pretty paper. true stories. {and scrapbooking classes with cupcakes.}

Time to shed a little light on the mystery of this weekend. It’s a weekend-long inspiration party here at shimelle.com! I hope you can stop by and join in the fun!

Over the course of the weekend, there will be four challenges with a chance to win a prize, free downloads for both digital and paper scrapbookers, new projects, tutorials, bargains and some surprises along the way. But the best part—the part I am SO excited about—that would be the part where an absolute ton of inspiring scrappers are joining in the party to show off some amazing projects. I am positively giddy over their work and I know they will inspire you too.

We’re kicking things off on Friday night, and from early Saturday to late Sunday night, there will be blog posts nonstop (well, every hour or two, roughly) with freebies, challenges, prizes and projects.

All you have to do to join in the party is drop by! No need to dress up, wear uncomfortable shoes or wrap a gift and no worries about drinking too much of the punch and later regretting it! You are welcome to stop by dressed to the nines or in your pajamas, and either just to say hello or to craft away with us all weekend!

The party is this weekend—don’t miss out!

xlovesx

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_{Supplies: All the papers and the butterflies are from the Caldera kit by The Queen of Quirk, plus these negative frames and these borders by Carina Gardner and trim from this kit by Holly McCaig.}

Ever have a day that starts with extreme organisation then spirals into pure crazy? That would be today in ShimWorld. I’ve been to those places you go only when trouble abounds: two different auto repair places (and still no car outside our place) and the confidential customer service desk at the bank (where they let you sit when they don’t want all the bank patrons to know just how much they have messed up lately). I came home and opened the curtains to let the sunshine blast away all of that, only to find the window pane has been smashed. Does it put my day in perspective if I tell you I did some ironing to calm down?

Thankfully I think I have managed to put it all into perspective now: broken cars and broken glass can be fixed. It is really not that much of a big deal. If anyone ever figures out why these things throw us so much, I’d appreciate a memo.

So once upon a time, I had a plan for an exceedingly well-thought out blog post. I think that plan has been thrown far, far through that broken window. Instead, I give you assorted notes in bullet point form:

...the winner of the free place on Go To Press is Beth. I’ll be in touch with your class sign up details tomorrow morning!

...tomorrow (Wednesday) I’ll be doing a live chat at 8pm UK time // 2pm Central time. Come say hello and chat away with me! The chat will be here as part of a three day online CHA party—but we can chat about anything you like!

...the digital page above is my answer to this weekly challenge to scraplift yourself. I lifted a paper page from 2005 with a new favourite digi kit.

...and now I have a question for you! I want to update a little research I did a while back. When do you scrapbook? Weekends? Evenings? Daytime during the week? Please let me know in the comments! Thanks!

xlovesx

PS: This weekend. This site. Be there or be square. That’s all I’m saying for now.

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Another tiny little sneak at Go To Press, the online class I’ll be starting on the 3rd of August. I can’t seem to go through an entire project without a tiny bit of cupcake influence, but I promise cupcake devotion is not a requirement of the class.

The biggest question that seems to have come up is what kind of printer you need. Because we’re going to be using our printers a great deal—but the good news is you don’t need anything superduper fancy.

Do you need a 12×12 printer? Not at all. I don’t have one! All of the printables are designed to be printed at 8.5×11 or A4 sized and can be resized even smaller if you prefer. If you are lucky enough to own a 12×12 printer, then you can enlarge them a bit too and print anywhere you want on the cardstock. That can give you some flexibility, but I managed to make my album without that and I promise I didn’t have any headaches at all! So a standard sized printer will be fine.

Do you need a laser printer? Not at all. I printed everything for the class on my ink-jet photo printer. If you do want to use a laser printer, keep in mind that you may be slightly limited for what you can send through it (you’ll be fine with paper and transparencies, I should think, but you may have trouble with fabric, for example).

Do I really have to send lots of stuff through my printer? There’s nothing you have to do. You’ll see lots of examples of non-plain-paper items that have been printed on—but you’ll also see plenty of layouts using the same printables on traditional white cardstock. So you’ll have plenty of options to go with what you like and what supplies you have to hand.

Those were the big three that I found in my inbox over the last few days—if you have any other questions, let me know and I’ll happily answer them!

As for a little more non-printer detail, here’s a quick summary:
...20 full colour PDF prompts delivered to your inbox Monday to Friday.
...20 pages of colour printable accents
...permanent back up and access to the prompts and files
...40+ example projects, including layouts by Kelly Purkey, Tia Bennett, Kelli Crowe, Stacey Sattler, Shannon Tidwell, Caroline Ikeji, Amy Grendell, Cindy Liebel, Jennifer Gallacher and me.
...step-by-step instructions for new techniques
...twenty page themes and journaling prompts to make up a completed album
...private message board to chat and share your work
...plus door prizes along the way!

All that, and you can sign up right here.

To kick things off, everyone who comments on this post gets their name in the hat to have me pay for your place in the class. Just leave a comment to enter—entries close at 10pm UK time on Monday 27th July and the winner will be posted on Tuesday the 28th! (If the winner has already purchased a spot on the class, she can have her choice of a refund or a place for a friend.)

And if you’re so inclined, please pass the word about this class to your scrapping friends and blog readers. Here are a few images you might find useful!

(that is 300×300 pixels, but there is also this one which is 150×150 which works for sidebars.)

(or this one for you non-blinking blinkie collectors!)

But all you have to do right now is comment for a chance to win, so say something in the box!

Have a fabulous weekend!

xlovesx

PS: What’s on your schedule next weekend? There might be something going on. Just maybe! Stay tuned.

ETA: Comments closed. Winner will be announced Tuesday 28th July. Thank you for entering!!

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Just posted a little something about this layout plus a card and a giveaway over at the Frog Blog. Be sure to comment over on this post so you can be entered to win a page kit and a set of stamps.

I also wanted to say thank you to Fiskars—they featured a little project of mine as part of their summer school series of guest posts. You can check it out here if you fancy!

And tomorrow, I’ll be back here with some class previews and a chance to win a spot in the new class so don’t miss out!

xlovesx

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If you’ve taken a class from me, you know my biggest mantra:
There is no stress in scrapbooking!

Seriously, we all started doing this for fun. Because it was something that was creative, pretty, enjoyable. And yet from time to time we get stressed out by a range of things that come along with this happy hobby. Stresses like…

I’m falling behind because I’ve taken so many pictures and I don’t have time to scrapbook them!

I love all the latest and greatest supplies, but I can’t justify them since I haven’t used all my other stuff!

I feel like everyone I know who scrapbooks is super talented and makes it all easy!

I’ve been working on this page for hours (or days!) and I just don’t like it.

I bought this new product because it seemed fabulous, but really I don’t have a clue what to do with it. What a waste.

I want my pages to mean something, but by the time I’ve finished, they don’t seem emotional or special enough.

Any of those sound familiar?

So I’m starting a new series of online classes that put the stress and the guilt and all the negativity completely out of the picture. These classes are all about learning, creating and always, always having fun. Hence, Stress-Free Scrapbooking.

Okay, maybe I can’t come clean your desk, but the other stuff we can work on together.

The first class is called Go To Press and you can sign up now. Over the next few days, I’ll be sharing a bit more about this class. But let’s put this into perspective: do you have a printer? How much did you pay for it? And what exactly do you do with it?

Most of us are taking our printers—one of the biggest investments a scrapbooker makes—for granted. We print photos. Sometimes journaling. Maybe we go all out and get creative with something title-ish. But most of us are neglecting the tool that could bring the most in custom embellishment our way—making our printer our very own personal printing press. To give you plenty of stuff to run through your printer, this class includes twenty pages of custom printables that include accents, embellishments, journaling spaces, titles, quotations and all sorts of little surprises along the way.

So over a four week class, we’ll be putting our printers through their paces, and creating a finished album while we’re at it. And that is something I’ll be sharing with you later this week!

I hope you’ll join me for class—you can sign up here! Class starts Monday 3rd August.

Can’t wait!

xlovesx

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_{Click for layout.}

Heads up: a new garden full of scrapbook pages is here and this month we were set a fashion theme. Great ideas in there for how to take inspiration from fashion to your layouts as well as scrapbooking about fashions you love. Like perhaps my teeny, tiny Orla obsession. Perhaps.

My pages are here, here and here definitely take in the whole garden for all the pretties!

xlovesx

PS: Prize winners—postal strike over (for now?!), I have started to post these off to you! I have a few more of you I need to contact, but I am working down the list and will be in touch! :)

PPS: HARRY. POTTER. TONIGHT. Woot!

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I am not, and never have been, a water person. I can swim well enough to not drown but not well enough to engage in anything that can be marked by laps. Luckily, this was not much of a problem growing up rather far away from any coast line.

I moved to England more than ten years ago now, and we do not need to start discussing just how old that may make me. In terms of geography, the big shift was less about mileage and more about living just a short walk from the beach (as well as my sudden discovery of hills, but that is a tale for another day). You have to understand that if I call Brighton Beach the beach, I cannot really be a water person, because swimming in the channel is not really something that many people do past a quick wade in. And that may have been on a dare.

There have been times when I’ve thought of myself as completely fearful of large bodies of water like swimming pools and oceans. I will do anything possible to take the tunnel rather than the ferry to cross the channel. And yet, there has been something intriguing there, like the rhythm of the waves hitting the rocks were water’s way of laughing ever so slightly and saying ‘Really, you’re making a big fuss of nothing.’ So on our trip to Hawaii, I talked myself out of this conflict and figured it was about time I discovered for real if I really should be terrified of the sea, or just respect it.

I want to record this honestly: kayaking in the open water pretty much freaked me out and there’s no way to put that feeling in pretty terms. But I did not fall out, panic or cause a big problem (other than being slightly useless at paddling but hey – one thing at a time). There were occasions in which I chickened out of things. But there were occasions in which I was swimming along and realised there just happened to be sea turtles on either side of me. I’m also pretty sure that one of my snorkeling scrapes is going to be at least a semi-permanent reminder that the current is certainly stronger than I am.

But sometimes there are little things we do in life that feel like really big personal victories. For me, this was one of them.

What you may find more interesting is the photography challenge I’m hosting at Two Peas this week — it’s all about photographing water.

Personal victories not required.

But seriously: do you have a little thing that gets the better of you? I’d love to hear about the sorts of things we go about beating from day to day. Just something on the brain recently, I think.

xlovesx

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this series of photo masks by Carina Gardner. So very pretty. And very easy to use.

I’ve added a photo mask tutorial here in case you have wondered how these lovelies work!

_{Supplies: Photocuts Masks v.2 and Inked Edges by Carina Gardner, Rich Bohemia Solids and Spool of Stitches by Tia Bennett, Bare Branches by The Queen of Quirk, Bada Bing overlays and Travel Journal Tool Kit by Rhonna Farrer. Adler & SocialAnimal fonts.}

Wishing you a lovely week!

xlovesx

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