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

For March, I wanted to embrace the rainbow, I suppose! I was looking at all the different scrapbooking products hitting the store while sitting through day after day of grey rain, and then one sunny day reminded me that all that rain can come with its fair share of rainbows, and that’s how this month’s Best of Both Worlds scrapbooking kit came together: a little grey, a little gold, and a lot of the rainbow!

Click here to shop for the March 2014 Best of Both Worlds Scrapbooking Kit.

This kit mixes some brand new releases with a few great bargains in the sale. The stamps, tape set, and a couple papers are 25% off, making it possible to also include some fancy new things like kraft card stock with gold finish, a big pack of ephemera, and both flat letter stickers and Thickers. If you’re digging the rainbow feel and want to carry that through in the lettering too, you might try the Bon Ami letter sticker sheet for something brand new or this rainbow alphabet for something that’s on sale.

And let’s talk gold embellishments for a moment. I will warn you: the gold label stickers have been really popular in the shop this week so there are not all that many left. If you’re coming to this list by the time they are sold out, please don’t panic! There are actually lots of really lovely gold embellishments in the store, and you can choose one that is just your style, assuming you like gold! Have a look here if you want to replace it with something else. (There is also the option to swap the chipboard hearts for chipboard stars that show up near the top of that list, in case hearts are just not your thing!)

Flair… well, today is the first of March and as of the time I’m writing this, the March flair hasn’t appeared in the store just yet. As it’s the weekend, I’m guessing these will appear in the store on Monday, but I didn’t want to leave this any longer to post since I do try to make sure it’s always here for you on the first! If you’re a big fan of flair, then you may want to wait until Monday if you’d like some badges to coordinate, but you can always wait and add them to your next order too if that’s better for your needs.

If you’re new to the Best of Both Worlds concept, every month I post a list of products I really love together on the first. There is no subscription and there’s no requirement to buy everything on the shopping list. If you want to use it as a starting point for your shopping, then make changes, you can! You’re not locked in to paying for something you already have or wouldn’t use. Likewise, if there’s one item you know you would use multiple times, you can add more than one. You decide your budget and you can add more to the kit or bring it down a bit to fit how much you want to spend, how much scrapping you plan to do, and how much ‘stuff’ suits your personal scrapping style.

Each month in 2014, a guest artist gets the kit for the month and shares five projects she makes with it. You can see the January guest post and the February guest post currently, and this kit is on its way to the March guest artist right now! I also have new videos coming your way Sunday and Monday sharing projects I have made with recent kits. (Some, though not all, items from the January and February kits are still available.)

If you opt to spend a bit more shopping while you’re there, the March shipping discount code is TQTBEX, which is good for $10 off US shipping and $5 off international shipping on orders that include at least $50 of physical, non-clearance product.

I think that’s everything! After a several very exhausted days in a row, I’m enjoying getting new videos and articles lined up, so I hope you’ll stop by for a good week ahead. You know… the kind of week where we embrace rainbows and naps and you can celebrate fancy things in your life like sleeping more than an hour without waking up for the loo. Maybe. I promise not to get jealous. Well, not very much, anyway.

Thanks so much for your continued support, and don’t forget you can always come back to this post later and add a link to the comments to share what you have made with the March 2014 Best of Both Worlds scrapbooking kit!

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It’s Saturday again which mean its time for another project from me! This week I’ve gone for a more technical tutorial, which means my beloved sewing machine gets some use! I got my first and only sewing machine when I was sixteen and told no one about it as it wasn’t the ‘hip’ thing to have. However, now I can definitely say I am proud to own a sewing machine and I hope you all feel the same about yours! So, let’s put them to good use with a comforting, retro looking envelope cushion.

For this project you shall need two different fabrics measuring one metre each, paper to make your template, one button, ribbon if prefered and the standard sewing essentials (pins, ruler, fabric pen, scissors, etc.). Oh, and the all important cushion! My cushion size is 40cm (L) X 60cm (W). One fabric shall be the outer cushion, the other for your lining inside.

To make this template, I simply stuck pieces of paper together until they measured 42cm X 64cm. You need to make sure you have a 2cm seam allowance, hence why the dimensions are bigger than the cushion. I drew in the seam allowance and made sure to write any little notes down that would be useful, such as the P.O.F (place on fold).

Place your template on each fabric, one at a time. Pin in place and cut. Fabric scissors are much better to use as you get a straighter, neater cut. Separate scissors for scrapping and fabric are a good idea!

You shall only need to put in a seam allowance for the lining fabric as this is what you shall see whilst sewing the fabrics together. Before removing the template, pin holes through the template which will help you join up the seam allowance and simply mark with the fabric pen.

Now to put your pieces together! Basically, you want your outer fabric inside your lining. If your outer fabric is patterned, then you need to make sure the right sides are facing together so it looks like its inside out (as shown). You will have two pointy triangles, fold one of them down as shown, as this will go inside. This gives the inside edge a neat look. With me so far? I hope so! Pin in place on your seam allowance marks and you should now be ready to start sewing!

I used a zig zag stitch with the tension set at number two. Once you’ve sewn around the square shape (not the triangle) Snip off the corners. This will give you nicer corners once folded the right way out.
Fold the triangle edges in at about 1cm & sew all the way round still using the zig zag stitch.

Now all the stitching is out of the way, you can fold it the right way out! And if all went well, your lining should now be inside! Place your cushion in, check your happy with the fit and close it like an envelope! Next part is the button hole.

Measure your buttons diameter as this will determine how big your buttonhole needs to be. In my case, it was about 2.7cm so I rounded it up to 3cm.

Draw up your buttonhole. The middle line is where your button shall slip through. The lines on the side measure 1cm and you shall need to join it altogether. Unfortunately, it wasn’t until I got to this stage I remembered you needed a buttonhole zipper foot for your sewing machine (which, annoyingly, I don’t own) so it went to plan b – hand sewing!

Cut the middle line to make a an open slit. The stitch I did for this was a blanket stitch. I made sure the stitches were close together making it much more secure.

Sew your button underneath and hurrah: a retro, beautiful and refreshing cushion! I hope you have enjoyed this more technical tutorial this week and have managed to make some wonderful creations and I would most love to see your homemade cushions!

Alice Partridge is a young designer-maker from southeast England. She hopes to make a living doing what she loves, and spends most of her free time reading blogs, drinking tea, or stitching with a needle in her hand. In addition to working behind the scenes at shimelle.com, her recent work includes Kirsty Neale’s recent craft book, Hoop-La: 100 Things to do with Embroidery Hoops. She blogs when she can on Alices Homemade Studio and you can follow her on pinterest.

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Hello! May Flaum here – excited to be working with this month’s best of both worlds scrapbooking kit! When I pulled this kit out I saw so many lovely things and possibilities.

To start off with – I made this page with just the kit. I’m not usually a heavy patterned paper user – so it was a fun challenge to use nothing but patterned paper. I wanted to give it a bits & pieces kind of a look, so I used small strips, stitching, and stickers to bring it all together.

With the kit officially cut into (and isn’t that the hardest part?!) and feeling warmed up I decided to scrapbook a story happening right now. It is Girl Scout cookie season, and I’m so in love with how hard my girls are working so I knew this kit with all the hearts and lovely details would be perfect to do a layout about our cookie selling booth.

After re-organizing all of my layouts (thirteen years worth!) what I have found is that I really like the pages about very specific ‘right now’ type events. Whether small like today we sold cookies at our house, or big like the details of a major holiday – I cherish the pages that feature facts and details that might be forgotten.

With this in mind, I happened to find some photos of a breakfast that was pretty darn epic – and our first time at what is sure to be many visits back to a little restaurant in a small town not too far from home. I added in some buttons for color and texture, as well as some Maggie Holmes die cuts that go so beautifully with this kit. The heart stamp in the kit is a favorite – I have already used it many times!

Looking around my stash of “scrap me now” photos and stories, I did not find another that I wanted to tell that worked really well with these kit papers at the moment. So, rather than do more layouts that would be ‘because I’m Shimelle’s guest’ or try to make it happen, I used some scraps to make a few cards instead!

Inspired by the ‘darling’ stamp, I made myself a messy background and then inked (and cut out) the word darling. I also stamped and glittered (hooray for glittery things!) the round element in the center of my rosette. I love how messy and fun this card was to create.

I love the typewriter graphic on one of the sheets of patterned paper – but I knew this would be a piece that would not make it onto a scrapbook layout. When I run into products or papers I know that I won’t likely scrapbook with – I make cards! This makes me feel good about using up my stash, as well as making cards that I can have ready to mail at any time.

With five projects made, I still have quite a few pieces of this kit still to play with. My plan is to bag it up (in a clear bag) and keep it on my desk so that as I sit to scrapbook should a story pop up needing to be told that will go well with this kit – I’ll be ready to go. I hope that you’ve enjoyed my projects – and that you get some creative time for yourself in the near future as well. If you’d like to check out my site, blog, or perhaps take an on-line class from me please feel free to come check out my website at Craft with May.

Happy Crafting!

When it comes to crafting May Flaum has one rule: it’s gotta make her happy. She’s not afraid to get super grungy or work with bright colors, dabble in lace and doilies then make something more splattered and wild. If she’s not in her studio (aka ‘the bat cave’) then she’s probably out running around having fun with her family or cooking up a storm. May has been working in the Scrapbooking industry for a decade and currently blogs her crafty adventures, teaches online classes, and works with amazing companies sharing her projects and ideas. If she has one piece of advice to share, it’s always to be true to your creative heart.

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Creating notebooks and all sorts of mini books is my little obsession. At the same time I love when things are pretty AND useful. I knew I wanted to make a tutorial about something beautiful – and while thinking about what I could create – or better, what kind of mini book I could create – I realized I had my address book since I was about 13! Yes, I LOVE snail mail and as my old address book was full of addresses that were out-of-date, creating a new one was pretty useful.
As you can see in the video, I did’t really measure anything. I’ve used folded A4 sheets for my book but you can choose really any size. And please forgive me the spelling mistake, ‘ve eventually added the missing “d” in the word “address”.

I hope this tutorial inspires you to create something pretty AND useful. Maybe your old cookbook needs a remake? Thank for joining me and have fun with your projects! :)

Lucia is a scrapbooker, designer and a “dream follower”. She comes from Slovakia but had been travelling around Europe for the past 9 years. She then decided to return to her hometown to pursue a design career. She is starting a new business adventure and hopes that designing pretty logos, blogs, patterns and stationery will allow her to pay the bills one day. Her hobby 1 is crafting and scrapbooking and she sometimes puts the two things together, the result: digital paper packs that can be found in her Etsy shop or clear stamps in her own language – the first of a kind in her country! You can find her on her blog, facebook page or watch more videos on her youtube channel

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Alice is here today with a little project for your weekend! Enjoy!

I love going through all my photos. Time and time again I do it and it never gets boring. Every time I look at a photo, I get the same feeling I did the first time I saw it! With all this ‘lovely dovey’ talk in Valentine’s week, plus some behind the scenes work on an upcoming article that’s a little bit ‘Scrapping your Significant Other’, I felt this project would be best shared with that in mind.

The photo I’ve used for this was taken at Christmas last year, when I went ice skating with the boyfriend’s family at Somerset House. Now I have to say, ice skating is not my most favourite thing to do, however it didn’t take away the magical atmosphere! This is one of my favourite photos of him and me as it very much was a memorable day (unfortunately due to the fact I nearly cried the whole way round the rink).

Anyway, let’s get cracking with showing off those heart felt moments! (I hope you like my little play on words!)

For this you shall need: one photo, felt in a colour of your choice, ribbon, embellishments you wish to add, sewing utensils and standard supplies e.g. scissors. Oh, and a heart stencil! If not you can easily make one in a word document. I found mine on Pinterest. When choosing your heart, remember to keep in mind the size of your photo. My photo is wallet size, so I chose a heart template a bit bigger than that.

Once you’ve found the template you wish to use, print it, pin onto your fabric and draw around. I drew around mine with a little bit of room, in case I needed to trim off any bits, however that choice is yours! You’ll need to cut two hearts from the felt.

When you’ve finished cutting out your two hearts, you will need to cut out a smaller heart of one your pieces. If you don’t wish to do this freehand, either print out a smaller version of your heart or find a stencil with the heart already inside, just like mine. Nevertheless, if you’re feeling brave, go ahead and draw a heart freehand! It will work whatever technique you use!

Pin down the two hearts, and cut your photo to size. For the photo, I printed it out wallet size. Obviously the bigger the photo, the bigger the heart will need to be, so always keep that in mind!

Remove your photo at this stage and pin your hearts together. Making sure the full heart is at the bottom and the open heart on top. When you’re pinning, place your pins closer to the inner edge. This will give you more room to work with when it comes to sewing. At this stage, get your ribbon, fold in half and tuck the edges at the top of your heart. Pin it down! Annoyingly, I forgot to take a photo of this stage, so do forgive me!

Place under your sewing machine! You want the tension to roughly be on about 1.5 or 2, most likely, though your machine may vary. It’s completely up to you what stitch you wish to use, whether it be tiny and straight like mine or zig-zag!

Once you’ve tidied up everything, you should be left with a cute heart photo frame! It’s such a quick, simple project- you could make many and use them for gift wrapping or a banner. If you’re up for a challenge, why not make a heart photo frame chain? Continue sewing hearts and attach them together via the ribbon, making such a cute gift for someone or wall feature. Dress it up by securing the hearts to each other with buttons or bows. Of course, if red love hearts aren’t your thing, the entire idea is easily switched to any motif you care to cut from felt! It could even work with a lettered banner – place your photos in the centres of letters that have a window (A, B, D, O, and so on) and spell out a name or phrase adding in the rest of the letters as just cut from felt or fabric. How would you customise this project?

Happy Belated Valentine’s to all you wonderful readers and happy sewing!

And a P.S. If my boyfriend reads this – Happy fourth Valentine’s to us and hopefully many more!

Alice Partridge is a young designer-maker from southeast England. She hopes to make a living doing what she loves, and spends most of her free time reading blogs, drinking tea, or stitching with a needle in her hand. In addition to working behind the scenes at shimelle.com, her recent work includes Kirsty Neale’s recent craft book, Hoop-La: 100 Things to do with Embroidery Hoops. She blogs when she can on Alices Homemade Studio and you can follow her on pinterest.

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One of my 2013 New Year’s Resolutions was to find Mr Second Date (Mr Right was looking like a long shot) and so it was with no small amount of trepidation that I signed up to online dating. And therein lay the first hurdle: I had to describe myself in detail so that people would, y’know, fall in love with me and whisk me off on that second date.
I’m nothing if not methodical, and not content with blurting out random information in haphazard order, I spent some time writing my profile on my computer and editing it to my satisfaction before I launched it on an unsuspecting internet. A year later looking back on that written profile, it is fascinating to see how I described myself: what was important to me, my tastes and interests and what I thought would make me sound like a good date.

And so in true scrapbooker style, I decided to scrapbook it. I jotted out my profile on little slips of paper and arranged them on a page. Although that journaling was online for all the world to see, to me it’s personal and something I feel a little self-conscious about. I wanted the handwritten journaling to be a clear design element, but I didn’t really want it all to be read quite that easily. The truly interested reader of my scrapbook album is going to have to delve deeper to get to the full details.
To achieve the slightly-hidden journaling look, I organised the journaling blocks to overlap; once happy with their placement, I added a little clothes peg to the corner of each one and glued just the peg into place. The pegs will hold the journaling fast, but the paper can be unclipped to read more easily as it’s not adhered to the page. I’ve always been a prolific (or should that be excessive?) journaling-writer, but if the quantity seems overwhelming or you’re simply not as self-involved as I am, then you can create the same effect with typed journaling, book-pages or patterned paper.

I constructed the rest of the design around those journaling blocks. Some elements went underneath and some were layered on top, but the most important thing when structuring a page like this is that if you have paper, photos or embellishments that will sit on top of the journaling, don’t adhere them fully to the page. Make sure you leave enough of those elements unstuck so that the journaling can slide in behind them. A few pencil marks outlining where the journaling is going to go can really help with this process.

I used the idea of letter-writing to inspire the rest of the design, using an envelope to slide one of the journaling cards into, and another to dress up with some pretty writing and a couple of stamps. I finished the page with my photo, a hand-cut title, a camera snipped from a sheet of patterned paper and some of those wonderful and universally popular enamel dots.

The finished page gives an appearance of a letter just opened with the contents tumbling out, and this is an idea I’ve been playing with a lot lately. But this layout can be deconstructed and you can read about me in (slightly excruciating) detail.

P.S. In case you’re curious, I lined up three dates with three different guys in January 2013. The first two were both disappointing. And the third guy? Well we just celebrated our first year together as a couple.

Kirsty is a maths teacher by day and many other things by night. After several years, she is still wildly excited about living in London mainly because there’s so much to do and see and visit and experience. She takes her camera with her so that she can scrap about her adventures, and then she drinks tea and blogs about it all over at journalofcuriousthings.co.uk

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Although I’ve never been the type of scrapbooker who could focus and work through twenty pages at a crop (I’m afraid I spend way too much time talking and snacking to make that happen!) I would still consider myself pretty prolific. Prolific scrapping combined with fifteen years of scrapbooking makes for a great deal of pages and a great deal of albums. I have nearly seventy 12×12 albums, and I treasure them – I don’t mind how much space they take up at all, and they live in my craft space, so no one else really gets to comment on the space they take up. But I would never feel like there should be some sort of obligation for anyone to take seventy albums when my time here is up, much less the many more I hope to make in the future! It’s something I’ve discussed with a few scrappers over the past year or so, when some crafters said this was the biggest reason they were walking away from the hobby: that the albums had become a burden.

Please forgive the slightly morbid tone of this thought, but in this house, we’ve discussed the scenario of what I would want to happen, and my answer was that I would just appreciate it if, whenever the timing felt right, that The Boy and whomever else felt compelled to do so would flip through my albums and have one look through everything (which I realise is asking a lot when it’s so many books) and then select whatever they feel are the highlights they want to keep and to feel zero guilt in letting the rest go. I imagine that would take things down to one or two albums of the absolute highlights, and we’ve also talked about a couple albums that might stay intact, like our wedding album and the books of our epic backpacking trip, because these really focus on telling our story in a different way from the page-by-page randomness of any given annual album.

Something that came up in this conversation was but which pages would you feel were the most important? and that was something I hadn’t really devoted much thought to in the past. With a bit of distance from the conversation, it started to feel like a real challenge for this year of focusing on why I scrapbook, so my goal is to identify about fifty Important Pages that would create some sort of story of my life. I haven’t sat down and figured out all fifty at once. That means they may not go in any sort of order as I write about them. Some are relatively new, some are old, some will truly document the evolution of my creative style, and I’m fine with all that. And so, on to the first page I’ve picked to get that capital letter treatment: one of The Important Pages.

Originally created in May 2011 and shared in this post that marked my first effort at raising funds for girls through the charity Plan. I think that gives this page two levels of meaning to my heart – one about the photo and the memory itself and another about what making the page symbolised and all the thoughts that went through my mind while making it that were so far removed from the memory of exactly what was in that photo, and the sheer thrill of that first big donation I was able to make combined with knowing that I’ve continued to be able to work for that cause through a love of craft. But it’s the photo and the memories that I want to focus on here.

This photo was taken, as far as I know, in the back yard of the first house I remember. I believe there was an apartment when I was a teeny baby, if I’ve pieced the stories together correctly, but by the time I was old enough to remember the visuals, we lived here, and there was grass in the front and the back, and the back yard was fenced to keep the dogs in, in theory, though there was one who had a habit of following us to the post office. There was at least one big whisky barrel style dog house that I loved to climb until the day I took a tumble from the top. I still have a funny white scar on my knee from that day. I have no idea if the fall actually made me stop climbing, and I’m inclined to believe it didn’t, as in elementary school I had developed an obsession with another female super hero – She-Ra, Princess of Power – and would climb to the top of the jungle gym to fly off the top, if only I believed I could. Of course, gravity had other thoughts, and I would go plummeting to the ground every time, only to dust myself off and think that I would have to believe harder the next time. It is seriously a miracle that I didn’t break every bone in my body during recess that year.

But back to the time of this exact photo… I remember what I think is this particular summer that the temperatures soared and the paddling pool actually melted past a point of all recognition. I remember being this age and loving to eat Ruffles potato chips from the bag, having meals on an Incredible Hulk melamine plate, and watching Hart to Hart and the Muppet Show in the living room from a tiny brown arm chair. My Anglophile stage wouldn’t begin for another few years, so these early memories are some of the things I truly remember in an American nomenclature, which would slowly fade away over the years.

Then there is also how this page starts to capture the influence of superhero culture and how I grew up. There is a little confusion you might pick up between the photo and the title here: that swimming attire is most certainly Supergirl influenced, not Wonder Woman. I promise it all makes sense in my head: too little to read at this time, so my superhero influences came almost entirely from TV. I watched Wonder Woman and thought she was amazing. Again, a female superhero who could fly! (Seriously, I am still searching eBay for an invisible plane, because that would just be useful, assuming it stays in good repair.) I didn’t really know who Supergirl was until the movie came out and that was a few years after this picture. To my untrained eye, this outfit was very much Wonder Woman and I don’t remember anyone correcting me. If they did, I might have been a brat about it and told them they were wrong. I’m not too sure, but I can believe it. I remember more correcting adults as a child than I really care to admit, but thankfully there weren’t too many people in my little world who believed in the ‘children should be seen and not heard’ school of thought, so I managed to survive to adulthood unscathed, and probably learned more about keeping my mouth shut when one can’t win an argument during university lectures with those kinds of professors who have been teaching the same class every term for longer than you’ve been alive. The Wonder Woman obsession stayed around for a long time, and there is another page in my album that documents how I only wanted a Wonder Woman birthday cake at least three years running, despite my wonderfully-meaning grandmother thinking I would surely be bored of that by now and want something else. I think she still has the cake pan. If I ever end up in Kansas around my birthday again, well… it would never surprise me. And I would probably cry a lot of happy tears about it.

(By the way, when Supergirl did finally hit my radar, the fact that her first name was the same as my cousin may have made me think she was the coolest person on the planet. Frankly we should have been invincible and able to leap tall buildings, but we mostly have epic skills in eating black olives off our fingers and finishing off the potatoes at family gathering, and let me tell you, I do not think these are super powers that should be underestimated, because they are ridiculously rewarding. If you disagree, you are eating the wrong potatoes.)

Even the silly ball in this photo reminds me of other things, and it’s just one of those dime a dozen bouncing balls that would be in a big cage at the end of the aisle at K-Mart or TG&Y. (I could probably also write an entire paragraph on why I miss TG&Y, which was the best bargain hunt of a store in my youth, but I fear it is really one of those ‘you had to be there’ things and there isn’t a true way to explain an appreciation of the five and dime.) From this photo, I clearly had at least one as a little girl. But as a teenager, there was another – with the same exact print and from another metal cage – that my high school speech team carried to forensics tournaments, and at the end of each weekend we would take a Sharpie to the ball and record any wins from the week. The rest of the time it served as distraction during the down time of a tournament, waiting for postings and results, and had a hand in a few warm up games we would do to start the day. More than once, I had to cram it in my locker quickly when someone would throw it to me in the hall from the classroom. I often skated a very fine line with being a bit too ‘lively in the halls’ when speech team stuff was concerned and there was one member of staff who always seemed to turn up at just the moment. We never really did get along. But I am thankful for the teacher who actually led that team and how he would give those little troubles a bit of a wink and move on, because when I was my most disheartened with all things academic and truly wanted to throw in the towel, he would throw me something that would keep me there. He also made me fall in love with Shakespeare after another teacher had made me truly believe that old texts were the most lifeless words thrown together in a blender of boring. After he made me perform a few monologues, I returned to the dusty copy of the complete works on my shelf at home and I read them all, in order, usually in whispers in the middle of the night, which is all a little Dead Poets Society without the boarding school, but still: that was the truth, and I get all that rushing back just from that silly bouncy ball in the back yard, aged three.

And all that makes this a pretty important page indeed.

Admittedly, I feel this series of posts is going to lead to a stack of journaling that isn’t included in my album. I’m thinking I may add these posts to my albums next to the highlighted pages in a smaller page protector (like 6×12), but if I don’t get that bit of added writing into my albums, I am happy that it at least exists here.

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Though I’m sure New Year was only three days ago, it appears to be February, and that means we’ve just finished our first full month of the 2014 inspiration and education programme at Two Peas. I love working with the Garden Girl team and this year’s programme has been so inspiring for me to create new content. But it is different to what we were doing in 2013, and we know change is difficult, even with the random little things in life, so I wanted to bring everything the team has done this month together in one review post. Fair warning: it turns out that a full month of content makes for one epically long post. But this includes all of Glitter Girl’s videos and layouts this month, plus a look at all the team projects and links to each of those to see more. I hope you find it useful!

_{Image sources, clockwise from top left: 101 woonideen, Studio 404 (includes links to different lettering artists), Melanie DeFazio, House and Hold, Avotakka, Sparrow & Co via DesignSponge, Rosellen Ralmond, GaliaAlena.}

One new thing for the team this year is a monthly mood board chosen by our fearless leader, Kristina. The January mood board was certainly wintry, and that might have something to do with the exceptionally snowy winter hitting Two Peas HQ while there has been just gallons of rain here in London. (To be fair, London can’t cope with a couple inches of snow once a year, so who knows what would happen in a true snowmageddon reality. The capital might just crumble while Scotland laughs at our southern failings.)

_{Image sources, clockwise from top left: Sandra Kleist, Michael Alberstat for House and Home, Antique and Vintage Woods, Oksana Nazarchuk, Noel Shiveley, Saartje Knits, Sasha Hollaway.}

We’ve had monthly topics to guide our page topics for the five or so years I’ve been a Garden Girl (this month’s theme was family) but the mood board is a new concept for the full team. Last year, four Garden Girls worked with a mood board they created each week for the In the Mood to Scrap video series, but this time there is one board for all of us to work with for the full month. I looked at the mood board in two parts: first gathering textures from the photos, like natural woodgrains and knitted patterns.

The second part was the colour scheme. For most of my pages this month, I worked with aqua and brown, accenting with other colours from the board, but once I even switched it up for aqua and pink. I’m pretty sure it’s not really possible for me to make it through an entire month without some aqua and pink together!

With this mood board in mind, we then have four weekly themes that structure the month, with videos every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Glitter Girl is still on Wednesdays and there’s a new series from Jen Gallacher on Fridays called Make it Meaningful. Glitter Girl’s format has changed just a little this year: after two full years of taking her weekly topics from the message boards, the topics were getting a bit thin on the ground and there were some more detailed scrapbooking dilemmas she felt the need to solve. But not to panic: the overall premise of saving the world one crafty dilemma at a time still stands, and she still has the Adhesive Avenger on hand to help too. He’s useful like that. Glitter Girl still reads the message boards and the comments in the gallery and on YouTube, and she still keeps an eye on the problems posted, but the new format is just enough of a change to keep things exciting behind the camera, and I hope you enjoy her adventures throughout 2014.

How do these four weekly themes work then?

Throughout the first theme of the month, we embraced the ‘inspired’ concept: telling our stories through art and design. This is the week that saw the most literal translations from the mood board, although we took inspiration from that throughout the whole month. Each of us working on a project for this first week picked up on a different artistic element we could share, so Inspired week is great for giving yourself a creative kick, and might be your favourite week on the schedule if you prefer the artsier side to scrapbooking.

Wilna Furstenberg kicked off our programme for the year with two videos: one on how to make the cover for this beautiful minibook in textured winter whites, and one for the interior pages with large black and white photos and beautifully layered embellishments. (Find both videos by scrolling down the page here.) Celine Navarro selected woodgrains and navy blues for this page on her love of winter days. Jen Kinkade dressed up basic tags with watercolours and turned her hand to script writing with this project. Paige Evans took inspiration from homespun quilts and shared her paper quilting techniques with a tutorial video. And Jen Gallacher started her brand new weekly video series, Make it Meaningful, with the challenge to create your own family crest to display on a scrapbook page or frame in your home.

Glitter Girl’s contribution to this Inspired week came in two parts: first, a look at how I translate a digital mood board to a selection of physical scrapbook supplies I can put to use on several pages. The supplies you see selected at the beginning of this video appear throughout my projects in January, and now I just have a few items left on my tray, so it was a pretty good approximation of what I would need for a month of Glitter Girl projects. The camera angle is different for this part of the video because I really wanted to show you this process in as close to my own viewpoint as possible. I don’t look at all my supplies from overhead all the time. When I’m pulling together inspiration, I constantly walk around my desk and look at things from a literal different angle to see what catches my eye. It’s one of the most invigorating parts of the creative process for me, and I hope sharing that look at how it works for me might be helpful. (I say ‘invigorating’ and yet the narration really emphasises out easily I get out of breath right now. Please forgive me – I’m having a terrible time taking care of my voice this winter, so all of my January videos seem to bounce between being out of breath and being completely hoarse. Thank goodness I don’t make a living as an opera singer!) My biggest inspiration when putting together this physical mood board was to mix two colour families: the warm, dark neutrals of the woodgrains and the icy, cool tones of the aqua shades.

I think in future months I might film this same process and just share it here on the blog and my own YouTube channel, as it wouldn’t necessarily add value to Glitter Girl’s lessons to repeat the same process every month, but some of you might be interested in seeing how each month’s mood board works for me. Thoughts? Let me know if that is something you would care to see on screen each month or if once was enough for it to all make sense.

The second part of the video is the creation of this Christmassy scrapbook page from start to finish. Interestingly, Celine and I chose a few things in common – even the picture of putting our feet up on a cold day! And yet there is quite a bit of difference between the two layouts. I find that sort of thing really interesting – what happens when multiple people start from the same inspiration piece. That big bokeh photo of the Christmas tree really makes me happy when I see this page. I need to remember to do that more often!

So all of that made up Glitter Girl Adventure 102: Inspired Colour Curation.

During the second week of the month, we take on the Storytellers challenge: using tools to tell our story. That doesn’t necessarily mean tools like punches and die-cutters. It refers to anything that is a building block as we make our pages. That makes a little more sense with a week of examples.

Lisa Dickinson started the week with a video on mixing words and graphics to create an ‘In Review’ page to tell the story of the year just finished. Nancy Damiano and Stephanie Bryan both created layouts in their own style inspired by the look of infographics: Nancy mixing journaling cards and textures and Stephanie working in layers of hexagons. Jill Sprott shared a video on using timelines for your journaling, and Jen’s next episode of Make it Meaningful focused on page ideas for offering advice to a loved one. Lots of tools and not one of them a punch of a die-cutter! Although those kind of tools make come up from time to time as well, what we really aim for with Storytellers week is a way to help you realise all the tricks in your arsenal, so you can continue to be creative with the way you tell your stories on paper, be it through the design, the journaling, or the photography.

Glitter Girl focused on group photos this week, like that annual challenge of getting a picture of the entire extended family in front of the Christmas tree using the self-timer. It always includes plenty of outtakes in my world, and sometimes those outtakes have some of my favourite moments and the truest facial expressions, so they can be just as scrapworthy as the final winning shot. The first part of this episode shares a few pages that feature self-timer photos over the years and some thoughts on this subject.

The second part of this episode shares this page from start to finish, putting some definite reality into my Christmas pages to tell the whole story for years to come. (Place your bets now on how many years until my nephew gets really cross with me for keeping that top photo. But I think he’s adorable there, of course!)

That Storytellers focus makes up Glitter Girl Adventure 103: Family Photo Faux Pas.

Our third week is dedicated to Moments: the stories we just have to scrapbook. I love this sort of topic – those times when you are thinking through the journaling or the page design as soon as you take the photo because the moment is so fabulous, you never want to forget a single detail. This is the electricity of scrapbooking to me. It literally makes the muscles in my upper arms tense up and my hands go into some sort of post-cheerleader spirit fingers mode, just itching to print that picture and get cutting, pasting, and writing.

We started the week with a video from Nancy Damiano, which at first glance is about a trip to a tree farm, but when reading Nancy’s words on the page, it is very much more. Beautiful pages from Lisa Dickinson and Jen Kinkade showcase two very different styles of capturing winter moments on a scrapbook page. Laura Craigie contributed the next video, with ideas for turning a standard school portrait into a real time capsule of a child. Jen’s Make it Meaningful episode took its inspiration from the moments you capture relationships on camera. Celine Navarro rolled the clock back with an older moment, scrapbooking a childhood memory.

Paige Evans shared how she balances the typical moments in her family adventures with her detailed scrapbooking style, and Stephanie Bryan shared our first Project Life spread of the year, capturing a few weeks of moments in her life.

Glitter Girl took on a pretty big moment for this week’s layout. I braved scrapbooking the day I found out I was pregnant. I have to say this was one of the more intimidating episodes to upload! But it one of the most gratifying pages I’ve ever made, and I’m really happy I took the time to tell this story of a day turned from so very bad to so very good. If this episode helps even just one person out there feel a little like that, then it’s worth the trepidation of sharing quite so much!

This layout tells the story of one day across two pages, with one full 12×12 page and one pocket page. The pocket page conceals even more journaling, with one part of the story I didn’t want to be obvious to everyone who looks at the page. It’s hidden simply with two journaling cards and bit of hidden washi tape. The use of several journaling cards really helped me tell this story, because I would naturally feel compelled to change the topic when moving to the new card, rather than going on a bit too long on the negatives before I turned a corner to get to the happier part of the day.

All that makes up Glitter Girl Adventure 104: Tear-Free Tell All.

Our fourth week of the month is called Capture. In this week, we focus on everyday stories, like scrapbooking chronologically and approaches like Project Life. If you’re doing an everyday documentation project like Project Life or something similar in 2014, this last week of the month is there to boost your productivity and help you end the month with at least some of your stories in the album!

Celine started the week with a fab video sharing how she catches up on a week of Project Life in under thirty minutes. Mel Blackburn and Laura Craigie both shared traditional pages capturing everyday moments with their family. Stephanie Bryan’s first Garden Girl video shows how she creates interactive scrapbook pages. Jen’s Make it Meaningful episode shares a minibook to make for a loved one. Laura also shared a second page documenting some more serious thoughts as she aims to catch the smallest details of her son’s first year.

Two more Project Life pages round off the Capture week: Stephanie shares how she works with a page and a half when that’s the best match for her photos, and Mel Blackburn shares a double page from a week of travel without relying on travel-themed products to complete the look, opting to get more from her favourite supplies.

Glitter Girl’s latest adventure is another with one standard 12×12 and one pocketed page, this time with 3×3 square pockets. This whole idea of being ‘caught up’ isn’t really something that has kicked in for me in the years I’ve been scrapping. Sometimes I want to scrapbook something straight away, and other times I like to go back and tell a story from the past with some distance, which I find adds to how I tell the story. I’m glad there are no scrapbook police to show up on my doorstep and arrest me for not worrying about or ever wanting to be caught up with my scrapping. Nothing would frighten me more than being out of stories to tell!

While many scrappers use divided page protectors to scrapbook by the week or month, there is certainly no reason to be limited to that. In this case, the pockets showcase a full year of memories, divided so each row is one season. These are all photos that I wanted to include in my album for 2013, but were really quite minor and didn’t warrant a full page on their own. But together, they tell the story of all those simple things I am happy to have back in our little world since we moved back to the place that feels like home.

That’s Glitter Girl Adventure 105: Seasons and Schedules.

That brought our January to a close and we’ll start with a new mood board for February tomorrow, heading back to that inspired topic for the first week and so on. January included seventeen videos and a total of thirty projects, so that might explain why it took a bit longer than the average blog post to wrap it all up here. I hope something here catches your eye and wish you a very creative February!

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_{The Garden Girls are the design team at Two Peas in a Bucket. You can always find our latest projects in the designer garden, including both layouts and videos. Any time you purchase a product by adding it to your bucket directly from the shopping list below a project, you support that designer’s work, and we thank you for that! We know that it’s not always possible to support your favourite designers with purchases, and we also appreciate when you take the time to leave a comment, like, or thumbs up a project or video. The 2014 Garden Girls are Amy Tan, Celine Navarro, Jennifer Gallacher, Jennifer Kinkade, Jill Sprott, Kristina Nicolai-White, Laura Craigie, Lisa Dickinson, Melanie Blackburn, Nancy Damiano, Paige Evans, Shimelle Laine, Stephanie Bryan, and Wilna Furstenberg. Two Peas also has its own blog and YouTube channel where you can subscribe for regular updates in this year’s inspiration and education programme.}

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