH.