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

One of the side benefits of working with a series of guest posters is that sometimes their projects combine to teach me a big lesson. In this case, it was these two layouts, by Riikka Kovasin and Diana Besemer, that reminded me how fabulous it can be to really stretch the supplies we purchase – our scrapbooking investments! I’m relatively good at using a kit until all the paper and most everything else is gone, but I definitely have plenty of punches in my drawer despite using the same half-dozen all the time and lately I’ve been trying to remember the ‘use it while you love it rule’ applies to stamps as well as paper. I’ve just started boxing up some older stamps that I’m going to list on Ebay and I’m ashamed at how many stamp sets I’ve purchased then only used one stamp in the whole pack. Sometimes I play that stamp game just the same as paper – maybe I should use it yet because a better project will come up soon. It doesn’t make a lot of sense for paper really, but it makes zero sense for a stamp – or any tool that can be used more than once! Let it never be said that I am the most logical scrapbooker in the world, I tell you.

So for a little change of pace as we near the end of the day, two guests who taught me a lesson! I hope they inspire you to get the most from your investment too.

The first thing I did for this layout was to punch out a stencil for myself. I used a piece of scrap cardstock and punched large holes in it with a circle punch. I used some punched borders to create texture to the background, too. Both the punched out shapes and the negatives are used in this layout. It’s really time effective – at the same time you can make your patterned paper layers and embellishments! The papers also have delicate, airy feeling, like lace and the layers can be seen through each other. If you can’t reach to the middle of the paper with your punch, cover the solid parts and create an illusion of a piece totally punched.

The embellishments in this layout are also made with punches. I decorated the edge of washi tape with a border punch. The flowers are made with a scalloped circle punch. I cut four pieces of the patterned paper and cut the petals loose by clipping little slits from the edge towards the center. Then I attached the layers with a brad and bended the petals a little to create 3D effect. I used the little circles made from punching the punchinella type paper as confetti to finish the layout.

About the Artist
Riikka Kovasin is a Finnish mixed media style scrapbooker who lives in Helsinki with her husband and two daughters. She’s happiest when she can combine her love for the beautiful products with the possibility to get messy with different paint media. She also loves to experiment with different, non-scrapbooking related products.
You can find Riikka also on her blog as well as Facebook, Twitter and Youtube.

_When scrapbooking with only one picture there is enough space to get some extra use of your favourite paper, an extra long title or journaling. In this case, it’s the title I wanted to focus on, with a eye-catching effect but also something that would give me hope for my collection of supplies. By just spelling out one short word each from a variety of different packs of letter stickers, I could get more use from a sheet of stickers that wouldn’t spell a whole title. It takes more planning to get out all those sticker sheets and figure out which fonts can spell what words, but after that stage, it’s rewarding to get another word from a set of stickers that can’t spell much really!

About the Artist
Diana, who is married and mother of two children, lives in a small village in The Netherlands.
Since 10 years scrapbooking is a big part of her life. Occasionally she loves to make cards with the scraps laying around on her desk.
She designs for cardandscrap.nl , and have a blog where she post on a regularly basis.

Your twenty-third challenge is to stretch your supplies! That might mean using tools you often ignore (like lesser-used designs of punches perhaps, but other things like stamps could be your weakness) or it might be a consumable product like stickers or paper that can be used for a clever look even when you don’t have a full pack or a full sheet. Entries close at the end of next Sunday, the 12th of May. Please check back on the 14th of May to see if you have won a prize.

Comment [3]

So far I haven’t joined the camp of scrapbookers who take pretty much all their photos with their phone, but I do take plenty with it. It’s just that I take a zillion with my ‘proper’ camera too! Though I don’t post anything near all of my phone photos to Instagram, I do tend to edit the images to squares, or take them in Hipstamatic, which only shoots square photos. And yet, I didn’t quite realise that square images are definitely in the minority when it comes to my albums. Just trying to find examples for this post proved a bit more challenging than I expected.

I have been on a kick recently of using my Instagram images having ordered a pack of prints from Origrami, and I have them sitting at my desk so perhaps being surrounded by the square photos made me think more of them had appeared on my pages! The project that did include plenty of squares in one place was my journal from last December, and I liked how the small square images meant I could still include plenty of photos even with the smaller page size. Useful!

Interestingly enough, the very first Glitter Girl Adventure featured a square photo, and I remember our discussion that this factor alone could make or break whether people were going to like the series! We had a lot of worried discussions in the weeks before making Glitter Girl live, actually. Maybe just a little overthinking, possibly due to my enthusiasm for a pretty oddball idea and then my surprise when my boss thought it sounded like a good idea. (Well, that’s what she said. It could have been that she was thinking something else entirely, like ‘where do I find these oddballs?’ but she was more polite about it than that!) Speaking of the boss…

And now for guest artist Kristina Nicolai-White, who is definitely pro-square when it comes to photos.

_I am addicted to square photos. Once I got my iPhone and started using the Hipstamatic app, I was done for. I was taking photos with it constantly. I grew even more enthralled with the arrival of Instagram. At this point, even if I am not instagramming my photo, I am still editing them in an app or program and cropping them into a square. There is just something that feels so right about it.
As a result, I have a lot of edited photos that are square. I really like the way they look on a scrapbook layout. (No surprise. I think I would like them anywhere really). I am an 8.5×11 scrapbooker, and I can fit two 4×4 inch square photos across the middle. If I do a two page layout, which I usually am doing, I like to do 4 across. If you are doing a 12×12 page, you can nicely fit three 4 inch photos across. or you can fit nine on the whole page._

_All of the photos I printed for this page, which I knew was going to be about how I capture pieces of life with my iPhone camera, turned out to have no people in them. I had not done that intentionally, but I really liked it once I realized that I had been doing that. For me, it really adds to my feeling that I really do capture every piece of my everyday, of my life, whether there are people around or not.
I used two plain kraft card stock sheets as the starting point for this line of photos. I created layers of papers and other bits to lift and accent the photos. I used the heavier pattern—the thick black and white stripe on the bottom to create the weight there rather than at the top. Most of the product used is neutral, grays, whites, cream, tans and a little black. I used the red pieces in the lower left corner, hoping that your eye is drawn to the orange in the farther upper right corner and then to the aqua in the lower right. All of the bits and pieces that contain words create somewhat of a sentiment if read all together. Capturing little moments that happen, awesome this & that._

About the Artist
Kristina Nicolai-White has been scrapbooking and memory keeping in various forms for most of her life. Founding and owning the online scrapbooking company Two Peas in a Bucket has kept her active and part of the scrapbooking industry for more than fifteen years. Kristina loves using her iPhone to document the craziness of her everyday life with three active teenage children, two giant dogs and her high school sweetheart husband. Her work is usually full of color, products and blurry photos. You can find more of Kristina’s work in her Two Peas gallery, of course, and her new blog We Blow Kisses.

Your twenty-second challenge is to scrap with squares! Entries close at the end of next Sunday, the 12th of May. Please check back on the 14th of May to see if you have won a prize.

Comment [1]

Whatever did we do before divided page protectors? I am not exactly sure. I didn’t sit around thinking I needed my page protectors divided into handy-dandy pockets, but they do seem to come in ever so useful that now I wouldn’t want to give them up.

I’m particularly fond of using them to go back to existing layouts and improve them with a bit more writing or supporting photos – or sometimes using them right alongside the process in a case like this where the photo is large but the story is also of significant length. The divided page protector makes room for both of those plus pretty paper and embellishment. Happy times!

Glitter Girl has a few tips for using divided page protectors to help with stacks of photos that you really want to get into your albums, and I applaud her doing that because well… that stack of a thousand photos she mentions in this video isn’t really shrinking much despite all the layouts I’ve made! Turns out a thousand is a pretty big number when it comes to photos to scrap. (Please see this page for further details on this Glitter Girl Adventure.)

And now for guest artist Linda Auclair, who is going a bit meta and scrapbooking about scrapbooking!

On National Scrapbooking Day a unique opportunity to interact with scrapbookers from around the world, unconstrained by the limits of packing and travel, is merely a click or two away. Participating in online challenges is one of the highlights of the holiday for me. I enjoy working with a set of guidelines defined by the challenger and find it incredibly freeing. Having an organized worktable and a variety of photos printed and ready to go are an advantage if there is a time limit involved – working within a specific “kit” of favorite products and papers that are close to hand makes it even easier. I have been working with divided pages a lot this year; creating weekly Project Life pages using a wide range of products specifically designed for this scrapbooking format alongside my favorite “traditional” products. My page for this challenge uses Echo Park Paper’s Photo Freedom collection, Happy Go Lucky. The addition of buttons, washi tape and twine personalizes the pre-printed elements and lets me tell my story without a lot of fuss. I embellished my scrapbook room photos with stickers and phrases from the collection. It always surprises me how quickly my divided page layouts come together, and I attribute that to being able to focus on one 4 ×6 section of the page at a time. My scrapbooking mantra has been “Glue and Go!” for a long time, and this format makes that philosophy a reality.

About the Artist
Linda Auclair has always loved pretty paper. Long before the scrapbooking hobby took over her life, she kept illustrated journals with photos and clippings. One of her favorite jobs was in the Product Development department of a greeting card company. Working with all those great artists, colors and textures drew her into the paper-crafting medium, and once the hobby took hold, there was no turning back. In the past decade, she has had the opportunity to work for a variety of companies, such as Fiskars, Creative Imaginations, Epiphany Crafts, and her current Design Team post at Echo Park Paper, as well as a number of online retailers. You can follow Linda via her blog and Pinterest.

Your twenty-first challenge is to divide your page! It might be with a divided page protector, but you could also use the idea of a blocked page design to inspire your work on a standard 12×12 or 8.5×11 page too. Entries close at the end of next Sunday, the 12th of May. Please check back on the 14th of May to see if you have won a prize.

Comment [3]

I suppose I could just be a big crafting contradiction, but I try to write it off as a need for variety: for as much as I love 4×6 prints for the majority of my photos, it can be rather fun to mix in smaller photos too. And I do love a strip from a photo booth!

Apparently I love a photo strip so much that I’ll also make one when it doesn’t come from a photo booth! Just printing a set of phone snaps in a row works in much the same way, and while it’s quite easy to do in Photoshop or other editing programmes, you can actually do this in a word processor and just drop them onto the page and pop them into a line then print!

This is one of my favourite small photo pages. The basic design can be used with one or two larger photos too, but the idea of plenty of small embellishments plus a grouping of small photos just keeps everything delicate and detailed.

For this challenge, I set guest artist Kelly Purkey the task of using this page sketch, which she interpreted in her own style by taking it to a smaller scale.

My mindset has been in smaller photos lately since I’ve been in Project Life mode and the size I use is 3×4. So I picked out two photos I had printed and made them work for Shimelle’s fun sketch. I created the same type of cluster but on a smaller scale and anchored down at the bottom of the page. I used her three groups of accents to guide me for adding some stamped words. The stamps that I used on the layout are all from my new Kelly Purkey release at Simon Says Stamp as well as the stickers and the sequins. If you are ever in New York City, I highly recommend tracking down a Dough doughnut – you won’t be sorry!

Kelly Purkey is a graphic designer who has recently launched her own line of paper crafting products at SimonSaysStamp.com. Her products strive to help you create projects that are bright and trendsetting with top notch designs. You can find Kelly at KellyPurkey.com and on Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest as ‘kellypurkey’.

Your twentieth challenge is to scrapbook smaller photos! Entries close at the end of next Sunday, the 12th of May. Please check back on the 14th of May to see if you have won a prize.

Comment [1]

I’m tempted to treat paint as the scrapbook supply with the greatest potential for mess, but I’ve actually made a lot more mess with bits of paper and those pesky backings from pop dots ending up all over the place than any paint disaster that has ever existed on my table! But still, there is something a little intimidating about putting paint to pretty paper. Maybe because it’s a case when it could go horribly, horribly wrong.

I’ve actually only had the horrible, horrible happen once, and that would be when I reached across a layout-in-progress to answer the phone and knocked over the paint bottle, spilling at least half the bottle and covering more than half of the page. I don’t remember who was on the phone and I hope they have forgiven me for the panic that ensued. This was when I adopted a preventative measure and started adding the paint to a teacup so it would be harder to topple and highly unlikely to splash everywhere since there wouldn’t be much paint in the cup at any one time. It has saved many a layout from an untimely end, I’m sure, because I am often the least coordinated person in the room.

Here’s a bit of evidence of my tea cup phase! It’s actually something I’m looking forward to returning to as I get all my supplies back in place, tea cups included. The Jenni Bowlin paints have sadly been discontinued by Ranger, but I stocked up when that was announced and they are still holding up well. Provided you can keep a good seal on your acrylics, they can keep for a very long time, so make sure there’s not paint on the seal of the bottle and you’ll be all set.

And now to guest artist Corrie Jones, who probably doesn’t throw paint over her layouts when the phone rings!

I love working with paint. I find it to be one of the best mediums to get the most out of my supplies. Not only does paint work perfectly to color chipboard, wood veneer and plain Thickers, but it also gives me complete creative freedom to create custom backgrounds for my pages. The more and more I use paints, either acrylic or watercolors, the less patterned paper I use and the more “me” I feel like my pages are becoming. For this page, I used paints to create an ombre background with red paint and gesso. I also used gold paint to give the butterfly circles some random color. Lastly, I painted white fabric butterflies different shades of teal to compliment the pink. I challenge you to use some paint on your pages! Allow yourself to play with colors and embrace the brushstrokes.

About the Artist
Corrie Jones lives with her husband and three active daughters in the suburbs of Atlanta where she spends a considerable amount of time playing a taxi driver and trying to stay cool in the heat. She has been scrapbooking since 2009 and has found that it forces her to remember how amazing this life and world are, even when things aren’t happy and perfect. Beside scrapbooking, Corrie enjoys photographing her kids, reading on the beach, and eating sushi with friends.
Corrie enjoys being on design teams and can currently be found over at Two Peas in a Bucket as a part of the Garden Girl team or on her blog, You, Me & Crazy.

Your nineteenth challenge is to paint it up! Entries close at the end of next Sunday, the 12th of May. Please check back on the 14th of May to see if you have won a prize.

Comment [1]

Sometimes I worry about the things I repeat ad nauseum in videos and blog posts. At this point, I don’t really need to tell you that I love the power of three in design. I almost feel like I should just let you have a go at identifying just how many different three-is-a-magic-number moments can be found on a given layout.

But then again, for a long time I felt I was explaining inked edges in every single video and yet I still get at least a couple emails every week asking why I ink my edges and where to get that tool that I use for the job. (It’s the Ranger ink applicator with the foam option, by the way. I wasn’t convinced until I had to demo with one for a convention once, and instantly my mind was changed and I understood exactly why this product existed. No more messy and out of control inking by using the ink pad directly against the paper.) So I will continue to mention the power of three now and then, and I can’t imagine a time when you won’t see me using three areas of embellishment or three splashes of the same colour or three dots in a triangle on most of my pages.

This particular design shows just how much a little grouping of three can dress up an otherwise very simple and static layout design. In this case it’s three circles, but that’s not a necessity. You can replace the circles with any shape of embellishments you like!

And now for guest artist Christy Strickler, who has unknowingly combined at least three of our challenges into one page!

I used to approach scrapbook challenges with a bit of trepidation. This was especially true if the challenge was timed. Experience has taught me that focused choices produce layouts I love in a short frame of time. Today I was challenged to create a layout using eyelets and brads. My first step is always to choose my photos and then my supplies. I make it easy on myself by choosing the first photo that inspires me and the first collection of papers that fit the story. I often create vision boards on Pinterest. Set a time limit and choose an idea to lift. I chose to be inspired by some greeting cards which featured eyelet embellishments (See here ). As you work on your layout, don’t second guess your supply or design choices. Embrace any imperfections as they come along. I like to machine stitch to save time, but I can’t always sew straight. Instead of letting some of the imperfect lines on the circles get to me, I chose to stitch a few extra wonky lines to make it all look intentional. Your goal is always to create a layout with a story to share. Keep focused and don’t let options overwhelm you.

About the Artist
Christy Strickler currently resides in Nassau, Bahamas with her husband, son and three striped island cats. She designs for Scrapbook News and Review Magazine, Get It Scrapped and is a JBS Mercantile Ambassador. You can find her at My Scrapbook Evolution or on Twitter.

Your eighteenth challenge is to embrace the power of three! Entries close at the end of next Sunday, the 12th of May. Please check back on the 14th of May to see if you have won a prize.

Comment [1]

Hands up: who collects fabric in much the same way as paper? I know I am not the only one. I am slightly better at using the paper than the fabric!

I haven’t had my sewing machine set up for quite some time, until just last week, so I’m happy to be venturing back into a more traditional way to use fabric on all sorts of projects, but I have to admit there are plenty of times when the fabric on my layouts doesn’t include a single stitch to sew it into place. Glue and staples work pretty well with fabrics, and I mostly love their texture amongst all the paper of a page. I need to find a way to get my fabric stash organised again and actually get using it, including a bit more going into my albums.

For as much as I love fabric, I think I have only filmed two videos that feature it! This example is Glitter Girl’s specific answer to incorporating fabric on your pages with ease – and sewing isn’t even required. I think if I were keeping a weekly Project Life album, I would be tempted to use fabric quite often as a way to vary the textures in the pockets. Though I would be tempted to start cutting up fabrics from ‘real life’ as a means of documentation, and I’m not sure how well it would go over in the house for our clothes, table cloth, curtains, and tea towels to be missing random 3×4 patches! (Please see this page for further details on this Glitter Girl Adventure.)

And now for guest artist Jen Kinkade, who clearly hasn’t had her sewing machine stowed away in a box for several months!

I love the texture that fabric can bring to any project!! When I decided to do this project challenge, I happily dove into my stash!! :) I was inspired by triangle trends I would see all over Pinterest, so I immediately thought to apply this trend to my layout using fabric. I began cutting varying sizes and colors of isosceles triangles, while knowing I wanted a few bigger ÒmainÓ triangles. Then, I placed them around my white cardstock until I was happy with my layout. Before I adhered the triangles, I stamped a few triangles on my cardstock using the Mama Elephant Trifecta stamp collection. I lightly adhered the triangles with some adhesive to keep them in place while I machine stitched each one down. I added the photo of my family using foam pop dots by American Crafts. The colorful triangles also complement the fun, summery colors in the photo of my family. I had some ÒleftoverÓ white triangle pieces from a recent project I had cut with my Silhouette Cameo and decided to use watercolor and acrylic paints to custom color a few triangles to fill in the spaces of the stamped images since they fit the space perfectly. I finished my layout by adhering my ÒLOVEÓ title and adding wood veneer embellishments from Freckled Fawn. I always finish a layout with a few paint splatters and/or drips!! ;) **Note: I trimmed off about 3/4 of an inch from 2 sides of my white cardstock then added the arrow patterned paper by Studio Calico behind it to complete the triangle theme of my layout.

About the Artist
Jen lives in West Virginia with her husband and 3 daughters. She loves all things paper, glue, and photography related and loves trying out new scrapbooking techniques. Jennifer currently designs for Two Peas in a Bucket, Pink Paislee, Ormolu, and scrapperin—a German-based scrapbooking line. You can find more from Jen on her blog, at Two Peas, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.

Your seventeenth challenge is to scrapbook with fabric! Entries close at the end of next Sunday, the 12th of May. Please check back on the 14th of May to see if you have won a prize.

Comment [3]

I think it’s still pretty common to get started in this craft as an ‘event scrapbooker’, right? I focused on events for years – birthdays, graduations, weddings, performances, parties, and that sort of thing. And I actually think that’s a perfectly useful and practical way to scrapbook! It does, after all, create a record of the special events in life. But there is also this lovely simplicity of recording more everyday moments against a world that continues to pick up speed and technology. Scrapping from that perspective can be a sort of ongoing gratitude exercise – a way to slow down and pause life and spend time making something that in some way celebrates your gratitude for some simple, lovely moment in life.

That either makes complete sense or is total rubbish, but it is the sort of motivation I find ongoing in creating pages for my albums – wanting to create a record that keeps things humble and acknowledged and reminds me to be grateful for all the good even when life tries to get busy or stressful or pull my focus away from what’s really important. Even for pages that are more traditional ‘event’ scrapping, like a birthday party, there’s now that awareness while I’m making pages, working with photos, and writing the journaling. I think this kind of scrapping keeps me more grounded in life, and though I could always do with more grounding, it is a huge help to finding some balance in this crazy world!

It’s often the pages with the more lengthy journaling that really brings home the gratitude concept for me when I turn the pages of my albums. With travel experiences especially, I find that I write a great deal on the road about comparing and contrasting my life at home with whatever I’m experiencing that day, and there’s a a certain tone of learning and appreciating and being more aware that creeps in – it is what makes travel so meaningful to me and I suppose that’s a bit of a personal journey it itself. In any case, the writing for this project was one of those instances. (Please see this page for further details on this Glitter Girl Adventure. The journaling can be found here, in the form that I recorded while we were still on the road. I made a few changes when I printed it for the layout, because I always want to change something when I re-read my own writing. Which is a dangerous compulsion for a blogger, I tell you, but that’s an entirely different conversation.)

And now for guest artist Marianna Barone, who even has a step-by-step process for scrapbooking with gratitude but not taking all the live-long day!

Scrapbooking feeds my creative soul. I like nothing better than to sit down with a stack of photos and some brand new supplies and let my creative spirit soar. Best case scenario, I should have a pretty bit of paper that reflects my memories and my feelings within an hour or so. Worst case, I sit among the stacks of pictures and patterns and think, “How do I do this again?” Like most of you, I could probably scrap 1000 photos and never have to run out and buy a thing. All that product can be stifling to creativity when the possibilities are endless. Enter scrapbooking challenges. They help me narrow down my creative choices and focus on being productive. Here are five steps to getting that challenge page scrapped… fast.

Step One: Find a challenge that speaks to you.
A challenge about gratitude? That speaks to me on a soul level. Not sure if I have a photo for that! What else am I grateful for? Laughter! So I went in search of a picture about the people in my life that make me laugh. That’s how this page started. Gratitude also makes me think of Thanksgiving. Have you scrapped those photos yet? What else are you thankful for?

Step Two: What’s the first thing you think of when you look your photo?
Is it love? What color is love? Red? Pink? Maybe you’re thinking about turkey? Turkey is brown…and gold. Ah….autumn colors. Aside from gaining direction from the challenge at hand, I also look to my photo to guide my creative picks, A seaside photo with pretty blues? I grabbed my newest, prettiest collection that I knew had blue in it and just decided, “I will use this.” Honestly, when you want to actually get a page done, you have to settle. There are probably several “perfect” choices in your stash. Stick with the first one that looks good. This just cut an hour off your average time, right?

Step Three: Is the challenge technique or embellishment driven?
The problem of deciding what to add to your page has just been solved for you. Recipe challenges are great for telling you exactly what needs to be on your page. Look at a page you have pinned or bookmarked. Copy that design and embellishment placement. Groups of threes and visual triangles are also solid design principles. I had a bunch of matching diecuts for the collection I picked. I dumped them out of the package and thought…banner. So that’s what I made.

Step Four: What’s your title?
Glitter Girl will tell you to use Thickers. They make every page look good. Just ran out? Black sticker letters work on every page unless your background is black cardstock. If that’s the case, use white sticker letters.

Step Five: What’s your story?
I bet you’ve been reliving the memory half the time you’ve been working on the page. Write down your thoughts or your memory on your page.

Another memory captured! Sit back and admire your creation.

About the Artist
Marianne Barone (aka Scrapnatya) lives an hour east of New York City with her husband and two teenage daughters. She has been scrapbooking and paper crafting for over fourteen years years and tries to carve out time to be creative every day. She is currently on the design team at the Color Me Scrappy Challenge Blog and hosts a weekly stash busting challenge on the General Scrappin’ board at Two Peas In A Bucket. She shares her scrapbooking creations on her blog at marianne in the moment.

Your sixteenth challenge is to record hope or gratitude! Entries close at the end of next Sunday, the 12th of May. Please check back on the 14th of May to see if you have won a prize.

Comment [3]