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

Contributing Designer May Flaum recently shared a 1-2-3 approach to card making on her blog, with plenty of Starshine stickers to embellish. I love her take on how simple it can be to make your own cards, so I followed her steps but changed the collection. In just a short little window of time, I had three cards ready to send, so I know this will work with your stash favourites too.

May’s 1-2-3 approach starts with a simple combination of choosing one patterned paper to become the card, one sticker or embellishment to become to the focal point, and a matted square between the two.

The only thing I did differently when working with the Go Now Go collection to add a word strip sticker below the compass. That compass square comes from a cut-apart sheet of paper, and that washi-styled background paper is one of my favourites for cutting into journaling boxes.

For card two, May sticks with the patterned paper background but looks within a collection for something that has a frame, like the chipboard stickers in the case of this square. She still uses a big sticker or die-cut as a focal point, but dresses it up with things like her collection of beautiful sequins and buttons.

There’s a chipboard sticker frame in the Go Now Go collection too, so that was an easy choice to follow her formula. Both the bicycle and the floral washi tape stickers are from the sticker book, and instead of sequins and paint, I used a few enamel dots and some gold mist.

It’s step three in that 1-2-3 card making process when May lets loose with a more collaged look that can incorporate leftover stickers, die-cuts, and paper scraps. Starting with kraft cardstock instead of another sheet of patterned paper makes it easier to see all the elements she selected and layered across the front of this card. Plenty of sparkle from glitter glue and sequins makes for something very special!

I kept that kraft cardstock look for the background and piled on pieces from the cut-apart papers, labels punched from patterned paper scraps, die-cuts, stickers, and chipboard, before sprinkling with more gold mist. May used her sewing machine to add the stitched frame, but I cheated and used a stitched border stamp design to try something just a little different. As soon as I finished this card, I knew exactly who would receive it: a friend who always has a serious longing to be in New York!

I love May’s philosophy on making cards like this, and following the steps made it a much more streamlined process than my usual card making endeavours! I always seem to forget how paper works for at least an hour if I start on a card rather than a scrapbook page, but not this time. All three were done in a flash and with very minimal mess to tidy. I think this process works well in both directions: if you have a collection you love and want to use in every way, make a set of cards you will send to others, whether they be for an occasion or just for little notes. If you prefer to work with scraps, you could choose a nice combination to use then create sets either to write and send yourself or to bundle together and give as a gift. Thank you, May!

And thank you for your love of Starshine. If you have a favourite Starshine project you’d like to share, please leave a link in the comments. I’d love to see! Tomorrow we’ll talk a bit more about Go Now Go, while I get my bag packed for CHA 2017!

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Four collections in brings us to last year’s CHA show and the release of Starshine. Every collection is fun to develop but this one was extra special. It took all my childhood dreams and styles and mixed them with my current perspective. I loved that there was just the teensiest touch of Lisa Frank inspiration from my junior high days of pen pals and sticker books nestled below layers of other things that became more important as I grew up. In the original pitch for this collection, I told the team I wanted to turn 2001: A Space Odyssey into a paper collection. It turned out to be a more outlandish request than the mix of coffee cups and rocket ships, but when we broke it down, it started to click. There’s a red hexagon b-side pattern inspired by all the white bars on the space craft. There’s a colour blocked pattern that turned out to be super useful for layering (because you could have all the colours and a variety of patterns all on one sheet you could easily cut into small pieces) that was actually inspired by the lunch trays in the film. I will stop or else I will tell you the layers of backstory to every single piece in this collection and that might just get a little much. Suffice to say, the girl who spent her summers learning about space travel was ridiculously happy to create a paper line that embraced those stargazing dreams.

We’re going to spend two days talking Starshine in this CHA countdown, and today I’m so happy to share with you a project from guest artist Wendy Goodman. She’s done something that always makes me giddy: a layout without pre made embellishments – just paper. Paper, and in this case, a stamp. I’m not the only one who needs to get a bit more use from her roller stamps, right? That’s what I thought.

I loved the challenge of using only paper on my layout. The Starshine collection was perfect for a page about a moment at the beach I want to remember. I brought out my favorite punches and went to town punching out colorful patterned paper circles and arranging them in a grid. All of the circles were stitched down and I snuck in some vellum stars. Other punches I used included the label, tab, star, butterfly and even tiny circle punches to create faux ‘enamel’ dots. I cut a globe and camera from the papers. The globe happened to be exactly the right size to match the other circles.

I used my favorite phrase stamps on the labels. I arranged my paper embellishments equally around the page for balance. I even cut my title out after tracing the letters onto cardstock. I love that even though I only used paper, this page still rings true to my style of using a white background, grid design, and the primary focus is on the photo and story of this adventure at the beach.

I love how there is so much detail in Wendy’s page without needing to spend a fortune on embellishments or feel like her page is filled with things assembled by others, which creates a never ending mental battle for me when crafting. I love all the pretty embellishments in packages! Must buy more! But then I also like it when I spend less on stuff and make more by hand, even if it’s just cutting things out from plenty of different patterned papers. So which side wins? It changes by the day.

There’s basically a little bit of every collection in this layout! I love the rocket motifs from True Stories with the papers from Starshine.

And both these videos feature lots of Starshine to create the pages, along with things like vellum and Distress Inks. We’ll take a look at some more Starshine fun tomorrow, but please don’t hesitate to leave a link to any Starshine projects of your own in the comments below!

Today’s Guest Artist: Wendy Goodman loves big cups of coffee, travel adventures, and superheroes. You can find more from Wendy on Instagram and her blog

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With True Stories in the spring, collection three arrived for the holiday season and brought a bit of nostalgia along for the fun. Christmas Magic was actually named after my childhood puppy! This is the most limited colour palette I’ve worked with in the paper collections: predominantly evergreen, brick red, and cream, but actually you’ll find some shades of blue and turquoise in there too. Plus silver and gold! I think my favourite part of this collection was two vellums – one with stars and one with snowflakes, each with a bit of special shimmer. But I also love the stories told in the ephemera and sticker motifs: the Christmas records my family would pull out year after year, the toys inspired by the look of Christmas TV specials, like Rudolph and Frosty. I also loved a product that was very different for me: a die set to cut paper chains to put on the Christmas tree. The challenge was to make a set that would have an interesting pattern even with plain cardstock (so you’d feel better about cutting plenty!) while also making them possible to assemble without any adhesive. Last Christmas, I made lots of these with crafters in pubs across London, and I got such a thrill from an email from someone who used the die with a Brownie troop to make seemingly endless paper chains to decorate their community centre.

Today contributing designer Leigh Ann Odynski has a beautiful page to share with you, featuring Christmas Magic.

_My design for this Christmas scrapbook page was inspired by Heather and Laureen who shared their pages here at the last online crop weekend.

I love how the quilted look works with the Christmas Magic Shimelle collection. To start off, I took the 6×6 Christmas Magic paper pad and picked out patterns in my layout colors. Turquoise, red, and black and white. Try for a variety of pattern styles. All over, tone on tone, text, and scenes are some of the patterns I chose. Punch four to eight squares of each pattern and then trim them all into triangles.

To lay them out on the page, I started at the very top left corner, by placing a triangle even with the edges of that top corner and then flipping it over. You can line up all the triangles quite easily in this way. A T-Square ruler helped me keep the horizontal line of the diamonds lined up.

After your triangles are all glued down with a tiny dab of glue, then you can stitch as shown, through all the triangles. I chose to keep the embellishing to a minimum so that the patterned papers and the quilted design are the focal point of the page. A 3×4 photo and snowflakes cut from the patterned papers, new Go Now Go enamel dots and some die cut pieces are all you need to finish out the page. You can add a few drops of Mr Huey’s “Dewey” color to coordinate with the colors in this line if you like!

Notice how I kept the embellishments in three small areas around the page. They form a triangle, but are kept close to the diamond shapes of patterned paper.

I love how Leigh Ann’s tiny triangle technique could be used to make gorgeous Christmas cards out of the smallest scraps. I’m trying to tell myself to let go of some Christmas scraps I’ve kept for years, but this idea is not helping that effort, I’m afraid!

Much of what I made with Christmas Magic was part of my Journal your Christmas project in 2015, but there is one very Christmassy process video should you require that sort of inspiration! Again, please feel free to link up your own Christmas Magic projects in the comments! The more the merrier.

Not long until CHA now. I’ve even started putting things in a suitcase! Tomorrow, we go to infinity and beyond in terms of paper collections. See you then!

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With that first collection meant – if only in my mind – to be called Pretty Paper, the next one had to be True Stories. There was the idea that we could just start with Pretty Paper in collection two, but I already had ideas for what True Stories would be and I was just too stubborn far down the path to go back and change my mind. True Stories it would be. This is always what I find scrapbooking to be: pretty paper and true stories.

I will never forget our original pitch meeting for designing this collection. It was on a computery-conference-call thingy with me in London and the American Crafts team in Utah, and a seven hour time difference that may have been enough to make for plenty of ‘huh?’ opportunities. But I started with one clear vision: ‘I want coffee cups and rocket ships. And now I need to find a way to bring those things together.’

The thing that brought them together – along with a few other motifs, including the pastel plastic radio I carried onto the school bus every day in the fourth grade – was ‘everyday daydreams’. A sort of place where the mundane of everyday life collided with the fantastical. Coffee cups and rocket ships. Actually, for a while this collection had the alternative name Six Impossible Things, based on the Alice in Wonderland quote that sometimes I’ve believed six impossible things before breakfast, but it was deemed a bit too confusing so we scrapped that name but did keep some text from Alice, including that line, if you look at some of the less bold patterns.

Today please welcome guest Sarah King to share a new page with the True Stories collection!

I used the Shimelle, True Stories collection to create this layout about one of the major things I craved while I was pregnant. Strawberry Shortcake!! Yum! I used a Fancy Pants, Park Bench envelope to keep my moms recipe I used to make my yummy snack, I thought this would be a good way to keep the recipe for my kids when there old enough to cook too.

I love how the little envelope here hides something practical like the recipe, but given a different story, it could just as easily be used to hold journaling you really want in your album but don’t particularly want read by every casual visitor to your home who takes a look at your pages.

Each of these is clickable for additional layouts and videos from the archive here, with those projects I made and a mini class I taught with True Stories. The next collection? It was all inspired by a scrapbooking class. I’ll share that one tomorrow!

Today’s Guest Artist: Sarah King loves scrapbooking, her family, and coffee. You can find more from Sarah on Instagram, YouTube, and her blog.

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With just a week until the doors open upon Creativation, the CHA trade show for 2017, it feels like a perfect time to think about using (or at least earmarking) all the supplies we’ve gathered over the years. Every day for the next week, I’ll share ideas for scrapbooking with my previous collections with American Crafts. Today we head all the way back to that original collection, which was just called ‘Shimelle’. Trivia: I had hoped it would be called Pretty Paper, but for marketing reasons, it was name only. In my head, this is still my Pretty Paper collection! First up, here’s a beautiful project from contributing designer Meghann Andrew, mixing that original collection with paper from Starshine.

When creating a layout, I typically try to match the style of the layout with the mood in my photo. When I came across a photo of my daughter asleep on the floor after playing with her toys, I wanted to create a playful layout, almost as though toys were scattered around my photo.

As soon as I saw the Phoenix paper from the Starshine collection, I knew that it would create the perfect background for this fun, colorful page. It also helped me to dictate the design of my layout, using a circular photo to match the colorful, circular lines on the paper, and arranging my embellishments in a circular frame around the photo.

I typically use several different patterned papers on my layouts, but I didn’t want to compete with the lovely background paper. So, I decided to die-cut part of my title from Starshine patterns. This added more color and different patterns to the page. Since I also kept the title on the radial axis, it became a starting point for my embellishment cloud around the photo.

Mixing and matching several of the Shimelle collections from American Crafts was easy, and gave me so many different options to add embellishment. I’d love for you to take a look at how this layout came together, and how I mixed and matched several collections. It certainly was a fun layout to create!

Hands up if you have any of this original collection sitting in your stash to this day! If you have pages in your gallery or on your own blog that you’ve created with this collection, please share in the comments – the more the merrier!

Each of these is clickable for additional layouts and videos from the archive here, with those projects I made in the early days of this collection with American Crafts. And what came after this collection that was called Pretty Paper but was not called Pretty Paper? That would be something we’ll review tomorrow!

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It’s nearly time for CHA, so that means plenty of new papers and embellishments! Today I’m delighted to share my newest collection with American Crafts: Little by Little!

My box of Little by Little literally arrived this afternoon, so I’ve just filmed a video of these products! I hope you enjoy the commentary.

There are plenty of papers and a lovely little collection of embellishments, including a sticker book with cardstock, clear, and washi stickers all in the same book. It includes two small alphabets as well, to make sure you have plenty to use with that big colourful set of Thickers.

As always, I design my collections to be equally useful for boys and girls, young and old, so you’ll find plenty of whimsy here but also the types of patterns that can just be used again and again, with geometrics and black and white patterns thrown in there too. And if you like special papers for special things, there’s a gold foil metallic printed on navy blue cardstock. I’m ridiculously excited about how pretty it is. I wish it was a dress so I could wear it, but I guess that’s going a bit far with a 12×12 sheet of paper.

The sticker book includes a page of stickers that let you build your own wreath, perfect for framing your journaling or the sentiment on a card.

I can’t wait to see what you make with Little by Little! When you share something, please tag it with #AClittlebylittle and #shimelle so we can all see your fabulous creativity! Little by Little is shipping to stores now, so you’ll see it at your favourite shops very soon.

Stop by the American Crafts Blog for a chance to win a Little by Little prize pack too!

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With autumn in a colourful force in our neighbourhood this year, it’s with a big smile that I share a beautiful Go Now Go autumn layout today, by contributing designer Meghann Andrew. Enjoy! And jump in some leaves if you can.

Autumn layouts are my most favorite to create. Sadly, I have to travel a few hours north to get photos of autumnal colors, but luckily, I did just that a few weeks ago, and I had a day to document using the Go Now Go collection.

The design of this layout came together quickly using the “World” patterned paper. The delineated lines on the “B” side told me exactly where to place my photos and title, then the dark blue vertical section became a playground of sorts for some fun embellishment. I find that autumnal layouts almost require layers upon layers of leaves and pretty things, almost like a pile of leaves.

I gathered plain white and vellum die-cut leaves, colored paper leaves, as well as fussy-cut leaves and trees from the “Live” and “Park” patterned papers, and layered them, using dimensional adhesive, buttons and string. I wanted to match the copper color of the beautiful glittered Thickers in my piles, but I didn’t have any copper metallic paper. So, I grabbed white die-cut leaves, and pressed them into a Versamark pad, then covered them with copper embossing powder. After heat-setting, they were beautiful and shimmery, and the perfect metallic accent on the right side of the page. For additional texture, I added small enamel dots.

The “see the beauty” journaling tag from the “Run” patterned paper couldn’t have been more perfect for this layout about a beautiful valley that we visited, and I typed and printed my journaling onto the tag to get the most out of the space I had. I love that this layout feels like fall on a page!

PS: Don’t forget the challenges from last weekend remain open for this weekend too. We’d love to see what you’re making!

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Today I’m joined by a certain lady named Orange who has me thinking I really need to get my head thinking more creatively about die-cutting! I use my Silhouette most often when I need to make dozens of the same item, like party invitations, and there is a wealth of beauty in creating unique pieces with the Silhouette rather than my assembly line approach. I hope Orange inspires you as much as she has me, and I also hope you enjoy something to get you started or to help build your cut file library.

I’ve been looking for the perfect way to document this photograph of my daughter watching the fireworks nearly two years ago. I struggle when it comes to being a “themey” scrapper — I’m just not good at it — I mostly focus on those everyday moments, but I really wanted to scrap this photo!

The fireworks that we were watching were set to music and so one day, it just popped into my head to use the title “Tick Tick Tick Boom!” from the song by The Hives (which also happens to be one of the songs from that night).

Shimelle’s Starshine collection fit perfectly because there was the navy blue and red, traditional “Fourth of July” colors, but balanced by the less “themey” yellow and bright green! I created three different cut files for this layout — two for the title and one that looks like fireworks to use as a mask.

Now I realise I’m definitely one guilty of letting my Silhouette gather dust, then having a flash of cutting inspiration and firing it up to cut as much paper as I can find. (Well, maybe not all the paper I can find. I can find a great deal of paper.) Recently that included cutting the days of the week in giant size for some big photo scrapping. Those penned words were a kit from the Two Peas digital store years ago, but now I’m delighted to share them with you here, in case you might find them useful to cut the days of the week or months of the year. They can also be added digitally to a photo if that’s more your style!

Click here to download the Penned Dates digital kit.

If you need help cutting PNG files on your Silhouette, this video tutorial will probably help! It’s quite a simple process once you know which buttons you need to click.

Happy scrapping!

Today’s Guest Artist: Orange Gearle loves music, wine, and spending time with family. You can find more from Orange on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and her blog.

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