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

Today, please welcome Jamie Leija, a fellow scrapbooker in love with seeing the world and scrapbooking it with a globe motif or two. But of course it’s best when we can get even more from our supplies and not need to book a holiday just to have an excuse to use a new stamp (though I won’t blame you if you do!) so I’m delighted that Jamie has come up with five new projects to share that all use globes and aren’t about travel at all. Stay right where you are and be justified in that globe stamp anyway! Take it away, Jamie.

I’m a traveller. Therefore, I’m addicted to travel motifs. My favourites are geotags, compasses and lately globes. The Shimelle collection features some really great globes. But I didn’t want to use them on only my travel pages. Instead, I want to show you how versatile they can be! From your everyday and ordinary, to the most special people in your life, globes are a great alternative to the stars, hearts and geometrics of this world (pun intended).

I turned to my love of quotes and sentiments to act as starting points for these projects. I found quotes about the world, earth and even distance to use as my inspiration for each project.

Light up the World
I love this sentiment. Just about everyone you love can light up your world. My nephew definitely lights up mine. Pairing the globe stamp and this fantastic Lemon & Ginger
(lightbulb) patterned paper was a no brainer once I settled on this title. Also, the stamp itself reads See the World but it was simple to print a bit of text and paste over top of the “See the…” portion of the sentiment.

See the World as an Adventure
Inherently, I think globes imply adventure and the unknown. Isn’t life itself a grand adventure with a myriad of unknowns. I can’t think of a better icon to help convey that message. Also, here’s a killer combo to consider: Shimelle’s stamps paired with Hero Arts Ombre ink pads! I love love love how the stamped globe turned out.

Change the World
The world is a tough place. And I personally need reminders that you can’t let it get you down. This quote completely resonated with me when I found it. It’s a great one to use for a simple picture of a lovely smile. An equally awesome quote to consider: “be the change you want to see in the world”. Pair a globe with that sentiment and you’re golden!

However Near or Far
The great thing about the globe metal die from Shimelle’s first collection is that it’s the perfect size for your standard A2 card. I think globes are a perfectly lovely icon to include in a card to a friend far away. And sending notes to friends is one of my favorite pastimes. This one is zooming off to NYC as this is posted.

Ends of the Earth
Have you ever spread your arms as far apart as they go and told someone “this is how much I love you?” A globe paired with the sentiment “I love you to the ends of the earth” is the greeting card equivalent. For this card, I had fun making my own patterned background using the phrase stamp, some ink and Shimelle’s pens..

I had so many more ideas for projects with globes, all using a quote or sentiment as a starting point. Here are a five others you could consider for your next globe project:

“You colour my world” – Awesome for a person, a pet, or even a thing
“The world is brighter because of you” – Make this tongue in cheek and feature a non-living item or stick with the traditional a document someone you love
“It’s me and you against the world” – Easily used for a page about a relationship, romantic or platonic, I think it would still apply
“Embrace your journey” – Not all journey’s are travel related, so focus on the what and the how that got you to where you are today
“Watch with glittering eyes, the whole world around you” – I love this Roald Dahl quote. I think it would be completely awesome for a baby page!

I hope you’ll look at globes with eyes anew, and consider them for more than just your travel pages.

Jamie Leija (said Lay-ha) is a native Texan who loves to travel and scrapbook. She’s lived in London, Thailand, and Spain and has travelled to so many other places. In Jamie’s mind, traveling and scrapbooking go hand in hand. She loves that one hobby supports the other and that scrapbooking also lets her relive and share all of those fabulous travel moments. Jamie has been scrapbooking for the past seventeen years and has been published in Scrapbook Inspirations Idea Book, Scrapbook Trends, CARDS, and Create publications. She is currently on the creative teams for Scrapbook Circle and Simple Scrapper.. You can see more of her work on her blog, Instagram or YouTube.

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Oh, 12×12 scrapbook pages! How I love thee! So much so that I made another straight away. This feels like a massive victory.

This time it’s a bit further from my comfort zone but hopefully not so far that it doesn’t look like my work. That was my aim, anyway! The difference is I just had one teeny, tiny photograph to scrapbook, but I still wanted it in my album that has 12×12 pages rather than in a smaller format like pocket pages, Project Life, mini book, or planner. I love 12×12. But I just had this tiny photo from my day out with Barbara and her daughter while they were in London, from a selfie taken with her phone and printed on the spot with tiny little printer that makes photo stickers – the Polaroid Zip with Zink ink. It’s very cute and fits in her handbag!

Again I’m working with the Mind the Scrap September kit, which they sent me to have some fun. (Check this post for another video and page, plus shopping details for the items in the kit.) I just added some red acrylic paint and some mint green mist for my finishing touches. I love it when something goes to plan like using that London map paper and managing to get the actual location for our day still showing on the page. Moments of small scrapping happiness are important, right?

I hope this still looks like my style! That was my aim, at any rate. And it makes me smile, which is always my aim these days. Happy pages for happy days is my creative mood at the moment!

Oh little corner of just a smidgen of embellishment. I was really tempted to add lots and lots more here and I held back. Whenever I placed more there just to look, it felt like that corner ended up heavier than the actual photo, so I opted to keep it ridiculously simple. I cannot begin to explain how difficult that was. I’m putting it in the album right now so I don’t go change my mind and ruin it all. not that I am prone to doing that or anything.

What have you tried lately that’s just a little out of your comfort zone? I’d love to hear – or see!

AND speaking of see… I’d love to see you IN PERSON! Next Friday (the 18th of September), join me in London at the Canary Wharf Spiegeltent for a lunchtime mini book workshop for just £6. Book your ticket here. Or if London doesn’t work for you, perhaps Barcelona is better? I’ll be teaching at Somos Scrap on Halloween weekend, along with Amy Tan of Amy Tangerine and Liz Kartchner of Dear Lizzy. ¡Estoy emocionado!

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In the last few years, it often seems all the shop announcements in the scrapbooking world have a sad tale, so I am very happy to change that up and introduce a new kid on the block! Mind the Scrap is a new scrapbooking kit club based here in the UK. Their debut kit was last month and in their second kit, the letter option is none other than the foam Fitzgerald Thickers from my True Stories collection, which I was very happy to learn. So much so that I put together a little extra for the first forty-five September kits sold, but I’m getting ahead of myself here.

This video includes two parts – the first five minutes is an unboxing of the September Mind the Scrap kit, and starting at 5:10, there is an As it Happens process video of this travel scrapbook page coming together.

I took that airport photo with just my phone and I smiled a lot when it came up on the screen like that silhouette with the passport visible. Porto airport is so light and lovely, even if the pilots’ strike made our travel plans a little… interesting. I didn’t have my own passport until I was nineteen, and I still randomly get Wonder Boy’s passport out of the drawer just to marvel in its cuteness for a moment. Even baby passport photos are funny!

If you’re here in the UK (or possibly nearby!), then it’s easy for you to find this entire kit all ready for you at Mind the Scrap. For those shopping in the US or elsewhere, you can find some elements of the kit in other shops, though some of the kit is exclusive. Look for Crate Paper Poolside (sb.com // blue moon), Pink Paislee Atlas (sb.com // blue moon), and Imaginisce Happy Traveler (sb.com) collections, plus the Fitzgerald Thickers (sb.com // blue moon) from True Stories!

Thank you so much to Mind the Scrap for including my Thickers in their kit and for sending me a kit to try!

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It’s September and I’m sharing my Easter scrapbook pages. This is completely fine and normal, right? Just goes to show I really do still love to create with whatever photos and stories inspire me of a particular moment rather than try to get caught up or stick to a calendar.

It’s not really the Easter theme that made me want to share this anyway: it’s just how quickly something can come together with one of those simple page formats we can use time and time again and always get a slightly different look by just having different supplies, different photos, and a different story. This page doesn’t look all that different to something I shared all the way back in 2011:

Except in this case, it’s just the three photos and the journaling card, no extra interactive section and no customising page protectors, so it came together super quickly.

I need to come back and write a proper update on what I’ve learned from my month of doing a bit of Project Life each day, but this was a full page I could finish in about twenty minutes, and that made me very happy indeed.

To keep to that twenty minute time frame, I was really going with the supplies that grabbed my eye first and not stopping to consider a second option. The supplies include Pebbles background paper, Elle’s Studio journaling card, flair badges from American Crafts, Evalicious, and Studio Calico, three different Thickers alphabets from American Crafts, tapes from KI Memories (text), Bella Blvd (dots), and American Crafts (glitter), large scallop border punch from EK Success, plus the True Stories sticker book and the 6×6 paper from the original Shimelle collection, both from AC.

If you have a favourite simple format you return to often, please share! We all have days we long for a finished page in twenty minutes, right?

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Week five of this year’s Bake Off brought a new theme they hadn’t challenged the bakers with in previous years – alternative ingredients. This episode featured signature challenge of a sugar-free cake, a technical of making gluten-free pita (pitta?) bread, and a showstopper involving dairy-free ice cream, and a few stunners and a lot of things going wrong. Great, that just sounds brilliant for baking along, especially after last week.

I’m sure the gluten-free technical is probably what I should learn to do but honestly I don’t miss pita or pitta bread, and it seemed an absolute nightmare to make, so perhaps something less likely to end in another disaster would be useful. I opted for the sugar-free cake and followed the rules of the show, but honestly, I’m not entirely sure how useful this challenge could really be. It seems like the idea of removing gluten or dairy would be to show you could still make something amazing with a diet that restricts those items, but the sugar-free challenge was just to use something other than table sugar. Honey, agave, various syrups and fruits were all fine, so it’s hardly like you could call this the cake to eat if you were diabetic. I think I had a revelation about why they included this challenge once my cake was out of the oven.

This week, I started with less of a plan, so the ingredient photo isn’t particularly accurate. The challenge didn’t require the cake to be gluten-free, but I wanted to eat it, so I ended up working with both restraints. This is what I put on the counter to start and see what I could cobble together! It wasn’t all that far from the real list in the end:

for the cake
2 apples (3 if they are tiny)
handful of raspberries
150g + 1 tablespoon unsalted butter
140g honey
85g oat flour
60g sorghum flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
pinch of salt
2 eggs, separated
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
60 ml (1/4 cup) milk

for the frosting
200ml double cream
2 tablespoons honey
1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract

Preheat the oven to 160C. Peel the apples and reserve the peelings for the decoration. Chop into bite-size pieces. Place in a small saucepan and add just enough water to cover the bottom of the pan. Top with the spare tablespoon of butter. Cook on a low heat, stirring now and then to make sure nothing sticks to the pan while the apples soften.

That seemed straight forward enough, but I wondered if honey and butter would eventually get to a fluffy texture similar to normal sugar and butter? So while the apples cooked, in went the rest of the butter and the honey into the mixer for a good five minutes of whizzing round and eventually it was less syrupy and more fluffy. Hurrah.

From there, I stirred in the egg yolks and vanilla, then the flours, baking powder, salt, and milk, until it was all nice and even, but quite thick. One of the big criticisms of plenty of the sugar-free bakes on the show was that it was all too dense and heavy (or ‘close textured’, as they are so in love with saying!) so I hoped the old trick of egg whites could help in some way. But right about this time, the apples were definitely cooked through. I added the raspberries for the last few minutes so that would all caramelise and hopefully bring some depth to the sweetness that wouldn’t just be some sort of injection of honey. (I kept three raspberries back for the top of the cake.)

Egg whites whisked to soft peaks (egg whites and whipped cream are the entire reason I kept my hand mixer after upgrading to a standing one!) and then folded into batter as gently as possible to keep all that air, and then the apples and raspberries folded in as well, and that seemed to be everything.

Into a greased cake tin and into the oven – mine took 40 minutes at 160C for a skewer to come out clean. This is where I discovered what I think was the reason they added sugar-free challenge. I’m convinced it was less about dietary concerns and more about the complexity of baking with something else, because the texture of this cake is so soft. Not at all dry, not grainy, just soft and a bit delicate. But not thinking about that at all, I tipped it out onto a wire rack like I would with any old sponge cake and oh goodness, the cracks. It wasn’t that it wasn’t holding together – it was just a softer texture and it needed more care to stay completely intact. I would let it cool in the tin next time.

And while that was cooling, I made honey whipped cream, which is literally just cream, honey, and some vanilla whisked until thick. Almost all of them made mascarpone or cream cheese frostings, but they would be quite heavy for this cake I think. Whipped cream is light and works well with honey, but probably far too simple for the likes of Bake Off really!

I might have gone a bit Pinterest here… a rose from an apple peel! I just had to give that a try. It reminds me of making fabric roses for scrapbook pages and it is literally just apple peel, round and round in a loop, and stuck into the whipped cream.

The verdict was this was a recipe worth keeping in our house, and that’s always nice! And the whipped egg whites did seem to keep the fruit from all falling to the bottom! Hurrah. As always, if you’ve come to this recipe because it’s free of one thing or another, please know your own tolerances and read your labels – I am no expert and am just having fun baking for our family and our assorted minor ailments.

Great Bloggers Bake Off is organised by Jenny at Mummy Mishaps. See more bloggers’ breads this week at participating blog, Hijacked by Twins. Please no spoilers from the actual show in the comments, for those who watch later than the original broadcast! Thanks.

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Four weeks into the Great British Bake Off and we’re presented with Dessert Week: the first round challenge to put a signature spin on crème brûlée, a technical challenge of the meringue madness that is apparently Spanish Windtorte, and a showstopper challenge of cheesecake, cheesecake, and more cheesecake. Crème brûlée came at an apt time on the calendar, because The Boy and I have a habit of making family announcements over crème brûlée, like when were at a big fancy Christmas meal with all of his family, only for the dessert to come out with a positively terrible crème brûlée that left everyone with nothing else to say, so we decided it was as a good of time as any to tell them we were getting married. It seemed so perfect to make crème brûlée for our seventh anniversary this weekend. I may have missed out a bit of logic though: that announcement and the ensuing long-standing joke all came from a truly terrible creme brûlée. Ahem.

I also decided this week I would save time by just following a recipe for once. I haven’t made this dish from scratch before, so it didn’t seem the right sort of thing to do lots of experimenting to come up with my own signature version. Just pick one that seems like it should be legit, and go. When big companies publish recipes on pages that look all beautiful and well-branded, surely the recipe would be pretty trust-worthy, right? Ahem. Baileys, I am looking at you and your beautiful and well-branded recipe page.

According to their recipe – presented in both written and video formats – the recipe made six servings and required 4 eggs (1 whole + 3 yolks), 300ml each of single and double cream, vanilla, Baileys, and a mere 750g of sugar. I went ahead and measured out the 750g of sugar for this photo at the start, just so we could all have a laugh at how you could make this recipe but would need to call ahead to your dentist before preheating the oven to the denoted 160C. Double checked to make sure the 750g was indeed the same in both the printed recipe and the video. Yep. And double checked the 750g was all to go into the custard and not a total measurement including the caramel topping too. No, that was listed separately. And double checked we were definitely talking Celsius and not Fahrenheit, since the 160 seemed high after watching the Bake Off episode. Yep, definitely 160C. Oven heating, cream and vanilla warming in a saucepan, eggs and sugar whisking in a bowl, and so on.

It made so, so much custard. I put the regular ramekins away and pulled out six juice tumblers. I thought maybe the people at Baileys Canada just really loved this and thought the portion size should be massive. Except even when I had filled six juice tumblers, I still had enough to fill five regular ramekins too. Oh well, dessert for all!

Into a roasting tin, tumblers and ramekins sitting in boiling water, and into the oven… and a few minutes later, this happened:

We both sat there staring at this mess, wishing we had something to announce over our very own truly terrible crème brûlée. The only thing we could think of announcing was ‘thank goodness we are going out for dinner tomorrow’!

We pulled up a few more classic crème brûlée recipes. We went to the shops for more cream. We managed to whip up a simple three serving success with significantly less sugar, and have come to the conclusion that the 0 on the end of 750 grams of sugar has appeared from absolute imagination, as 75g would have been enough to make it super sweet. C’est la vie: at least it didn’t use up the entire bottle of Baileys?

Now I have a much better understanding for why the signature challenge seemed to truly be a challenge to many of the Bake Off participants this week! At least we managed to have something nice in the end… now excuse me while I clean up this nightmare of a kitchen mess.

Great Bloggers Bake Off is organised by Jenny at Mummy Mishaps. See more bloggers’ breads this week at participating blog, Utterly Scrummy. Please no spoilers from the actual show in the comments, for those who watch later than the original broadcast! Thanks.

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With just the last tiny bit of August remaining, I’m breathing deeply and looking forward to September, a month filled with reflective tradition. While the resolution-crafting, be-your-best-self energy of the new year hits in January, I also feel that same hope at back to school time, even though I probably won’t find myself inside a traditional school in the month ahead.

That reflective tradition is an online class now in its ninth year: Learn Something New Every Day. It is something I started as a scrapbooking class, but it works well for a variety of memory-keeping formats, be that a mini book, a Project Life or pocket style scrapbook, a full-size scrapbook, a journal, a diary, a planner, a social media account, or a blackboard. Essentially, you need your pen and a few moments to reflect on the day. That’s it. If you want to add photos, then include some kind of camera. Everything can be as simple or as creative as you desire.

The entire idea of Learn Something New is to open your eyes, your ears, and possibly even your heart to the world around you and record one thing you learn from that world each day for a month. Sometimes we learn from our mistakes. Sometimes we learn from watching others. Sometimes we learn from things that seem more like school, from a training session or reading an article. Live the day, then take a moment to sum up something you have learned in a single sentence. Leave it at that, or complement it with photography, art, or more writing if you wish. That’s why it’s so easy to adapt to a variety of formats.

You can read more about the course here, including a bit about how I’ve used a few different formats for this project over the years.

Each day in September, class participants receive a PDF prompt by email with something to read and set you on the way to various ways you might learn from your environment, plus visual inspiration from a variety of crafters. There’s also a class forum to chat and share in a members-only environment, or hashtags to share your thoughts and images in a more open format. This annual class has a great wealth of materials from previous years, including video, galleries, digital templates, and printables, all of which you can access when you join.

This year, I will be adding a new video series to the class materials. It was developed from working through my lessons from September 2014 and how September was unfolding differently for me with a baby than in all those earlier years, but it’s not a parenting video series in the slightest and my hope is that it’s useful for a variety of life circumstances. I simply had a different perspective in that particular September and wanted to share how that made a difference to my process with this annual project.

Learn Something New has a one-time registration fee of £10 GBP or $15 USD, and then you can participate as many years as you would like at no further cost. I’d love for you to join us!

These buttons will allow you to pay by your choice of credit/debit card or Paypal account – your choice. Please make sure you are using a valid email address. Registrations can take up to twenty-four hours to process. If you do not receive an email in that time, please check your spam folder, then email me at shimelle@gmail.com. If the email address on your paypal account is not where you would like to receive class materials, please let me know that too. You can leave a note on your payment, or send an email if you miss that bit. (If you would like to gift the class to a friend, just sign up as normal and in the comments or an email, let me know her email address. Simple as that.)

Previous class participants, the first message goes out on the first of September, and includes an easy way to opt out of mailings if you prefer not to have emails this year. If your email address has changed in the past year, drop me an email and let me know so I can update that for you.

May back to school be wonderful for you in whatever form it takes!

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Today I’m delighted to welcome May Flaum to share how she’s been inspired to get scrapbooking with the True Stories collection. May is hilarious and has an above-average appreciation of Zoolander, and this along with her fabulous crafting and teaching skills, make her one of my favourite people. I wish she lived much closer than the zillion miles away of reality. But at least today we can be found here in the same place, in some way or another. I hope you enjoy her video!

I was inspired by this layout and really was struck by the simple design for two landscape oriented 4×6 photos – something I rarely do! I was also struck with the challenge of using a lot of patterned paper. I tend to be a mostly cardstock girl so I was excited to get in touch with my patterned side and play.

The vellum paper (BlueMoon // SB.com) was perfect for this layout, and I had an absolute blast mixing and matching new favorites with a few classic supplies. I was able to be inspired by Shimelle’s layout and get that lovely paper used while staying true to my own style. To me, being able to try new things and incorporate fresh ideas while staying true to what feels like you is crafty nirvana.

Other supplies for this page include wood veneer borders, vellum tags, wooden buttons, and sticker book from the True Stories collection (BlueMoon // SB.com), black glitter Thickers, plus wood veneer hearts, buttons, sequins, and kraft cardstock. (Shopping through these affiliate links adds no cost to your order but supports this site and makes guests like May possible. Thanks!)

How long has it been since you made a page with two 4×6 photos? May and I want to see! Share a link to something new or an old favourite with this photo arrangement in the comments or tag us on Twitter or Instagram. Happy scrapping!

May Flaum is a lifelong crafter that makes her home with her two daughters and husband in California. She doesn’t believe her scrapbooks can have too much stitching, sequins, or kraft cardstock and is never found without a great pair of scissors. From scrapbook layouts to mixed media creations, when not traveling she can be found spending time in her studio blogging, creating, and teaching on-line classes. For more information about her classes and read her blog visit her website or follow her on Instagram

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