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

This week, Glitter Girl’s quest comes from a mother and grandmother of all girls who is expecting her very first grandson any time now. What’s a scrapper to do with years of feminine stash accumulated and a new challenge of how to make it work with boy photos? Embrace a bit of pink and floral with all things baby boy, I think. Unless you purely want an excuse to go shopping for new stash, and that’s perfectly acceptable too!

I haven’t really changed my buying habits on adding a boy to the family and this adventure made me stop and think about why that is the case. I think it’s largely down to not tending to buy themed papers, so I have stacks of dots and stripes and chevrons but very little in the realm of princesses or tractors. Of course there are some themed papers that capture my eye and I will still pick up, but as a rule of thumb, I go with patterns I know will be versatile no matter what photos I feel like scrapbooking on any given day.

Of course, if you’re going to challenge me to use some florals, I’m not going to waste an opportunity to pull out those Sassafras floral papers that remind me of the soft sheets on the guest bed whenever we visited someone as a child. I think large florals with a more organic shape like this (be they truer to an actual flower or quite abstract like a watercolour) are easier to work with on a boy page than something very graphic, orderly, or closer to a cartoon style, but you may find otherwise.

I also wanted to try a different composition on this page as I’ve been in a bit of a repeat mode lately with my boxes of paper. I love my boxes, but it is so refreshing to change it up now and then, so I wanted to work from the edges of the paper into the middle rather than the other way around. I really enjoyed this composition and the next page I picked up, I went straight to an edge without thinking about it, so soon you may need to remind me to work some other way again.

Jessica at Scraptastic spotted my love of pandas on Instagram and sent me their February kit that includes the adorable panda flair. I really liked how the cards had square corners and the cardstock is nice and thick! (It was a lovely gift and there was no obligation for me to use it, share it, or review it, but I was very impressed with the quality and the designs. I’m going to try it in Wonder Boy’s baby book next, I think.)

My last thought on this whole idea of ‘girl’ or ‘boy’ papers and supplies: it is totally up to you. Personally I have no problem using pink or florals or whatever on a page for the boys of my life, but that’s me. I also feel okay with it being a way to show that my pages are something I made and florals and pink are very me, so that’s okay. But if the boys of your life would be offended or it doesn’t feel right to you, then do what does work! Obviously! I enjoyed the challenge though, and you could always try it once and make your decision going forward for what does and doesn’t work for your albums. Happy scrapping either way!

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It has been such a delight and an inspiration to see the pages posted from our weekend of challenges! These have now closed, and 353 layouts were posted. Hurrah for all that crafting and creating and memory keeping. If you posted your work, you’ll receive an email over the next week with a little something I hope will help you with further pages too. If you want to mark your calendar for the next time, then that’s easy – the 7th of May for (Inter)National Scrapbook Day! (And again there will be two days of challenges and they will remain open until the end of the following weekend.)

Anyway! It’s Monday so there is a new challenge here right now and you don’t need to wait for weekends or crafty holidays! You just need letters. You have letters, right? You need letters!

This week, I challenge you to scrapbook with lots of letters. Use letter stickers, stamps, or pens; spell actual words or just use all your leftovers as a design element. Everything else is completely up to you, so you can take your inspiration in any direction you like! A few years ago, the page above was a letter-sticker-dominant design I liked so much I used it twice, and it might actually be one I return to for this week’s challenge, now that I think about it! To get you started with all these letters, take a look at these examples from contributing designer Meghann Andrew and guest artist Tracy McLennon.

Ireland is such a lovely place in which to travel- its beauty is astounding and people are so welcoming. I had originally planned on sharing a layout about my first trip to Ireland, when I was 17, however, I greatly overestimated the quality of photos back in 2000. To spare you having to view blurry pictures, I’m sharing a layout about my most recent visit to Ireland, for a weekend trip to Dublin with my best friend.

Since this week’s challenge is to use a lot of letters, I’m here to show you how you can get the same effect without breaking into your most-cherished packs of Thickers, using a die-cutting machine. I chose words from our trip- the things that stood out to me the most, including places we toured, restaurants we ate at and even the weather. After I printed my photos, and arranged them neatly in a grid on the left side of my layout, I began typing and placing all of my words in Silhouette Studio, keeping them in the same sans-serif font family, and leaving spaces to add Thickers from the True Stories collection for extra dimension, my journaling and my title.

Each individual line was then backed with patterned paper from Starshine, True Stories, and the Shimelle collections to add a lot of color to my mainly-neutral photos. I love how easy it is to mix and match the three collections on my projects! Using such bold colors and patterns on the right side allowed me to keep my embellishment fairly simple, and just a few elements finished off my page.
- Meghann

It’s not often that I have great photos to scrapbook for St Patrick’s Day, but last year was the exception for sure. I got some beautiful photos of some equally beautiful people…my in-laws. With their Irish blood, they love to celebrate St Patrick’s Day and last year we just happened to be with them to celebrate and capture how sweet they are.

I used a hodge podge of different letters to create my title and I just think it suits the photo and their love for each other perfectly! I love mixing lots of pattern, texture and colour, this layout and it’s super fun nature let me do that with a rainbow of colours.
- Tracy

You have a week to complete the challenge and share a link – but of course you’re welcome to set your own time schedule. Whatever keeps you happy and creative!

Today’s Guest Artist: Tracy McLennon loves papercrafting, vanilla milkshakes, and musicals. You can find more from Tracy on Instagram, Twitter, and her blog.

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Contributing designer Nicole Nowosad joins us today for one more perspective of phone camera fun for scrapbooking! And success – her editing app of choice is something different! I’m going to download it this weekend to give it a try.

In this busy world, I will admit that I often don’t bring out my ‘big girl’ camera. I often rely on my iPhone photos to capture those everyday moments that I really do want to remember the most.

I actually find that I take fewer ‘staged’ photos using my little old phone and when I use my camera, things are much more posed and less everyday. I really want to be able to share the normal, everyday moments more with my family so that’s why I appreciate my phone photos so much more than I had ever thought I would.

There are so many great apps out there for phones so that we can edit, resize and even print without moving to another device. I really love being able to resize my photos easily while waiting for a soccer game to start while I can also take a quick photo of how my daughter keeps busy while her brothers are out playing ball.

The concept for this scrapbook page came from just some simple photos I came across on my phone. I wanted to use a fun way to document these moments and decided to edit my photos in an app called PicFX and mount on cardstock cut so that the resemble Instax photos or mini polaroids. I added some small detail to each frame with my Starshine roller stamp and then created my page around the grid of photos.

I chose to do a few different edits to these photos. Originally there was lots going on in some of the photos. I used the app to zoom in and crop the photo of my daughter jumping so lots of the busy-ness was removed and there was more of a focus on the action in the photo and not so much all the other ‘stuff’ that didn’t apply to my final design. I also used the app to choose the size for all my photos, so they would all crop down to the same size, even though they are a different size originally.

I also love using this app to filter my photos if they are less than desirable! The way the sun was moving during the walk we took on this particular day, even though the photos were taken in a relative thirty minute timespan, cast very different shades in the photos. I used PicFX to choose a common filter and applied it to all the resized photos and now they are more cohesive and work. Changing photos to black and white would have the same effect if you have a mixture of odd color or pattern in a set of image you want to feature on the same scrapbook page.

I didn’t add a lot of journaling as I really do feel that the photos tell the story of the happy fun time we were sharing out walking in our neighbourhood and just spending time together. I chose embellishments and a title that highlight the theme of the photos from the Shimelle and Starshine collections.

Do you have a favourite page with photos you snapped on your phone that you probably wouldn’t have taken the time to photograph with your camera? We’d love to see those pages so please share them in the comments! Or tell us about your favourite photo editing apps in case we haven’t discovered something we absolutely need to download.

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Looking over what I’ve scrapbooked in the last year or so, what is your percentage of photos taken on your phone versus a camera that is just a camera? If we don’t count that one year of Project Life documentation, my actual camera is still winning, but the gap is closing – it’s probably forty percent phone and sixty percent camera for me. My dedicated camera still wins simply because the quality is better and I’m better at using it, while I tend to reach for my phone when I need to snap something quickly and I aim purely for the speed and my composition and exposure and anything else pretty all just goes out the window. So I edit. Of course there is an app for that. In fact, there are roughly eleven zillion. I asked today’s guest designer Gretchen Henninger to share how she edits her phone photos and my entire plan was that we would show you at least two apps because there would be two of us and there are roughly eleven zillion apps so it would be a start.

We both use the same app. Of course we do. Let’s see how many of you are already using this one too!

Here’s my original photo. I wanted to snap a picture that showed this entire packhorse situation of backpack and toddler, and preferably with a happy face on the toddler. That means I have to be quick, so this is what I ended up with. It’s crooked and the colour is pretty bland and perhaps someday someone will wonder why you can actually see my photo in so many of my pictures but it’s going to keep happening because I can’t get on board the with entire concept of a selfie stick, which is something for a whole other day.

My first edit to this photo was to straighten it and crop it, both of which I just did right there in my camera roll.

Then I loaded it into PicTapGo, which looks like this. It’s basically the phone version of Totally Rad Actions, the Photoshop editing plug-in I’ve been using for a long time. You don’t get that level of control, but you get a lot of options and every single filter can be layered and dialled up or down in intensity. You can also save combinations of filters you like and the app will automatically show you the last three combinations you’ve used without you saving anything, so if you want the second photo to match the first, you don’t have to repeat all the steps. That’s what I did with the two photos for this layout. When you’re happy with the edits, it’s just a click to save it to your camera roll or post to social media.

I printed both photos on a single 5×7 sheet on my home printer and scrapped them with papers from the Dear Lizzy Happy Place line. I hadn’t been sure what I would use this line for until things were a bit more spring and summer here, but then I realised how much I love the greens in this collection. I need to go back and get more sheets of the green patterns. The shades are really lovely, and I am totally saying that the tropical fruit pattern fits perfectly with journaling about how I now can’t leave the house without multiple snacks in my bag. Even if on days when it’s packed this full, the snacks must be sturdier than tropical fruit. I’m still going with it.

Now I edited my photos because they were just a bit lacklustre from being taken so quickly, but Gretchen has a specific challenge situation she finds herself in not uncommonly. Basically because her husband is a rock star.

I love using my camera phone to capture everyday moments, or evenings out when carrying a full-sized DSLR would be a nuisance. I edit almost every camera photo I take with PicTapGo. With a few quick taps I can lighten, sharpen, and crop a picture and have it ready to post on social media or print for scrapping.

I struggled with the lighting in these photos that I took of my husband on stage. I played around a bit and decided to use the Metropolis filter, which converted the photo to black and white and sharpened the contrast.

With the distracting colors gone, I was able to pick my papers and get to work scrapping this fun event. I decided to use a star-studded background: Miss Kate Camping Overlays, cut on my Silhouette, and a mix of product from Shimelle’s True Stories collection and Simple Stories’ A Charmed Life.

I added emphasis to each of the stars by layering them smaller embellishments like Studio Calico wood veneers and buttons. After all, my husband is the star of my life.
-Gretchen

We’d love to hear what apps you love for editing photos taken on your camera before you scrapbook them! Even if you’re another PicTapGo fan!

Today’s Guest Artist: Gretchen Henninger loves knitting, hiking, and photography. You can find more from Gretchen on Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and her blog.

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I’m not sure if ten challenges is enough for you, so why don’t we go ahead and have our regularly scheduled weekly scrapbooking challenge too! (Don’t worry, there is still time to enter the challenges from the past weekend – they don’t close until the end of this coming weekend, and there might be some little tokens of appreciation coming your way if you share your work!) Challenge weekends always make me think about what has changed in the time I’ve been scrapping, and this week we’re looking at something that has definitely changed behind the photos. When I started scrapping, we were all shooting film, usually in quite big and clunky cameras, and part of our scrapbooking process was that wait to develop the film and the surprise when you picked up a pack of prints to see what you had snapped! Now we wait less than a second to see what we’ve shot, and we don’t even need to carry a separate camera if we don’t want to. This week, we’re taking a look at all the things we now do with photos taken on our phones!

And now, on to the challenge! This week, make a little progress with a never-ending stack of photos. I challenge you this week to simply scrap three photos on one page. Everything else is completely up to you, so you can take your inspiration in any direction you like! A few years ago, I posted a sketch and video for the layout above, and it’s still a design I find practical on my pages. To get you started on this week’s challenge, take a look at these examples from contributing designer May Flaum and guest artist Lisa Hausman.

Memory keeping has changed a lot with smart phones. Having a camera everywhere from school drop off to grocery store runs means that I almost always have a way to capture a moment. The best part? The quality of those cameras keeps getting better and now I print out my regular camera photos alongside my iPhone camera photos and often use them together in layouts as I have here today. Which brings me to my favorite number when creating a single page scrapbook layout: three. It’s so easy to work with three pictures on a single page design, and it lets me get a few more shots onto a page while still having plenty of room for embellishing fun.

On this layout I have three very random pictures that capture my daughter as she is right now as she turns 11. I love documenting what my kids are into right now every year or two. Looking back it has changed so much, and yet there are things that remain. Those differences and similarities are favorites, and these kinds of pages are family favorites. A favorite tip of mine when working with three 4×6 photos is to use thin strips of patterned paper at the top and bottom (or sides, depending on photo orientation) of your pictures. Use scraps, or patterned paper like this that is designed in thin strips!
- May

I have to admit that most of the photos I take these days are with my phone, so it was no problem to find three that I wanted to use and as soon as I saw the Shimelle Starshine collection with this amazing constellation paper, I knew that these three photos from Amsterdam would be perfect. Printing the photos at 3×4 ensured that I could fit three onto a single page and still leave myself plenty of room to showcase the pretty products on my page. This smaller size also helps when the photos are not great quality, which can often be the case with phone photos taken inside – or using the front camera.

I added in some new Simple Stories paper from the Heart collection to really bring out the colours in the globe that Atlas is carrying, and some gold elements along with veneer stars and a couple of items from the Starshine seemed the perfect additions to support my star theme and the fact that I’m recording something I love. In this way, the story is less about the event of visiting the Royal Palace and more about me, telling another little snippet of my story.
- Lisa

You have a week to complete the challenge and share a link – but of course you’re welcome to set your own time schedule. Whatever keeps you happy and creative!

I’ll see you tomorrow to share how I took on this challenge!

Today’s Guest Artist: Lisa Hausmann loves all things gold, messy clusters, and stars – obviously! You can find more from Lisa on Instagram, Pinterest, and her blog.

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Just so you know this definitely happens here, the layout I was working on to share with you at 4pm has gone horribly wrong. I’ve reached that point where I need to look at something else rather than stare continually at something that just isn’t working for me. So I’ve made a little change to this final challenge. I want you to challenge me.

I’m going to scrapbook the photo above. It was taken Friday, so the story is all very clear in my mind and I will happily share that with you when I finish the page. But I will take all my design suggestions from the comments on this post. Feel free to give me your choices of things like photo size, techniques, colours, specific supplies, motifs – whatever you would like to see me try. I’ll wait just a bit to get started, and I’ll share the page as soon as it’s complete!

As for how you can then take part in the challenge – you need to choose one of the other comments left and use those suggestions for your challenge. You can read them all and pick or you can just close your eyes and point and see what you get in a lucky dip! It’s the Choose-Your-Own-Challenge!

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Hands up if you still have some of the original American Crafts Shimelle collection in your stash! I’ve asked three inspiring crafters to share their ideas for putting those supplies to use. They’ve made me want to go back to those patterns and embellishments, so I hope they get you crafting too! Please welcome Stephanie Baxter, Steffi Ried, and Jana McCarthy!

Stephanie says: There are a couple of birthdays on my calendar that always fall when I’m busiest and can catch me unawares if I haven’t prepared for them in advance of all the hustle and bustle! I decided to make a birthday gift box ahead of time so that I can just pop the gift in and have it ready to go in no time at all. I’ve been loving looking on Pinterest at all the gift-wrapping inspiration lately, feeling super inspired by all the lovely paper, doilies, and die-cuts that I’ve seen layered on top of gift boxes. I used an empty box that my Studio Calico Project Life kit comes in as the foundation and built up layers using various beautiful pieces from Shimelle’s first collection, adding in a couple of doilies and other bits and bobs to finish it off. I didn’t glue anything down but kept it all together with a wooden peg instead, so that the recipient can reuse each piece if they want to. It’s the gift that keeps on giving!

Stephanie’s first scrapbook page was about her high school prom and made in maroon in 2005. See more of her work at her blog.

Steffi says: And here comes my layout. The name of the layout is “Good Morning”. I used a snapshot from my little girl in the morning with her hot chocolate in the kitchen to capture a sweet moment in our everyday life. The embellishments and colours from this beautiful collection fits perfectly with my photos and the theme. They made it so much fun to scrap!

Steffi lives in the south part of Germany. You can see more of her work on her “blog”: (www.steffiried.blogspot.de) or on Instagram.

Jana says: I really love the greens and blues in this collection, perfect to scrap photos from my boys! This photo was taken on a lovely walk into a little forest. We had a great trip and so much fun, but we needed to take some breaks and just enjoy the moment! That’s what I hoped to capture on my page.

Jana’s first scrapbook page was about her youngest son and made in kraft with a touch of blue in 2013. See more of her work at her blog.

Now it’s your turn – and hopefully you could see this coming! It’s time to craft with that first Shimelle collection. If you don’t have any on hand, please don’t worry and just enjoy any of the other challenges! But if you do, it’s time to move something from your stash to your albums! And we’d absolutely love to see what you make. You’ll inspire someone else to get using that stash!

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Welcome back! Ready for another challenge? This time we’re going on a colourful adventure. I asked Jo Boland to choose a colour story and she came up with a combination perfect for hitting the road near or far. We wonder what adventure of yours springs to mind when you see these colours.

When I think of travel layouts I think of the colours red, light blue, and cream, I think it’s because of the colours associated with airmail labels. I love this colour combination so for me using it on a layout makes me happy.

I used the Hubble paper for the cream and Rosetta paper for the blue, both from the Starshine collection and pulled an old red polka dot paper from my stash, layered these on the page and stitched them into place.

Next I built up my layout with the photo, journaling and title, then added clusters of embellishments around the page pulling in pops of colours from the photo. I made cork embellishments with the Starshine stamp set, VersaMark ink and AC Zing embossing powder, which I cut / punched out and adhered to the clusters. I love the texture the cork brings to the layout and I’m really happy to have another story documented.
-Jo

One of my favourite layouts from my own albums uses this colour scheme too, and works with plenty of patterned paper scraps. Designs that let me use papers I’ve already used elsewhere without looking repetitive in my albums always make me feel better about my shopping habits!

When I created this page, I only had a Big Shot in terms of manual die cutting, and this post shares how I used the WeR letterpress plates with that. I’ve since used the WeR Evolution with the letterpress platform and it does work very well! I should do a video comparing the two machines perhaps. Until then, Amy has a video sharing the WeR letterpress process if it’s something you’d like to see.

Now it’s your turn, of course! What adventure (big or small!) suits this colour scheme for you? Create a new scrapbook page using these colours in any style and share it with us!

Today’s Guest Artist: Jo Boland loves making stuff, vintage style, and drinking coffee. You can find more from Jo on Instagram, Pinterest, and her blog.

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