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

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This week Glitter Girl returns to an old question that comes up now and then: all about mixing patterns. Funny that Glitter Girl likes that topic, since it’s one of my favourites too! Okay, rubbish jokes aside, the Out of the Box adventure was one of the most popular episodes in 2012, and similar questions come up on the board quite often, so with a brand new order on my desk, this was a great time to revisit the idea of mixing products from a variety of collections and manufacturers with an up-to-date look at current lines and trends.

You can find all the supplies for this project here at Two Peas, and there are plenty of new things in the shop, of course, like all those lovely new papers, overlays, and embellishments from Allison Kreft’s new lines at Webster’s Pages.

And yes, that is a Hello Kitty bandage. It turns out Glitter Girl is not immune to cardboard cuts and packing up the studio for this week’s move was a bit treacherous. I hope it wasn’t too distracting! Clearly hand models are not allowed to pack their own homes when moving. Oh well: welcome to my real world, plasters and all!

This January was the first time I had been to a Disney park since the grand opening of Epcot, so that would be long, long before I was a scrapbooker, or indeed holding a camera! Now I suddenly understand the entire Disney-related challenges brought to scrapbookers. I’ve heard about them for years but never really imagined them in full. I was only at Disneyland for a few hours really and have plenty of photos to scrapbook, but not really enough stories to fill a full separate album. And of course, I’ve now done the child-free version of Disney, and that’s a very different experience. I have come up with a few stories I want to tell that are more reflective (especially as I don’t think there are any photos from my childhood adventures at Disneyworld, so this is as good an opportunity as any to recall what memories I still have) but some are quite simple and everyday, like this particular page recounting how it was definitely worthwhile for non-morning-person me to get up and go to the park as soon as it opened, since we had very short queues and gorgeous blue skies – until around midday, when more people started to arrive and the haze of white rolled over in the sky. I’m still thinking about what I’ll do with the slightly less obvious photos from the day. Exactly what journaling might go with photos of the birds in the Enchanted Tiki Room? Yeah, I’m not quite sure either! We shall see.

Of course, Glitter Girl always challenges you to join in, and this time it’s to make your own mix of materials for your next page. Upload it to Two Peas to share it with us!

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A month has passed and it’s time for a new Gardeners’ Digest to catch up with the Garden Girls, the scrap booking design team at Two Peas in a Bucket.  Since we last hopped through the team, Glitter Girl has gone on adventures through wood veneer embellishments, the design principles of white space, and most recently the world of travel writing for your scrapbook.

For more details on this project and further Glitter Girl Adventures, find her under the video tab at Two Peas more details on this project and further Glitter Girl Adventures, find her under the video tab at Two Peas.

I’m always inspired by Garden Girl Wilna Furstenburg, but this month even more so between her fab In the Mood to Scrap video and the launch of her brand new workshop, Art Class. I’ve signed up and I’m working my way through, rationing each chapter so I make sure I put all these great ideas to work.  The workshop is filled with great tutorials and Wilna’s beautiful examples. More about that in a moment…

It’s a great time to go shopping at Two Peas, with new products arriving pretty much daily! Including the new lines from Amy Tangerine, Dear Lizzy, American Crafts, Crate Paper, Studio Calico, Glitz, and Echo Park! That’s some major good stuff, and you’ll be seeing lots of these new letter stamps from Amy Tangerine on my upcoming projects!

Speaking of upcoming projects, stop by this weekend for a special two day adventure through sketches and scrapbooking videos, right here at shimelle.com. Perfect if you’re snowed in, but snow is not a requirement.

Your next stop on the hop is brand new Garden Girl Celine Navarro.  Be sure to check our her blog and her beautifully artistic style!

But before you go, I have something for one of you! I have a class pass for Wilna’s Art Class workshop so you can join me and plenty of other scrapbookers for this creative adventure.  To enter, just leave a comment on this blog post.  Entries close at the end of February, London time.  And if there are 500 or more comments by the end of the month, I’ll throw in a prize pack filled with Wilna’s product picks so you will be all set to take part in the class and follow along. So tell a friend, won’t you? if the winner has already signed up, we will refund the workshop – so there is no need to wait and see. Sign up now: and get started straight away!

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Inspired by this conversation on the General Scrapbooking message board at Two Peas, Glitter Girl brings you thirty minutes of scrapbook talk this week, all about journaling. She shares her tips for product choices that will make journaling easy, designs that allow you to incorporate your writing without losing other page elements, and other tips for seeing your writing as an integral part of any page. I hope you enjoy!

See this post for all the supplies for this project, plus further details including Glitter Girl’s challenge to you this week.

Those photos were taken in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, inside a market hall. I know the colouring looks a little blue, and I toyed with ‘correcting’ it, but the light truly looked like this inside and in the end I decided I wanted to stay true to the look and feel of the memory rather than changing the colour to look like it could be anywhere. But the story is about our adventures in drinking beans, which sounds strange, but I assure you is actually pretty fabulous. We were introduced to this idea in Vietnam when part of a cooking workshop took us through the local market to sample different local ingredients. There we met someone who was introduced only as ‘The Bean Lady’, and she sat outside the market with half a dozen pots of different slow cooked beans. This summer concoction is made with azuki beans that have been slow cooked with sugar until they are very sweet, then layered with sweetened condensed milk, shaved ice, and caramel. (In the winter, there is a warm version with similar ingredients.) Different regions have different ways of making and eating this and indeed different pots of different things from all the local bean ladies! As we went further south in Vietnam, bean ladies became harder and harder to find, so when we stumbled upon one in Cambodia, we were excited to try her version, which happened to be the sweetest we ever tasted. So for my journaling on this page, I didn’t just want to focus on the moment at hand, but also include some of that backstory – the context of other memories that makes you see why I felt these photos were worth taking and why they are something I want to preserve in my scrapbooks.

For more inspiration on journaling at Two Peas, follow this Pinterest board, where I’ll continue to add my favourites as I spot them in the gallery and other resources there.

If you’re looking to take your writing further in your scrapbooking, True Stories is a resource you might find useful. It’s my journaling class and I’m joined by guest artists and a guest teacher (Relly Annett-Baker, who is a writing expert outside of her scrapbooking side, and contributed a second point of view to each prompt, which provides a great balance and extension of ideas). The pages I made for True Stories are probably my favourites I’ve ever made for any class, because the chance to focus on the writing (but still have fun with photos, patterns, and embellishment) made these pages dear to my heart. I worked on them when we were at an interesting cross-roads in life, as well, and I am grateful that I took the time to document things like decision making processes and conversations between old friends. This class is available any time as a self-paced project, with fifteen prompts for £10 or $15, and you can sign up here.

Onward, covered in glitter, my dear scrapbookers!

The Adventures of Glitter Girl is a weekly series on Two Peas in a Bucket, and goes live every Wednesday. I’ll share each adventure here shortly after that. I hope you enjoy her quests for crafting happiness, and if you ever have a scrapbooking dilemma yourself, you can always call her to action on the message board.

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This week Glitter Girl takes on an older product that is back on the scene: she’s scrapbooking with vellum! Inspired by this discussion on the message board at Two Peas, she has a few suggestions for product choices and benefits, then a new layout to share in this week’s adventure.

There are plenty of vellum options available at Two Peas and now and many of them are on sale this week. Scroll down to the bottom of this page and you’ll find all sorts of goodies related to this week’s adventure, but be quick if you want to grab the discounts as the hot products sale ends on Friday.

And yes, that is a school photo from my early teaching years! We had to have a staff photo taken each year and once the school had taken the necessary number for bulletin boards and so forth, the remaining prints would appear in our pigeon holes in the staff room, and ever since I’ve had this small collection of grown-up school portraits. I am pretty sure this is the first time I’ve put any of them on a page. I also have yearly class portraits of my tutor group – that’s basically like homeroom for those of you stateside. I had the same group for four years, so those class pictures show them starting as teeny kids and growing up one year at a time, all in school uniform of course. Some day I will figure out the best way to scrapbook that entire experience too… but this is a start. Interestingly, the top I am wearing in this photo caused me no end of trouble in my first teaching job (I missed the memo that red did not meet the dress code there) but that is a different story for a different day and a different page entirely.

This week, Glitter Girl challenges you to scrapbook with vellum and share the results! You can link to them in the comments here too if you like.

The Adventures of Glitter Girl is a weekly series on Two Peas in a Bucket, and goes live every Wednesday. I’ll share each adventure here shortly after that. I hope you enjoy her quests for crafting happiness, and if you ever have a scrapbooking dilemma yourself, you can always call her to action on the message board.

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Over the last two weeks, Glitter Girl has been on a real mission of scrapbooking with die-cuts. Two entire adventures! The first deals specifically with manual die-cutting, whilst the second goes a bit more custom with cuts from a digital die-cutter like a Silhouette or the Cricut.

My personal rule is to only buy metal dies for shapes I will cut time and time again – so I have very few and what I have would all fall under basic or essential shapes, quite likely. The three sets I use most are all nested shapes (the same shape in several different sizes, perfect for layering) by Spellbinders – the small circles, small pinked circles and labels one (similar to the label die-cut shape from Jenni Bowlin). The pinked circles were sadly discontinued this year and I’ve continued to use them – but after this episode some scrappers started asking Spellbinders to bring back that shape. If you want to weigh in on that discussion, you can find it here on Facebook! Otherwise, you can find a few other options here and there or maybe find a shop that still has some in stock.

If you see anything in this episode you would like to add to your own stash, you can find a full shopping list here below the video, including additional dies on sale at the moment too.

Why yes, I do have new photo booth wedding photos to scrapbook! The lovely Rachel got married recently and we highly approve of her decision to have a photo booth at the reception. It’s a bit of a tradition now. I promise I didn’t wear a wooly jumper to her wedding: she knit those gorgeous owls for me as a thank you gift and we needed a photo or five to celebrate all that craftiness!

Rest assured, we can do more than just circles and such with die-cuts! I have a Silhouette for custom die-cutting, and use that for anything I might just want to cut once or twice. I love that I can design the cut myself or buy just individual designs from the Silhouette online store. With the cartridge based cutters, I always found I would like just a few designs on each cartridge, making each cut quite expensive. With the Silhouette store, I just buy the individual designs I like and that works out far more affordable for me. For this page I used three different cutting patterns from the Silhouette store – a suitcase, banner and a word card.

Supplies for this project can be found here. In addition to the Silhouette, that includes all sorts of fun stuff, like a new collection of tiny glitter pots, lots of label and letter stickers, and three paper collections I’ve really enjoyed using lately.

And it’s these photos that will make you think I will photograph and scrapbook just about anything. Which is possibly true. But I’ve been meaning to get the story of how we handled laundry while backpacking into this album. We became such experts in how to get our clothes clean and dry every single night, so it deserves to be recorded. I took a few pictures of this along the way and I think I even filmed a little video of one of us being a bit silly and faux-demonstrating to the camera how to wash something in a hotel sink. We had 100ml of soap concentrate and it lasted the full trip – just! That way we were allowed to take it on the plane as a carry-on. Of course it really came in a giant bottle to start, and we aren’t even halfway through that at home. It’s amazing just how concentrate a concentrate can be!

Onward, covered in glitter, my dear scrapbookers!

The Adventures of Glitter Girl is a weekly series on Two Peas in a Bucket, and goes live every Wednesday. I’ll share each adventure here shortly after that. I hope you enjoy her quests for crafting happiness, and if you ever have a scrapbooking dilemma yourself, you can always call her to action on the message board.

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This week Glitter Girl goes a little trendy with the ombre look, prompted by this discussion on the message board. Ombre is essentially a fade – it’s often a monochromatic look with one colour starting as a saturated hue and fading out to pale or white. In scrapbooking, there are two different ways to achieve that look – one is tidy and one is messy! The tidy version involves cutting different pieces of paper, like using the same punch on ten different shades of pink paper, then arranging them in order from lightest to darkest. Just paper and adhesive – no mess. (Have a look at this project by Jen Gallacher for a great example of that style.) Or the messy way: using mist, ink or paint to create the faded effect on paper or embellishments. In this week’s video? It’s the messy version.

Because really: chevron patterned paper AND a bunch of different shades of Mister Huey’s spray inks? This is the sort of thing that gets Glitter Girl out of bed in the morning.

You can find all the supplies used in this week’s video here. The orange-and-white chevron paper I started with is from Bella Blvd and takes the colour really well. I’ve included the full line of Soup Staples as well, as they are perfect for creating this chevron-ombre look in any colour – just pick the paper then mist, ink or paint to match. The b-side of each of those is a tiny polka dot, which also works for ombre. Try it with a distress ink pad or two and the foam applicator to blend. All sorts of things to fade in and fade out!

It’s been a little while since I went back to the stack of kraft cardstock and the equally large stack of backpacking photos. I have to admit I am now reaching the point where I get a little sad when I’m telling that story, because it’s hard to admit it actually wasn’t so recent any more! But not so sad that it’s not fun to work on, of course. Just a little bittersweet. One thing I’m really looking forward to after moving house in the next couple weeks is to sit down with the now four volumes of this trip and plot out what sections need the most attention and really look at it objectively to see how the story is being told on paper. I love that part of the process, and it’s very different from deadline work and that sort of thing, so it’s a good change of pace now and then. This message board thread inspired me to head back to the kraft cardstock, and I love that the ombre look worked so well with something that wasn’t trend-led or focusing on any sort of fashion in the photos. Ombre is truly just a fade, and that’s something that is always around us – not just a fashion trend. So there’s more to this look than first meets the eye.

This week Glitter Girl challenges you to take on the ombre trend in your own style, with whatever you would like to make. Share your project in the gallery at Two Peas and let us know how it all comes together for you.

Onward, covered in glitter, my dear scrapbookers!

The Adventures of Glitter Girl is a weekly series on Two Peas in a Bucket, and goes live every Wednesday. I’ll share each adventure here shortly after that. I hope you enjoy her quests for crafting happiness, and if you ever have a scrapbooking dilemma yourself, you can always call her to action on the message board.

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This week, Glitter Girl gets as close to a haul video as she ever will. Have you heard of the haul video phenomenon? It’s an interesting concept… basically, it’s the idea of going shopping, then sharing your shopping (and possibly the fabulous bargains you grabbed) with an audience via your webcam and a Youtube video. These videos can go two ways to me – sometimes the shopper shows you something they found with a clever deal or great excitement for a new project and it makes you consider a product you’ve never seen or never considered. That sort of thing can be quite inspiring! As someone who tries to pick the supplies I will love and use rather than just the things that are a crazy discount, sometimes haul videos can be a bit too much stuff for my personal taste and I get a bit twitchy, but I know that’s just one of those things about being me! But this week, Glitter Girl unpacked an order from Two Peas in a Bucket (funny, I’m sure that box says it’s address to mild-mannered scrapbooker Shimelle Laine) and takes you through her process of how her creative process starts straight out of the box.

This week’s adventure was inspired by this question on the message board, about mixing and matching various companies and collections in one project. The truth is I don’t set out on a special quest to mix like that – it’s just what happens as I look at new supplies and start to match them with what I already have. (To give you an idea, I tend to order from Two Peas on an average of once every three weeks, and I normally kit up about five layouts straight out of the box, then everything else gets put away with my supplies. Kitting up a few pages straight away inspires me to get creating rather than just looking through all the pretty paper for hours… which I could easily do!)

For a full list of supplies for this project and some of the highlighted items from the order, please see this page and scroll to the bottom to add your favourites to your shopping basket. Those Ink & Wit stamps on 75% off sale can be found here by the way – there are a variety of designs and they are all in final inventory and won’t be restocked, so if you see something you like, grab it!

The photos on this page are from a rather lovely day indeed, when I took up a last-minute place on a letterpress workshop at Typoretum in Essex. Highly recommended. Perhaps I should write up something about that day in more detail? I have done some letterpress before (I have an antique small format press, which we used for our wedding invitations and some other projects, but I have just a limited selection of type and the lot is in storage at the moment as there is nowhere for it to live in the tiny flat of these days, but I would never agree to letting it go!) but I wouldn’t say that was necessary in the slightest to enjoy the workshop. Instead, it made me want to focus on what I couldn’t do with my own equipment, which was work in a large format. So I pressed up something with lots of mixed wood type and swooned over the serious collection of type and presses at the Typoretum workshop. I’m hoping I’ll be able to work there for another day soon with more project ideas brewing away!

Now if you were paying attention, you’ll have picked up on how I said I tend to kit up about five projects straight out of the box, yet this episode only included one scrapbook page. Would you care to see the rest? If so, I’ll see what I can do.

Your challenge this week is to mix products from a variety of manufacturers – but especially by paying attention to the steps in your creative process as you gather your supplies. Share your project in the gallery at Two Peas and let us know how it all comes together for you.

Onward, covered in glitter, my dear scrapbookers!

The Adventures of Glitter Girl is a weekly series on Two Peas in a Bucket, and goes live every Wednesday. I’ll share each adventure here shortly after that. I hope you enjoy her quests for crafting happiness, and if you ever have a scrapbooking dilemma yourself, you can always call her to action on the message board.

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Glitter Girl got quite excited this week upon reading this thread on the message boards and realising it was time for an entire episode devoted to instant photos, like Polaroids and Instax. She got so excited that she went a bit over the top, with an extended episode just over forty minutes long including two scrapbook pages and a section all about your options for instant cameras and prints. Grab a drink and have a watch, won’t you?

If any of the products in this week’s episode strike your fancy, do click over and scroll down the page to add them to your shopping cart. There are quite a few of my favourites in this episode: wood veneer shapes, that Bella Blvd alphabet in several colours and the Paper Cottage collection pack from BasicGrey.

The first project in this week’s episode includes a vintage Polaroid from my youth. Most of the Polaroid prints from my family were taken at Christmas, but I really wanted to tell the longer story of my first bicycle rather than focusing on the Christmas gift aspect, so I didn’t scrap this in reds and greens. Pink and aqua (and this time, red) are winding up on my table a lot lately.

The second page is one tiny, recent Instax Mini picture printed from my regular digital camera on a Pivi portable printer. I know not everyone likes one tiny picture on a big 12×12 page, but I like variety, so sometimes I think that’s just right. Amy and I have started a bit of a tradition of a photo of her in front of her new collection in a certain style, so this shot from the summer show was perfect for writing down a few details about this lovely girl who is a faraway friend.

Onward, covered in glitter, my dear scrapbookers!

The Adventures of Glitter Girl is a weekly series on Two Peas in a Bucket, and goes live every Wednesday. I’ll share each adventure here shortly after that. I hope you enjoy her quests for crafting happiness, and if you ever have a scrapbooking dilemma yourself, you can always call her to action on the message board.

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