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

Happy Friday! Please welcome the fabulously colourful Ronelia, here to share a colourful project! As usual, supplies are listed with affiliate links.

Hello scrappy friends! Today I’m creating this 12×12 layouting using beautiful products from Shimelle. I love colour, it’s one of the main reasons why I craft, I love playing with colour and tones and rainbows. My original plan for this layout was to follow my favourite colour scheme being pink, blue and purple (largely dictated by my colourful hair of course) but as you can see it turned into more of a rainbow layout, which is also a favourite colour scheme of mine.

I started with adding a border to the layout using that lovely floral paper. I then laid out my photos in lopsided grid pattern and chose two of my favourite photos to mat on another beautiful Shimelle paper.

I added some dimension by propping those same two photos up on some foam tape.

My original plan was to create a journaling spot on the left of my photo cluster but I decided that my title should go there instead. Those gold glitter thickers were so pretty and I love how tall and skinny they are, they allowed me to have a longer title in a relatively small space.

Then for the fun part… embellishing! I used Shimelle’s sticker book and I wanted it to look like flowers were exploding from underneath my photos! If you know me then you know that my style is not exactly minimalist. I love to add ALL of the embellishments.

The story is a really important part of any layout for me. If I don’t have enough space to tell the entire story, then I usually just flip the layout over and add more detailed journaling on the back (like I did on this layout).

What I love about this grid style layout with a colourful border is that it can be translated into any size, from 6×8 to 9×12. You just need to adjust the size of your photos and maybe choose smaller (or fewer) embellishments.
I had such a blast putting this one together and I hope you enjoy the explosion of colour.

Ronelia has been a storyteller and crafter for almost 4 years since the birth of her daughter in 2018, but has been a creative person her entire life. She still has her high school scrapbook in storage… somewhere. She crafts because she believes that telling your story is so important and she loves the treasured memories she has documented over the years. In her non-crafty time Ronelia works in artisan market organisation, supporting creative small business owners in selling their hand designed and handmade goods. You can follow her creative journey on Instagram.

Hello hello friends! Please welcome today’s guest artist, Lauren!

We all have them, they are all over our crafty spaces and tucked into our crafty totes. Yes, you know what I am talking about, those much loved and most treasured favourite scrappy purchases that you just can’t bring yourself to use. As a 20yr + scrapper I know this situation well. Reflecting on this I thought it is time to bring out those treasured items and start enjoy using them to document some meaningful moments. One way of doing this is by making your own kits.

Often those treasured items are just one or two things in a collection so taking sometime to go through your stash and making your own kit is a great way of including those much loved items and having them ready on hand for the right photo to come along. Don’t be frightened to mix collections or manufacturers as long as they all coordinate in colour and/or theme you will be on the right track. The kit I used to create this layout had beautiful products from Shimelle, Dear Lizzy, Heidi Swapp, Simple Stories, Crate Paper and Pink Fresh Studio. All these different collections and manufactures have different styles but when I put them all together it created a beautiful kit.

To create this layout I used some fundamental techniques which include using a photo where the subject, in this case my beautiful daughter and her puppy, is looking directly into the camera, bordering my photos, creating cluster groups with flowers and embellishments and having a title that stands out. These few basic layout rules along with a hand crafted kit with all your favourite scrapping supplies will ensure that you create a beautiful layout that you will treasure.

Having been scrapbooking so long my motivations for why I create have changed overtime. Early on my motives were about documenting my life and then my children’s lives, but now as a middle aged (yes, I’m 43 this year and therefore I feel I can officially call myself middle aged lol) woman, who is busy working full time and raising a family, scrapbooking as evolved into a therapeutic retreat for me. The joy is now in the journey from taking the photo, to selecting the supplies or in this case creating a kit, to making the layout and admiring the creation. It gives me a little time to switch off from this crazy busy world and recharge a little. I feel blessed that I have a hobby that is able to bring me so much joy while at the same time allowing me to have some much needed time out. I hope this layout inspires you to dig into your supplies and put together some kits using all those favourite goodies you are hiding.

Lauren Hender lives on the Mid North Coast of New South Wales, Australia. She is mother to three beautiful children who have been the subject of most of her twenty plus years of scrapbooking. Lauren loves scrapbooking because it provides a little time out in this busy world. She also runs a local scrapbooking group supporting creative women who get together to nurture and share with each other. Follow more of Lauren’s work on her Instagram account.

This scrapbooking class about colour – it’s a concept I have worked on so long, on and off, because I knew I wanted to say so much and I felt like every angle I chose left me with all these other elements I wanted to include. Fast forward through a lot of scribbled notebooks and I’ve come to my very happy conclusion: it’s not just one class.

Today I’m opening registration for We Can Scrap a Rainbow, which is what I’m calling the first class in my colour-based curriculum. There are at least two more classes to follow, each with their own angle, and the series will build one class to the next, so joining in now will make it easy to follow along as we move through an entire spectrum of colour conundrums, possibilities, and tangents.

I know you’ll be tempted to look at the layouts I’ve made over the last two years and assume ‘scrap a rainbow’ means pages with a literal rainbow of colours and literal rainbow motifs. But I’m keeping you on your toes: IT IS NOT THAT. Instead, this is a dive into each colour, one at a time. So we’ll look at red, then orange, then yellow and so on. I’m adding pink even though it’s not in the rainbow. There is a balance in each colour, so we’ll look at the colour on its own and then in several combinations, all with scrapbook page examples and process videos.

What you get:

*As soon as your registration is processed (which can take up to 48 hours after payment – it is not automated) you can watch a class I originally taught for Scrap Smarter. It’s all about making page kits and looking at the ways those colours work together.

*From Friday 25th of March to Friday 1st of April, we’ll work through a series of edited video lessons about quadrant page design and different ways to use colour in this set up. If you have taken Half and Half, you also get access to this on the same dates. This week of lessons bridges the last class, all about composition, to the new class focus on colour!

*From Monday 4th of April, we work our way through the rainbow! Each colour in the rainbow will include a brief prep session so you can gather your materials, an edited lesson video, and a live video session. These live sessions are not like my casual YouTube livestreams, but instead start and end with a brief Q&A session and have a structured lesson in the middle so you can scrap along with me in real time. I’ll save all the random rubbish chat for outside class! Each colour also includes printable lesson notes and a Pinterest board of resources.

Your access to all the class materials is permanent and all live videos can also be watched on replay. The quick prep session for each colour means you can post any questions you would like answered in the Q&A without needing to be there live, and then you can watch it back when it suits your schedule.

$20 USD

£15 GBP

You can choose US Dollars or UK Pounds to purchase the class, and if your currency is neither of those, you can just choose the one your prefer and it will automatically convert when you purchase. You can check currency exchange rates at xe.com if you need to translate it into number that will make sense for you! Once you click through, you’ll be given the option to pay by card or from your Paypal account – either option is fine. No transactions are done on my actual site – you can check the URL when it goes through and you’ll see the secure processing is done through Paypal’s servers and not here on my blog. I never see your payment details.

If you pay by Paypal account and your account there has a different email address than where you’d like to receive your class materials, please email me at shimelle@gmail.com and just let me know the two email addresses so I can sort that for you! You can use that email address to ask any questions as well!

If you are a pass holder, you don’t need to do anything – you receive this class automatically. If you purchased a class during the flash sale to get a discount on this class, do not purchase here at full price – you’ll get an email with your discount instructions. Thanks!

If you prefer to wait hear more than just what’s here, that’s fine! I’ll be talking more about the class on both my YouTube videos and Instagram posts in the time between now and the start of class!

Hello hello and please welcome Petra De Vroege, here to share a lovely idea for the sprays we collect. Do you have an air blower tool or could you try something similar with a straw? I’m curious what ideas you’ll have from Petra’s project today! A reminder that supplies are affiliate linked to make all this possible. Thanks! -Shimelle

Hi creative friends! I’m so thrilled to be joining the 2022 Shimelle project to inspire other crafters. The layout I made was a growing project. Sometimes I start with an idea that suddenly turns out completely different, this time that was the case. I wanted to create half a circle, but it turned out “slightly” different ;) and that is also what I love about our hobby, get those creative juices flowing! Crafting gives me a way to get rid of stress and soothes me in many ways. Every project is different and every time it is a little adventure on its own.

In almost all of my projects I use Distress Oxide inks. I love to create backgrounds with them and give my work a touch of mixed media. This time I wanted to try something different and used the Oxide spray in Spun Sugar. I made little puddles of ink on my page and used my Tim Holtz Air Blower to get that splattered look. I love how that turned out! It gives such a cool effect and you see the different shades of pink that are in that spray. I’ll try this technique again for sure!

Since I’m the only girl in our happy little family, I rarely use pink, and certainly not a lot. This photo of me on our very first “after COVID” vacation was the perfect excuse to use pink! I used The Best Day collection by Pinkfresh Studio, such pretty and soft papers! The flair buttons are made with the WRMK Button Press, and it was so cool to be able to create matching flair with the papers from the same collection!

So, to finish it off I wanted to add some black to make it stand out more, but… I also wanted to incorporate some journalling. I never do journalling on pages, but since this was a special vacation for us, I wanted to do it for the first time. I decided to follow the “lines” of the layout, so I journalled along the circles and along the stitching around the border. Not a complete story, but small phrases about what we did, ate and saw.

I hope I was able to inspire you in some way, perhaps to get creative with your inks, or different use of different colors, I would love to see your work! Get those creative juices flowing!

Petra de Vroege is a mother, wife, vocal coach and scrapbooker from the Netherlands. Scrapping for almost 20 years, she loves the creative freedom and amazing community. Crafting has given her so many beautiful friendships and she loves it most when we all can inspire each other. You can follow Petra’s work on her Instagram feed.

Today I am delighted to welcome a very special crafty friend to share a project with you: it’s Crafty Jen Schow! You might already know that I love her stamp designs but you might not know that we got to spend some excellent time together at ye old craft trade show in the before times and friends, I MISS HER. So this is my next best thing: getting to see her scrapbook. Enjoy. -Shimelle

I love layers and textures to create interest on my layouts. One of my favorite things to do is create with leftovers and off-cuts from previous projects. I love the sort of “organic” look of torn edges and punched papers sticking out of a bunch of layers.

For this layout, I went through my stash of scraps and my bin where I keep interesting off-cuts, random inked or painted pieces, and embellishments that didn’t find homes on other pages. I layered them up behind my photo letting all of the interesting bits show. In order to keep the chaos contained, I like to add tight layers and keep them right around the photo. This allows room for your eye to rest on the outer edges. The other thing I like to do is make sure to add in lots of neutrals so the colors and patterns don’t become super overwhelming – book pages are a favorite! The last thing I really pay attention to when adding layers is to make sure none of the corners or edges line up – something that I’ve learned from Shimelle!

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For texture, I’ve added stitching, roughed and curled up the edges of the papers, used embellishments with different finishes, and added in stamping, staples, and embossing. Simple things really do make a big difference, so if you feel like your next layout is missing something I encourage you to try some of these techniques!

For me, the most important part of any layout is the story. I had this funny photo of my daughter and when I saw it I thought, “She always does this pose!” It was the perfect jumping off point for a list of the things she’s always doing right now – teenagers change so quickly!

I hope you’ve gathered some ideas for adding layers and texture to your next layout or maybe documenting the things that someone close to you is always doing!

Jen Schow loves documenting her most important everyday stories using words, photos, and pretty papers. She has been scrapbooking since age 12 and has worked in the industry in some capacity for about 12 years. She is most active on Instagram these days, but you can find her popular Use It or Lose It series on Youtube.

Happy March! Please welcome Dana Tatar to the blog today, and she has made a scrapbook page with three of my collections, which has really made me smile. I hope you find it inspiring too! Remember, supplies have affiliate links and shopping through those makes the guest artist project possible, so thank you for your support! -Shimelle

I’ve created a family themed scrapbook layout using a fun mix of Shimelle products and the color wheel as my guide. My sister and her four kids came to visit me over the Thanksgiving holiday, and we had an amazing time together. I took the photo of my sister with her two daughters at a local neighborhood park where we spent time enjoying the full palette of falling leaves, something that they don’t get to see living in central Texas.

I always gravitate to specialty papers. The 12×12 Die-Cut Cardstock from the Field Trip Collection, with the rainbow of colorful punch-out segments, was the starting point for my page design. I popped out the cool tone die-cuts that matched the colors in my photo. After trimming away the white border from each die-cut and distressing the edges with scissors, I arranged the pieces of patterned paper by color onto the base patterned paper.

Once I had the bands of color secured to the page, it was time to embellish! Shimelle’s paper collections are full of color and fun designs that have a lot of texture and dimension, so I had plenty to choose from. I applied puffy and foam stickers, and small images that I cut from patterned papers, into the matching-colored sections on the page. I mixed elements from two collections to create this layout; Never Grow Up and Field Trip.

I applied teal glitter star stickers (from Shimelle’s Glitter Girl collection!) for a touch of sparkle and white chalk ink splatters for contrast before adding a small journaling sticker to finish the page.

Dana Tatar currently lives in Ohio with her husband and two teenage children. She started paper crafting about fifteen years ago and has expanded from scrapbooking since then, now creating a little of everything including cards, tags, mixed media pieces, and small gift and home décor items. Dana has an eclectic style in terms of what and how she designs. She frequently finds inspiration in music, poetry, and pop culture. When not creating art, Dana enjoys baking, reading, listening to music, and spending time outside with her family and basset hound Peach. You can find more of her work on her blog,They Call Me Tatar Salad, and her Instagram feed.

I love crafting and scrapbooking because it’s an activity that relaxes and reconnects me. Keeping memories through scrapbooking is magical and fun. What I like most is being able to mix different types of art and techniques, making that memory even more interactive and alive for my family and friends to remember the moments we spent together.

For this layout, I decided to challenge myself to do something I rarely do: mix products from different manufacturers. I selected a few collections that I thought had a similar color palette and that somehow would have elements which could support the photographed moment. I started with Shimelle’s Sparkle City and Paige Evans’ Bloom Street collections, then added a few other elements as well.

I like to choose my supplies and techniques first and let that guide my plan. I wanted to use sequins with Polaseal, which is very trendy here in Brazil. It’s a way of using laminating supplies to create windows of sparkle. I chose this patterned paper because the frames of the design let me create three kinds of windows: some filled with photographs, some filled with embellishment, and others left intact with the original travel-inspired design.

The photos I chose were from the last trip I took with my husband to a beautiful and peaceful place, in the middle of nature, so that we could rest and get out of our routine a little bit. This place is in the countryside of São Paulo, Brazil; a few hours by car from the big city.

If you enjoyed how this layout came up, my suggestion is that you find a patterned paper with frames or shapes printed on it, then carefully cut out the inside of some of the frames. Then you can fill each spot with photos, Polaseal, beads, journaling, and whatever else you find interesting… I love die cuts and mini puffy stickers too! See what special embellishments you can find that are frame-worthy to you!

Aline Martins, also known as A Scrapper, is from from Brazil, and scrapbooks full time as the owner of a scrapbooking store, teacher and designer. She holds a degree in Tourism and Pedagogy, and I found herself making scrapbooks when she was a kindergarten teacher. Aline loves the freedom of expression and the countless possibilities found in scrapbooking and art. Find more of Aline’s work on her Instagram feed.

One November day we were walking with the whole family, just like that, for no reason. We had fun, drank coffee, laughed. I took a lot of photos and decided that I must definitely keep the memories of this day!
The photos turned out to be different – dark and light, so I decided to make a mini album where the most favorite shots were included.

To begin with, I sorted by color the remnants of embellishments from different collections. Then I prepared the basics of white cardstock in the form of tags

Each of the tags was embellished in one color surrounding one photo.

The back of each tag includes the journaling along with a bit more embellishment in the matching color. When each tag was complete, I added it to a string so it’s easy to see both sides of each tag.

Next, the cover was made using thick cardboard and patterned paper, plus a few embellishments and letter stickers. It’s all held closed with a bulldog clip. I really like the result! I’d love to see what you enjoy making with tags when you’re scrapping your stories!

Alena Grinchuk lives in the beautiful city of Saint Petersburg, Russia, with her husband and two sons. She loves photography, scrapbooking, shopping, and travel. When not crafting, you can find Alena cooking and baking and cuddling up on the sofa listening to a good audiobook or watching Netflix. When it comes to scrapbooking, traditional layouts are her favorite but she also loves working in Life Crafted albums, creating mini-albums, and documenting in a Project Life style. Find more from Alena on her Instagram feed.