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

Let’s just say this week there is no way I could have coped with Paul and Mary’s tough timings in the bake-off tent. I finished my bread in a flash actually, but right around midday on Monday, plenty of panic bells started going off around here and it’s only now on Friday that I can come back and actually post this and some other fun crafty stuff too. Hurrah for a day that seems much better from the outset, may we all cross our fingers that everyone stays well and safe and happy and let’s talk about fun things now!

Week three of the bake off focused on bread, with a new category of ‘quick breads’ for the signature challenge, classic baguettes for the technical, and bread sculptures for the showstopper round. The showstoppers included an amazing cornucopia that went right past the the producers and much of the audience, I think, as it seemed to be based in a North American Thanksgiving idea, and it was truly the sort of thing Norman Rockwell would have painted with a family around the table. Well, I appreciated it at any rate! But it wasn’t the only thing I found interesting in a lost-in-no-translation sort of way: quick bread has a totally different definition on the bake off than what I grew up knowing. Ask this girl who baked 4-H projects for the county fair about ‘quick breads’ and I’m thinking banana bread, zucchini (courgette!) bread, pumpkin loaf, and poppy seed bread most likely. It’s a cake really… it’s just baked in a loaf tin and tends to have something vaguely healthier than chocolate somewhere in the ingredient list. Were I to bake one of those in bread week, I would have been laughed out of the tent, regardless of cherished purple ribbons of my youth! They meant things more like bread than cake but without yeast. Soda bread seemed to be the thing of the day.

Our local bakery does a lovely soda bread on special occasions (I’ve never figured out the actual special occasions, but it only appears on the menu now and then) that is dense and sweet with a maple edge to it, though definitely still like bread more than cake, and topped with oats and seeds. They have an open kitchen and I’ve never seen bonkers ingredients like cola going into their bread dough, so I’m sure the maple flavour comes by way of things like actual maple syrup, but all the watching and inward amazement of these two lands separated by a common language made me leap to something else that is a pretty American phenomenon, but I see it often now by way of Pinterest and Facebook. It’s the ‘Two Ingredient’ recipe, where a headline claims you can make a cake or something else by just ‘two ingredients’ but when you look at the ingredients, they are a can of soda and a cake mix, or a pre made meal and a tin of soup, or some other shortcut that yes, involves tipping just two items into a single bowl, but in fact probably has eleventy ingredients in the final concoction.

That amazingly scattered train of thought left me wondering: could I make soda bread from Coca-Cola? (And yeah, in order to try it without getting hives, it’s gluten-free. More oat flour. My world is oat flour, I tell you. I’ve ordered something new to try next week before I bore the world and my family to tears with my oat flour.)

There are actually more than two ingredients, but relatively few at least!
200g oat flour + extra to dust the outside and any surfaces
1/2 teaspoon baking powder
150 ml Coca-Cola (I’m guessing it needs to be the real sugar stuff and wouldn’t work with Diet Coke, but I could be wrong)
pinch of salt
1 egg
8g chia seeds (that’s how much is in one of those Chia Shot packets, anyway. You could use other seeds.)
10g oats

This makes one small free-form loaf.

As always, if you’re making this recipe due to food sensitivities, know your specific reactions and read your labels.

Preheat the oven to 190C and cover a baking tray with parchment.

Combine the flour, baking powder, and salt in a mixing bowl, along with roughly half the chia seeds (4g) and oats (5g), and stir through until it’s all mixed. Add the egg and mix on low speed until you have an even but very dense dough.

Then add the Coke! Excuse this picture as it’s not the best, but the bubbly reaction is pretty quick! These bubbles will get the air into this loaf and make it rise, so work quickly to get from this stage to in the oven. Stir through until the cola is incorporated and you should shave a dense and sticky bread dough. If it’s exceptionally wet, add more flour at this stage.

Form the dough into a ball with your hands and dust with the extra flour. Add the remaining oats and seeds to the top of the loaf, and score an X in the top. Place on the parchment-covered baking tray and bake! Mine took about 35 minutes.

I added a pyrex pie plate of water in the bottom of the oven to see if it would produce a crispier bread crust, since they talked about this so much in the episode. Well, the crust of the bread was lovely but I’ve no idea if it was the steam that did it!

I would never be brave enough to bake this on something like the actual Bake-Off, but I also would never have the nerve to apply for the show as I’m not nearly well-rounded enough! It was a fun experiment though and the results were definitely edible: it’s particularly nice hot with butter. It is sweet but more like a bread than a cake, so the sort of thing that seems like a breakfast treat along the same lines as a sweet danish. What it doesn’t have is staying power. Straight out of the oven, it has a caramel flavour that is relatively subtle though sweet. The seeds and oats keep it from being completely over the top. But by evening of the same day, it tastes undoubtedly like Coca-Cola. The texture also goes a bit too gummy with that added time, and I’m sure that’s down to the oddball ingredients of the cola continuing to react with the flour. On the positive though, it is pretty quick to make and bake, so even as a breakfast food it wouldn’t need to be baked the night before necessarily.

Next week, it’s desserts, and I hear someone has made cheesecakes flavoured like sodas?! Well maybe this experiment wasn’t that far removed from the tent after all!

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

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In this latest round of asking some of my favourite scrapbookers to share their work with you, I tried to put something that was in my mind into their thought process: almost the entire time that I’ve been scrapping less, I’ve been feeling inspired more. Perhaps we just replace one creative thought with another in the same space in our mind, so where I used to make at least a layout a day in one form or another and then found myself trying desperately to make one a week, all those other days there was some small part of my mind that was thinking about making stuff. I would catch a glimpse of a layout I’d made years ago or pass a previous guest project when reading through new comments and I’d find I had a new idea in my mind despite not finding the time to bring it to fruition. As I’ve found myself starting to improve on this and do a little something creative every day (albeit some days more and some days less), I’m delving into all those thoughts and really enjoying the creative process. I think I need to just write about where I am with my personal creative process lately, but I digress. What I really hoped was that some of my favourite scrappers would also find inspiration in the archives here and find something that brought renewed energy to their creative process, so when I got in touch I offered a few different ideas for posts they might contribute, and something inspired by the archives was just one of those options. It turned out to be the most popular option amongst the guests and now I have one slight problem: I am inspired by all their inspired by posts! I’ll work on turning that from frustration into some gloriously fun cutting and pasting, I think. I hope you find them inspiring too, and I’m pretty sure today’s guest will inspire much of the fun: she’s one of the only people I know who could tell me her middle name was actually ‘Superfun’ and I would believe her. Please welcome… Amy Tan!

When I saw this layout – I immediately knew I wanted to scraplift it. Not only do I love the idea of clustering embellishments, but the appeal of using both old and new products for me is strong right now. I seem to hold onto things I love instead of using them up. Since we’re both designers collaborating with American Crafts, I thought it would be fun to use both our products and show how easy it is to mix the old with the new. For even more of a fresh take, I decided to work right into my notebook instead of doing separate scrapbook pages for this event. Check out the whole process in this video:

You can find Amy’s newest collection, Finders Keepers, at Blue Moon Scrapbooking and Scrapbook.com. (Shopping through these affiliate links adds no cost to your order but supports this site and makes guests like Amy possible. Thanks!)

And thanks so much to Amy! We’d love to see any projects you have made that combine products from our collections, so please share by leaving a link or tagging us on Instagram. Or if it’s just in that inspiration bank in your mind, tell us which collections you’d love to work with together or what other designs you’d bring to your crafting table. May you find some quality cutting and sticking time soon!

Amy Tangerine has always had a fresh outlook on life. Growing up in Chicago, she wallpapered her room with fashion magazines and dreamed of a life of visual creativity. By the time she was 23, she had founded the popular and award-winning handcrafted t-shirt line Amy Tangerine, featured in hundreds of retail outlets around the world, including Bloomingdales, Neiman Marcus and Barneys New York. But it wasn’t until 2007 that Amy discovered her true passion: scrapbooking. What started as a slice-of-life hobby blossomed into a full-time, fulfilling business venture that includes signature collections with American Crafts, her own book, celebrity events, consulting services, and teaching workshops all over the world. Most of all, she loves helping others tap into their creative sides. When she’s not at home in Los Angeles with two mischievous Jack Russell Terriers, her long-time partner, JC, and their adorable son, Jack, she is traveling, finding great places to eat, and doing her best to enjoy every moment. See more of her work on her blog, Instagram and YouTube

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It’s biscuit week for the second round of the Great British Bake Off, a term that is always destined to confuse all the different varieties of the English language. In the UK, a biscuit is what Americans call a cookie. Except when it is also what Americans call a cracker. Indeed. Suffice to say, it is never something served with gravy. Just to make it less confusing all round, I chose the first challenge from the show for my baking this week – biscotti. It’s Italian so we can all agree! Twice baked and found in coffee shops!

Peanut butter and chocolate is a combination I rarely saw in the UK when I first moved here, but it seems to have really gained in popularity over the last few years, and you can even buy an assortment of Reese’s products in our corner shop. There is a still a divide though, and it doesn’t have the classic flavour combination status that it does in the states, so I’m not sure I would have the nerve to bake these in the actual bake off tent in case Paul and Mary were not fans from the start! But I am a fan, so peanut butter and chocolate are always a good thing in my world.

For 24 small biscotti, you will need:
350g oat flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
generous pinch of salt (adjust if your peanut butter contains lots or little salt)
100g unsalted butter
225g peanut butter
215g sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla paste (or 2 teaspoons vanilla extract or one vanilla pod scraped)
3 large eggs
100g chocolate

Preheat the oven to 180C.

Combine oat flour, baking powder, and salt in a bowl and set aside. (Same caveat for the oat flour still goes – check the labels and be aware of your specific sensitivities! I’ve been using Bob’s Red Mill oat flour and getting good results, but your needs may differ of course.)

Combine butter, peanut butter, sugar, and vanilla in the mixing bowl. I ended up using half crunchy and half smooth peanut butter because the crunchy we had was a bit extreme, but I reckon the Bake Off judges would probably have liked it better that way actually! Cream these together with the mixer.

Huzzah for mixing. Mix, mix, mix so it gets fluffy and lighter in colour. Lots of air will open the texture and keep the peanut butter from creating a heavy, stodgy biscuit.

When you’re done mixing that into lovely peanut butter fluff (which smells pretty awesome to a peanut butter fan), stir in each of the three eggs by hand, then add the dry ingredients from your bowl and combine until it’s all lovely and even. It will be a pretty thick and dense dough and should not be wet or drippy.

Line a baking tray with parchment or a baking mat and turn out the dough. Form it into as even a rectangle as possible!

Bake at 180C for 25 minutes, then remove and turn the oven down to 140C. Give the big rectangle a few minutes to cool, then cut into twenty-four smaller rectangles – one big slice on the horizontal then twelve on the vertical, removing the teeny edges on the far sides. Because it is clearly important to taste-test at this point, I’m sure. Transfer to a wire rack if you’re stuck for time and need it to cool quickly or you live in a land of humidity and leaving them on the pan would let them soak up too much moisture. But leave them on the pan and just cool for longer if you are likely to drop them all on the floor in the process. Not that I have done that. No, of course not.

Once cooled, it’s time for the second bake. I do this in three sets of eight minutes – eight minutes flat, eight minutes flipped on one side, then eight minutes on the other side. I have no idea how much this actually helps and how much is just a mental need for balance. Judge appropriately.

Let them cool again (for good this time) and melt the chocolate. We like ridiculously dark chocolate in this house, so I used 90%, but I have to say it is a bit of a shock if you’re used to dark chocolate being more like chocolate chips, which tend to be somewhere between 65% and 75%. Whatever chocolate you choose, melt in a glass bowl then dunk one end of each biscotti and return to the wire rack.

And finally, the step that is most like scrapbooking – use the remaining chocolate on a spoon to dot and drizzle, a process that is much like flicking Mr Huey’s mist over a finished page and hoping it goes well and also coating your crafting table in the process. There may or may not be chocolate dots all over the cooker at the moment.

Best served with a hot beverage, but these aren’t so crunchy they’ll break your teeth on their own, so you’re safe if you prefer them with a lemonade this time of year.

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

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Today I’m uploading videos to YouTube that will be live shortly and while I do that, the lovely Paige is here to share a beautiful project with the True Stories collection! Paige’s work is always so artful and unique, and I hope you enjoy her tutorial as much as I do. We’d both love to see what you make with the cut file she’s sharing with you too. -Shimelle

Backing die cut shapes with patterned papers is one of my favourite techniques and I was excited to try it out using the True Stories collection! Bonus: I’ve provided the flower cut file I designed (as a studio file, PNG, and PDF) so you can create this layout too!

1) Die cut the flower from white cardstock using a Silhouette Cameo and carefully peel it off the mat.

2) Place a tiny foam dot between each petal intersection on the back side of the die cut. This will create dimension and shadows and make the papers really pop!

3) Using the inner petal pieces on the mat as a template, trace a petal with a pencil on the backside of your chosen patterned papers then cut out the petals about 1/8” wider.

4) Place the petals on the back side of the die cut flower.

5) To make sure all the petals stay in place permanently, place tape across the back of the flower.

6) Write journaling with a pen around a few of the petals.

7) Embellish with epoxy stickers, wood veneer, a cork sticker title, buttons, die cuts, paper stickers, and more!

You can find True Stories and other American Crafts products at Blue Moon Scrapbooking, scrapbook.com, and Amazon US or UK. (Shopping through those affiliate links costs you the same amount but helps support this site and makes guest artists like Paige possible. Thanks.)

Paige Evans has been scrapbooking since she was sixteen years old and worked at her first job at a local scrapbook store. The first time she put pictures and papers together it was a match made in heaven! She is the design team manager/blog hostess for American Crafts, a blog contributor for Elle’s Studio, a teacher at Big Picture Classes and Craftsy, a contributing team member for Studio Calico, and on the digital creative team for Ali Edwards. She loves traveling all over Europe with her family and teaching scrapbooking and bookbinding classes. You can check out more of her and her work on her blog, Instagram, Etsy shop, Pinterest, and Studio Calico Gallery

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Today I’m delighted to welcome back Mendi Yoshikawa, with the first in a new series of Inspired By posts! These guest bloggers have chosen their favourite posts from the shimelle.com archives and created something new to share with you as a result. (Don’t worry, I still have layouts and videos to share too, but there is room for a few guests so we can get back to a lovely balance of always having something to show you!) I hope you enjoy these new twists on something you may or may not have seen, and I’d love for you share what you’re inspired to create.

Take it away, Mendi!

For my layout I was really inspired by Shimelle’s Sketch Twenty-Five. I love the grid design with the little blocks and how they can be used for either photos or paper. As it happens, I only had one photo for this particular page so I chose to use them for some embellishments and show off more of the pretty papers that I had purchased for my page. In fact as I was working, I felt like I hadn’t used quite enough of that paper so I chose to continue the grid and add another row of squares to the top and bottom which bleed off my page. I love how doing this also helped ground my page.

I was short on extra matching embellishments for my squares so I decided to fashion my own by punching holes around a simple heart die-cut with my paper piercer. I then took a needle and some embroidery floss to stitch my trio of hearts. When I was done I decided I might as well keep going and added the cross stitch border down each side. While it can be a bit time consuming, I was able to do all my stitching in just over an hour while I watched some TV with the family, and I love the texture it gives.

I knew I wanted to use the large pale blue letters for my title, but I didn’t have quite enough room for them over the top of my photo like the sketch called for so I decided to flip the locations of the title and the journaling which worked beautifully. I would have loved to type my journaling over the top of my photo before printing it, but unfortunately my photo had already been printed beforehand so as a solution I printed my journaling on vellum and used 3M Spray Mount (US // UK). I love how this product covers the entire surface so there are no adhesive lines to hide. I hope I’ve inspired you to take another look at all of Shimelle’s wonderful sketches. She has so many great ones to get your creative mojo going.

Mendi Yoshikawa lives in Washington state with her husband and two girls. She has a passion for using sketches, loves linear designs and brightly colored tone-on-tone patterned papers, and has a self-described addiction to her sewing machine. You can find her at her blog, Pinterest, and see more of her work at her online gallery at Scrapbook.com

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It’s August, there is a tent filled with Kitchenaids in a field somewhere, and I find myself saying ‘who cares that the flat is already 28 degrees C? Let’s preheat the oven!’ This can only mean one thing: Great British Bake Off is back! Last summer, my challenge in the blogging version of the Bake Off was just to figure out how to bake something, anything as I found a new rhythm. This year, my challenge is to bake things I can actually eat! Gone are those glory days when I was fine with flours of all varieties and tomatoes that still smelled like a garden were my number one summer craving. I mentioned it briefly in just one post earlier this year, I think, but for whatever reason I’ve developed some new issues with food, and quite a few things I love now give me hives. Hives! Hives are not fun and give me a sad face. But not eating cake for possibly the rest of my life also gives me a sad face. After a few months of making progress by following a ridiculously strict diet that had no allergens at all, I tried various things again one at a time, to see what was causing the dreaded hives and it turns out that my biggest offenders are gluten and nightshades, so that’s most cake and bread right out the window, as well as tomatoes, peppers, chilies, aubergine, and white potato. (Random trivia: sweet potato is an entirely different family of plant and causes me no trouble! Huzzah.) This combination is a little bit extra annoying because most items you find in those lovely gluten-free sections of a store do so by replacing the wheat flour with potato flour. Still a sad face.

All that means I am baking again. That gives me a happy face indeed.

For the blogging version of the Bake Off, we choose something inspired by the baking in that week’s episode to make in our own kitchen. Cake was the first theme, with the three rounds including a madeira, a frosted walnut layer cake, and black forest gateau. I have never made a madeira and had never really heard of one before living in England, so I was quite tempted to go in that direction, but I’m afraid the pull of chocolate, whipped cream, and cherries was too much for me. I’ve been wanting to pin down a reliable gluten-free brownie recipe, and a black forest topping is simple enough to dress it up. Gluten-free Black Forest Brownies then!

For the brownies:
180 grams unsalted butter
225 grams dark chocolate (I used 72% cocoa solids)
340 grams sugar
4 large eggs
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
3 tablespoons cocoa powder
2 tablespoons oat flour (please see note below)
half teaspoon salt

For the black forest topping:
300 ml whipping cream
1 or 2 tablespoons sugar
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
fresh cherries

Preheat the oven to 180 C.

Simmer some water in a saucepan and top with a mixing bowl (if you have a stand mixer, it can be handy to use that bowl but mine doesn’t sit well in any of my saucepans, so I use a glass bowl and the hand mixer for this type of recipe). Melt the butter and chocolate. Years ago someone told me to not stir much while you melt chocolate because it can disturb the flavour and make the cocoa go gritty. I have no idea if it’s actually true, but I try to follow that, and just scrape down the sides with a spatula.

Once that is melted, reduce the heat and gently stir in the sugar. Adding the sugar while there is still heat allows all the granules to dissolve so you have a smooth texture rather than the grit of sugar. The grit of sugar bothers me enough that I use caster sugar for any recipe that calls for normal white sugar. It dissolves easier and has a better texture. I store it in a canister with my spent vanilla pods, so it’s like those fancy expensive vanilla sugars at the store but much simpler and cheaper.

When it hits that smooth texture, remove from heat entirely and leave to cool just a moment so the batter isn’t so hot it will cook the next ingredients. Stir in the eggs, one at a time. (Again that’s a texture thing. You can put them all in at once and it’s not the end of the world. It will still bake. But the texture is smoother if you add them one by one.) Then add the vanilla, cocoa, oat flour, and salt. I’ve been using a vanilla bean paste lately that is easier than scraping out a vanilla pod for every recipe but has a richer flavour than just extract. The oat flour could be swapped for other kinds of starch, I’m sure – so you could use normal flour if you aren’t worried about wheat, or you could use a gluten-free blend if that’s what you have in your kitchen, or even corn flour should work. I’ve been having good luck with the oat flour from Bob’s Red Mill. Salt is another thing that has variations. I wouldn’t have believed you until a friend studying cookery in Paris brought us a little tub of Fleur de Sel as a gift and it really did make a difference between salt being a flavour and salt bringing out the flavours you’re putting into the dish. M&S food hall does a nice and affordable one in the international highlights section now. Yes, I probably will buy into any food hype. Admitting it is the first step, right? Onward.

ETA In response to one of the comments below, I just wanted to address the oat flour and basically say if you’re baking with food sensitivities, be sure to read the packaging and be aware of your specific requirements. I’m not a coeliac and am in no position to give any advice like that. The gluten-free products I’ve been using have more information on their labels that would be useful, and this quick summary about gluten (which doesn’t occur in oats but is often added to products like porridge oats and oatmeal) and avenin (which does occur in oats). Know what works for you is probably good advice on all fronts!

Give that a stir so it’s incorporated and not going to send cocoa flying around your kitchen, then go electric and spin it up with a whisk for a few minutes. There is no raising agent, so you want to get some air in there, and you should notice a point where the texture of the batter thickens and starts to fall away from the edge of the bowl a bit. That leads to rich brownie goodness!

Pour into your tin, either greased or lined with parchment. My brownie tin is about 9×13 inches. Bake at 180C for about 30 minutes, though I start checking it at 25. Don’t leave it until a toothpick comes out clean, as that will be a dry and crumbly brownie.

While that’s in the oven, mix up some fresh whipped cream. You’ll need that electric whisk again! I recommend this run down if you need a detailed look at making your own whipped cream.

And cook up the cherries! Wash and remove stems and stones, then simmer in a saucepan. If they are very sweet, they won’t need sugar. If they are past their prime, add a bit of sugar as needed. For years, I’ve always added amaretto when cooking up cherries, but I’m yet to find a toddler cooking guide that suggest amaretto as a suitable flavour enhancer, so this time I just did added a bit of water and vanilla extract. Cherry vanilla is the new cherry amaretto for the foreseeable future, I think!

Top brownies with whipped cream and cherries, obviously. And eat.

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

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Oh hello. It seems like forever, but I finally have something to share. Let’s focus on that positive and not on how I haven’t managed to clear the dining table in weeks, shall we?

For years, the reason I absolutely love scrapping out of order (though I keep my pages in chronological order in their albums) is the complete freedom. Zero pressure. I don’t do the whole concept of staying ‘caught up’ because I have no hope in ever doing so, and I enjoy the hobby more when I jump around from story to story with whatever is inspiring me on a given day.

That said, I am starting to understand why many scrapbookers feel there is a pressure to stay caught up. Not that I am changing my philosophy! But I look at that baby book I started for Wonder Boy and I understand the pressure. It has ten or so weeks fully finished. The others have the photos slipped into the pockets with reference notes here and there but nothing else. I’m pleased I stayed on top of that part, but I really love how those finished weeks look and I long for the rest to go alongside, so it becomes an album like the rest of my library that I am happy for anyone to pull off the shelf and see. I also find I’m reminding myself of why I chose the Project Life format for this album in the first place: because I could work in tiny little pieces, a few minutes at a time, and still make progress. Wonder Boy is old enough now that I have the few minutes while he is engrossed in something (not many minutes, just a few) and while I could probably use those minutes to clear the dining table, dare I say I might find working on this album a little more rewarding? As a result, I’ve set myself a challenge this August to work in this album a few minutes every day and film it to share as well. My plan is to share those short, individual videos as soon as I can on my YouTube channel, then whenever I finish a full two page spread, I’ll post it all here in a sort of omnibus style, so you can choose to watch day by day or all at once. In this first week, I managed to stay on top of the create-every-day part of the challenge, but fell down with editing the videos on some days, but overall it was an enjoyable experience, so I think I’m okay to keep going, assuming you’d still like to see!

That’s another week done and a challenge kept! I realise I’m not working so quickly as to make great strides in August, but something is better than nothing in this case, and I don’t want to sacrifice enjoying the process for getting more pages done, if that makes sense. I guess I feel the pressure to catch up just a little, not a lot! But I do want to get these memories down on paper before they become fuzzy, and I’m already working more than a year behind now, so a little progress sounds good to me.

Supplies for this project include the Project Life ‘Lovely’ mini kit, which is no longer available in print form but is available digitally within the Project Life app for the iPhone, if that’s any help, or in a digital kit for your computer. I also used items from the Shimelle collection (my first collection with American Crafts), including the 6×6 paper pad, stamp set, word stickers, sticker book, and gold Fitzgerald Thickers, and word stickers and enamel dots from the True Stories collection. Also some gold sequins, patterned vellum, and gold chipboard hearts from Studio Calico, letter stickers from October Afternoon, and two punches by EK Success. I think that’s just about everything! I’m still embracing old and new together, so there are some items that would no longer be in stock, but you might have something similar in your own collection if by chance it reminded you to pull out your own pack of small chipboard shapes or some vellum. You can find my American Crafts products at Blue Moon Scrapbooking, scrapbook.com, and Amazon US or UK. (Shopping through those affiliate links costs you the same amount but helps support this site. Thanks.)

Have a beautiful Saturday and thanks for sticking with me through my radio silence! Happy scrapping.

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We have taken really goofy pictures for many years now. Having a child now makes this socially acceptable. WHY DID NO ONE TELL ME THIS? I have no better or more flowery way to express this sentiment. Just know, we continue to embrace goofy photos. I think you need a warning about that before you scroll down and see the full scrapbook page and all its goofy photo glory.

It’s also been a while since I created a page that takes a little longer, with lots of embellishments that come together in a collage, bit by bit. I don’t plan out what supplies I’m going to use and just let each step guide me to the next basket of stickers or bowl of die cuts. That process is definitely in my ‘makes me feel alive’ level of crafting techniques. I get such enjoyment from discovering that a punched shape fits in a chipboard frame matches the colour of an enamel dot and so on. I feel like that’s admitting something secret and shameful, but you like paper. You understand. I hope. And now, moving on to a really long video with that goofy photo!

This time around, my train-of-thought bother comes from descending letters and hybrid handwriting that is neither print nor cursive. Riveting, I tell you.

Supplies in this page are a true mix of new and old, and I tried to mention the brand of everything in the video as I went. The background paper, word stickers, polaroid-style frame paper and sticker, dotty paper, phrase stamp, and ticket and heart die cuts are all from my True Stories collection, the ‘2’ at the top right is from the 6×6 paper pad in the first Shimelle collection. Other supplies include tags from Cosmo Cricket, chipboard and letter stickers from October Afternoon, enamel dots from Doodlebug, vellum shapes from Studio Calico, journaling card, fabric and puffy stickers from Amy Tangerine, stickers from Dear Lizzy, label from My Mind’s Eye, sticker from MAMBI, stitched die-cut from Crate Paper. Adorably cheesy matching t-shirts are by Little Bird at Mothercare!

If you create a page with one side all filled with embellishments (or if you have already created one that is online somewhere), I’d love for you to share a link in the comments. What embellishments – new or old – are making you happy recently?

Have a beautiful weekend and may it have some time to craft. Bonus if it has time to craft with red love hearts, of course.

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