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

Are you feeling the lovey-dovey vibe with your scrapbooking this week or do you prefer to opt out of all things Valentine? I had to laugh when I looked back at my photo library for what we did for Valentine’s Day 2015 – we set the table properly and ate lunch during nap time. That’s all. And it was awesome and should definitely go in my scrapbook. But in crafty days, I love Valentine’s as an excuse to mix pink and red together. Truly pink is just red with white added, so they certainly go together in a monochromatic sort of way, but it’s not a combination we see everywhere and it feels just a little extra special and maybe even rebellious to me.

I threw orange into the mix today as well, and I wasn’t really planning that. But that Sassafras Valentine cut-apart sheet included orange and it made sense. In colour wheel terms, red-red/orange-orange all in row makes them analogous colours, so there’s a harmony there. A bit like blue and green feeling like the sky and the grass, red and orange feels like the colours of the horizon at sunset! But I had pulled out so many patterns, with all the hearts and text and that bold floral in the background, and I knew those two square photos would get a bit lost, so I blocked out a big section of the page in black. Solid black would work, but I just prefer more pattern! This dot is more subtle in terms of my pattern selections, and adding brown ink around the edges toned it a bit more in line with that vintage floral background. Or so I’d like to think, anyway!

In design terms, I did something a little different – no triangle of things surrounding the pictures! There are still three areas of more embellishment with the chipboard and wood veneer hearts, but they are all in that column on the right. I think their placement brings more attention to the cuter of the two photos (the one on the right) but that photo on the left might be a bit lost. Not enough for me to change anything, but it’s nice to look back and evaluate sometimes. I think the lighter bits of the patterned papers, like the calendar, the text behind the photos and the frame around the orange card at the bottom are really key in this mix of so much stuff. That off-white tone helps it from being too dark and heavy, and those do create a triangle that surrounds the photos, so I’ve not gone full on rebel or anything.

Today I’ve also asked guest artist Karla Yungwirth to take on the pink and red challenge, and she obliged with a Project Life style!

Not too long ago, my husband and I celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary! It was such a special day, and I wanted this page to really focus on our love for each other. I looked for red and pink pieces in my scrapbook supplies and was surprised at how many ‘love’ themed papers and ephemera I actually had!

I pulled papers from Shimelle’s True Stories collection and a Fancy Pants paper pad as well as using stickers, stamps, rub-ons and some My Mind’s Eye accessories to complete my pocket page. With eight pockets but just three photos, I made sure my pictures were the size of the full pockets so they wouldn’t get lost, but I still had plenty of room for my journaling and to play with embellishments in the pink and red colour scheme for a monochromatic look.
-Karla

Karla and I would love to see anything you’ve created with both red and pink, be it a scrapbook page or a Valentine greeting. Share it in the comments if you like! Happy crafting, no matter what subject you’re scrapping today.

Today’s Guest Artist: Karla Yungwirth loves family craft sessions, organizing and, of course, scrapbooking. You can find more from Karla on Instagram, Facebook, and her blog.

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_{(made with the globe and explore text stamps from the Starshine stamp set. Stamped on plain white cardstock in Versamark ink and heat embossed with white detail powder, then coloured with Distress Inks and a foam ink applicator.)}

‘Blue and green should never be seen’ is such an old phrase, the internet seems incapable of telling me who said it in the first place. But it was able to tell me that it’s actually not a stand alone phrase like I have always heard, but some sort of colour rhyme involving red and yellow as a good combination to wear to ‘catch a fellow’ and pink and green should be worn by a queen. Suddenly I have far less worry about breaking this guideline on a regular basis.

My logic has always been that blues and greens work well together because it’s a combination we see so many times in nature. Green grass or trees topped by a blue sky. The way tropical waters look blue one moment, green the next, and back to blue. Blue and green are next to each other in the rainbow. So all this ‘should never be seen’ is definitely rubbish, no matter where it originated.

That rainbow thing holds more value though: blue and green are next to each other in the rainbow because they are next to each other in the colour spectrum when it comes to all things light. That means they are right there together on the colour wheel – blue… blue-green… green -right in a row. If you want to be more official about colour theory, that would make those three analogous colours. Analogous colours are any three in a row on the colour wheel and those sets of three will always look lovely to our eyes. But you don’t need to talk about it in official terms to be able to spot that those colours next to each other make lovely little sets. Blue and green definitely make me happy.

Blues and greens aside, I once had an epiphany while scrapping that made it so much easier to use my supplies. I’d been scrapping about two years when Bazzill announced their new line up of scrapbooking cardstock. It came in sixty-four colours. Sixty-four colours blew our minds because previous cardstock options were really only like the small box of Crayolas and this was the big box with the sharpener build in on the back! We were allowed the 64 box with the sharpener in fourth grade at my school. I have many specific memories about opening new boxes of Crayolas, but that one is my favourite. I digress. Shades of one colour, like choosing a colour of paint then slowing mixing in more and more black paint to create a whole set of new tones, made it so much easier for me to use my supplies because I could let go of the mindset that came with just a dozen colours. With a dozen colours (and even with sixty-four, if I’m honest), we seemed to spend hours of our scrapbooking time trying to find just the right paper to match the exact colour and shade of an embellishment. Then something hit me that actually, all the shades of one pink look lovely together and all the shades of one blue look lovely together, and so on… and that meant instead of having one correct combination in all of my stash, there was far more freedom in this dark pink embellishment goes with this much lighter pink paper, and I tell you, it was like a children’s choir appeared in the corner of my craft space and sang hallelujah. Instant relief of stress. Zero pressure to make everything match to the exact tone.

This set of colours was on my desk every day as we worked on Starshine. The blues and greens with that inspiration from nature backed up by a bit of colour theory; the rose that offers a stark contrast while staying so soft. Without the rose, it’s not nearly so feminine, but by using different quantities, like just a tiny bit of the rose, then it’s still very possible to use this set of colours without having some sort of pink Lelli Kelly explosion on your project. It’s most obvious in the globe paper with every globe filled in with shades of blue and shades or green, and quite a few globes accented with a rose-coloured floral detail.

After loving them but looking at them on screen for ages, it was time to try this combination in terms of paper rather than pixels. I still love those colour together. And so I asked special guest Zinia Amoiridou to also give it a go.

My biggest challenge was where to start, since I looked at the products on my desk and nothing included this colour combination. After digging through my stash, I found some paper scraps and partial patterns thin shades of blue, green, and rose, so I decided to use them and hand-cut some heart shapes to use as embellishments. I placed the hearts diagonally on the page and I though it would be a nice distraction from my messy cutting to make them a bit more dimensional. So I folded them in the middle and stuck them with some hot glue, making them look as if they want to “fly” out of the page. To finish the layout I added a few more heart embellishments and word stickers to bring everything together.
-Zinia

Today’s Guest Artist: Zinia Amoiridou loves ice cream, colours and her little family. You can find more from Zinia on Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and her blog.

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Back in the Scrapbook Inspirations days, I used to write a piece about colour stories – sometimes it was something we used just in planning and when we went to the book format, we actually developed it into an article. And I found all the inspiration for those was purely visual. In recent weeks, a specific colour story has jumped to mind and it didn’t come from the visual at all. It came from a song that has been stuck in my head for what seems like an eternity.

We very much like They Might Be Giants in this household. In fact, it is one of the reasons I went on a second date with The Boy: I met him when he was working in a record store and I figured anyone working in a record store could at least have one date of decent conversation in them by talking about music. When the two bands he name dropped first were the Pixies and They Might Be Giants, I knew there would be more than one date of decent discussion! Even my grandmother will tell you that I have loved this band since my youth, and I thank her profusely for letting me use her phone on occasion to call their Dial a Song hotline to cheer me up on rotten days. (Dial a Song is back but weekly on their YouTube channel. I rejoiced, I tell you.)

In the years since I joined an epic conga line at my first TMBG show, they added children’s albums to their repertoire and I remained aware but blissfully ignorant of most of them. Until six months ago, when Wonder Boy was giggling so much at their back catalogue that it seemed appropriate to pull out the children’s tracks, even if Meet the Elements is perhaps a little beyond his comprehension at present. That song may indeed inspire a colour story and a layout on another day, but today it is most definitely a song about a magical little elf called Roy G. Biv.

That song plus the blanket in the background of the photo set me in a spin of finding a rainbow of colour to use on a layout. There is a bit of True Stories on this page (in stores next month!) and also some Simple Stories Daily Grind, paper from my first 6×6 tablet, and that yellow sheet is an older Studio Calico paper.

I don’t think I grabbed that particular blanket with a specific thought in mind at that moment, but once it was printed, something really came through that I wanted to tell, and that was how much Wonder Boy’s personality changed around six months. Those first six months were pretty rough some days with a boy who seemed grumpy so much of the time, but once we were to the point where he could grab things and start to sit up, he was a bundle of happiness. I am sure much of that crabby personality was simply wanting to do things and not being able to do them, or however that translates to baby logic. I still wouldn’t trade the days with him even when he was grumpy, but that colourful personality had me hook, line, and sinker. I’ll take cheeky over subdued any day.

These days we play that incredibly catchy tune some time in the morning, with an amazing accompaniment of tambourine, maracas, and blown raspberries, so even with a quieter flat and some time to scrapbook, I found myself singing about that colourful man, proudly found at the rainbow’s end. I suppose it is nearly St. Patrick’s day, after all. Maybe that calls for a rainbow or two. I’ll let you know if I find the corresponding pot o’ gold.

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This article was originally printed in volume one of the Scrapbook Inspirations Ideas Book, which is now out of print. It was probably my favourite column to work on over the years and I’m thinking it’s about time to bring it back and write more about colour stories here on the blog. So I’m going to start with this from the archives, and you’ll find a challenge at the end of this post, of course. And please let me know if you think this is something that should appear here more often. Oh, and it was for a spring issue, so do excuse the few references to winter ending and spring coming to life!

It’s only right to start with red: it’s the colour that means so much and can never be ignored. When I was a little girl, I always chose the red crayon first. In my precious box of sixty-four shades, burnt sienna and ultra green stayed perfectly intact indefinitely while red’s wrapper was torn down to nearly nothing from being sharpened time and time again. I chose red for my school bag and my sneakers and bows in my hair. Its allure so many years ago is a mystery, and I have strayed to other favourites over the years, but red is that constant: always there, always ready to pack a punch. As a teenager, I paired red with black to seem a bit rebellious. My first car was a very faded red Ford Escort. I dyed my hair to include streaks of red that were far closer to a red crayon than any hair colour ever created by nature. Eventually I grew up enough to embrace red as something a little less riotous and a bit more sentimental: red velvet cake, Christmas cards and perfect little love hearts.

Aqua is something a little more new. It was never the favourite crayon (though it wasn’t ignored either) and it has never appeared on my personal top five list at any point in my life and yet I am in love with its perfectly crisp balance to red. Blue but not blue, and lovely in shades from rich turquoise to a pale hint of summer sky and everything in between. It’s the colour of the sea in those magical places most of us see more often in travel brochures than with our own eyes. Between sea and sky, it’s certainly a dreamy colour. For every bit of warning symbolism that comes from the red of stoplights and danger signs, aqua offers a calm alternative. Red says panic, aqua says forget about it and head to the spa.

Then there’s white: the colour that gets ignored. We see it constantly throughout the day but we rarely discuss it as a design choice. I don’t think I’ve ever known someone to say white was their favourite of all the colours. I think we rebel against white cardstock in the scrapbooking world sometimes. Many of us were introduced to scrapbooking with just one option for the background: plain white cardstock. When we discovered other papers — colours and patterns that could also become the background — we stepped away from the white cardstock and so rarely head back. I’ll admit I still don’t like white cardstock unless it has a texture — just a little something to make it special. Despite all this, white has its own meanings that are pretty important — things like innocence and purity make white our obvious choice for baby clothes and wedding dresses, but its neutral perfection also gives it that stark look of an empty canvas waiting to be filled. I love the look of white floor boards topped with white furniture, a popular look in Scandinavian homes to maximise the light while also making it easy to change the decor by just making changes to accessories.

Red, white and aqua together make a whimsical twist on patriotic colours. If the red, white and blue of the Union Jack or the Stars and Stripes can be regal and official, then red, white and aqua becomes playful and youthful and reminds us to embrace a bit of our childhood with our creativity. This combination seems like a way to bend the rules without the out and out breaking them attitude of dark red and black. Three colours that say life is full and happy and not to be taken too seriously.

How does that translate to paper? Without any further instruction, I asked Laura to scrapbook anything she wanted in red, white and aqua. The resulting page includes that balance I had in mind — life is full of good things, like how she is looking forward to her wedding and how her husband-to-be will start a new career at the same time, but of all the other things she could mention in the journaling, she also includes his upcoming stag weekend as a planned highlight for the year! I blame the aqua: it’s almost like that striped paper reminded her to embrace some of life’s crazy-fun times as well as those big universal milestones.

_{Yes, that page is creased and damaged. It’s totally my fault, as it was in a box of ‘these need to be sorted into albums’ pages for months. At least it wasn’t totally destroyed. But seriously: I am loving putting pages straight into albums now. Can’t say it enough. Right, back to the article.}

Heading off to mountains of white snow and skies filled with aqua is quite possibly my favourite week of each year. I pack a small camera in the pocket of my jacket so I can take pictures and the occasional movie of our time on the slopes, but I soon realised that meant most of our skiing photos look very similar and there are only so many times I can scrapbook my awe of mountains and my amazement when I come home intact. I decided I would start scrapping these photos before I decided what angle the journaling would take, and put that red, white and aqua colour palette to work. While I was finding little bits and pieces in my scrapbooking stash to bring it all together, I realised the reason I look forward to these trips so much is because it is such a release from our daily lives when we both work more hours than we care to admit and are constantly driven by deadlines and things that need to be done. Even when we do have a day off or a holiday, we don’t switch off from the real world in the same way that we do when we head up the mountain. Things look differently there and work differently there and we adapt to forget all about any routine other than catching the first lift in the morning. Red and aqua strikes again: acknowledge that life is full of serious stuff, but we also have to take some time to just play now and then.

As we move away from this very cold winter and into a hopeful spring, my notebook is filled with flowers too. Predictable, I suppose, but charming nonetheless. I’m scrapping a few flower shots that remind me it os the time of year when things happen quickly and it’s important to get out there to see the world in bloom. This spring is all about flowers that seem just a bit special and surreal — twisted and stitched from fabrics, ruched and brightly coloured from paper. Beaded, pearled, buttoned and bedazzled in a way that takes something that looks so special occasion and make it perfectly acceptable for the every day. The return of fabric papers to the scrapbook world after an absence of a couple years made me break out those older sheets and try something new. Ripping away the adhesive backing leaves a fabric that is printed like a quilting cotton but with a very different texture. I tried folding it softly into flowers to no avail, since the fabric just seemed too course to ever relax in quite the right way. A bit of play with taking that rigidly folded and wrapped fabric flower and essentially destroying it with the iron creates a look I love: that very same fabric now relaxed with frayed edges and stitches to hold in place. The same technique works with regular fabrics to create a similar but calmer look like the red flower here.

Of course, it only takes the slightest change to create a completely different mood when it comes to colours. Replace the crisp white with a softer vintage cream and it tells an entirely different story. This family photo predates me, but I can still see so much that I do know in that picture. I’m not sure exactly when it was taken, but it reminds me of spring, with the combination of trees that are still missing their leaves with warmer weather that encourages short sleeves and putting cardigans away for a few months. Warming the colours with cream and off-white always works with older photographs, and I love the mix of that same trendy ribbon flower with something older in the pinwheel backing made from folding old book pages into tiny accordions and gluing them together in a circle. Something a little modern in the satin ribbons, something a little older in the crocheted lace. One thing I come back to often in my notebook is balance — how to have just enough of this and still have time for that and so forth. But making a single page is about balance too — a little pattern, a little plain, a little room for embellishment, a little room to breathe.

I’m not the only one thinking flowers recently. I asked Kirsty what red, aqua and white would inspire in her creative work and she came back with the sweetest of notecards and a bouquet of paper flowers topped with buttons. Perfect for spring and no green thumb required — and she’ll even show you how to make them. Find the paper flower tutorial from Kirsty here.

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So now your challenge might be obvious! Create a project in red, white and aqua!

One entry will be selected to win a prize pack of assorted scrapbook goodies. Entries close at midnight next Sunday (21st August 2011).

Feel free to use the comment section to chat about this challenge, as the entries should go in the linky widget!

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Fancy a series of scrapbooking challenges? With three prize winners each week? But no worry that you have to participate every single week or anything else stressful? Then Play Along with Scrap Factor is just for you! While our Scrap Factor contestants have five days to create their layout in response to each week’s challenge, everyone else is invited to spend the whole week, use the contestants’ gallery for inspiration perhaps and just generally have fun with each challenge.

Each week, the three mentors from the teams (that’s Mary Anne and Dolly plus me!) will each choose a prize winner for our category – paper, hybrid or digital. All you have to do to enter is create your page in response to the week’s challenge and upload it to UKScrappers by Sunday night. When you upload a page, you’ll see a special gallery called Play along with Scrap Factor and that’s the gallery you want!

This week’s challenge is based on a colour scheme including sky blue, two shades of blossom pink and two spring greens. You can see all the fab pages created by the contestants here and if you have time to scrapbook this weekend, you could still enter this week’s play along contest.

Or you can jump ahead to next week’s challenge – taking inspiration from advertising. Choose a print ad (from a magazine, poster, leaflet, etc) and use it as the visual inspiration for your next scrapbook page. Our contestants have been busy with that challenge this week and their pages will go on display on Monday when voting opens for the week.

Remember, there’s a prize each week for playing along – one for a paper page, one for a hybrid page and one for a digital page! So all kinds of scrapbooking are welcome, and as you can only win once throughout the challenge series, there are plenty of prizes to go around! We’d love for you to join in with Scrap Factor this spring.

xlovesx

PS: Don’t forget to enter this week’s giveaway before Sunday night – that just takes a comment to enter!

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Lots of giveaways that were open for all of June…and a drumroll for our winners please!

Scrap your favourite colour:
Selina_C and her love of green win an archived class of her choice.

Scrap with the template or rainbow border:
ConnieC and her digital page win a $15 gift certificate to Two Peas.

Spin the colour wheel and scrap the combination that comes up:
Wendy and her tulips win a set of letter stamps.

Use the colour wheel to make a project:
Nathalie and her pumpkins win a spot on learn Something New Every Day this September.

Symbolic colours:
Emma and her green symbolism win a green themed print.

Blog badge:
Dawn of Artist Reborne wins £10 shopping money at shimelle.com.

Green photo:
Brit and her greenery win a green 8×10 print.

Red, rose and pink photo:
Loumaroo and her flowers win a rose 8×10 print.

Grey & black photo:
Alison and her mosaic win a grey 8×10 print.

Blue photo:
Julie and her antique finds win a blue 8×10 print.

White and light photo:
Lynn and her white house win a white 8×10 print.

Earth tone photo:
Alissa and her daily Starbucks win an earth toned 8×10 print.

Cool pastel photo:
Rebekah and her pink blossoms win a cool toned 8×10 print.

Green crafting:
Leanne and her Jedi mind tricks win an online class.

Red, rose and pink crafting:
Lisa and her red laout win an online class.

Grey and black crafting:
Scrappycarrie and her Eiffel Tower win an online class.

Blue crafting:
ScaryMary555 and her blue beads win an online class.

Light and white crafting:
Anso and her owl card win an online class.

Earth toned crafting:
List and her rock chick layout win an online class.

Cool pastel crafting:
MarieP and her buddies win an online class.

Acrylic paint:
Laura and her bird book win a set of Banana Frog stamps.

Kirsty’s colour combination challenge:
Anne and her moped win a set of Banana Frog stamps.

Tia’s guest comment giveaway:
Mariangeles wins her choice of a Tia kit from Two Peas.

Write in colour challenge:
Tifany D and her green stitching win a set of Banana Frog stamps.

Thank you so much for all your participation over the last month! If you are one of the winners, please email me at this special email address so I can get your prize to you. Some will need to be posted; others will go by email so bear with me while I get them all out over the next week.

Catch you tomorrow!

xlovesx

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The calendar says today is the final day of June 2009. Which means A Month of Colour is coming to a close. But wait!! There is so much I meant to include that I haven’t had a chance to blog about yet!

Stuff like…
sorting your stash by colour (although seriously this boggles my mind), rainbow bookshelves that make me wonder how they cope with the multiple-colour spines that mess this up for me and how some days kuler can absolutely melt my brain with amazine colour combinations.

But alas, this is where June ends.
Okay, never fear—I may just drop some more colour posts now and then to keep you on your toes!

Thank you so much for joining me all month long! It has been lovely to see photos and projects from new friends and old. All the prize drawings close tonight at 11:59pm UK time and winners will be posted here tomorrow.

I hope you enjoyed this colourful month and I promise I have more to keep sharing when the calendar turns over to July in the morning, so I hope you’ll stick around!

xlovesx

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_{©twopeasinabucket.com. Click for supplies.}

You know what I have been extra terrible about recently? Reading actual books. For someone who claims she likes to read, I have made zero progress in reading anything in 2009. It’s not that I don’t want to read—I’m actually halfway through a book I love! But finding time to finish it has been a huge obstacle. I was looking forward to finishing it on the plane last week and it didn’t even make it out of my bag due to the pure exhaustion by the time I hit that completely uncomfortable seat.

So it’s time for this to change! And I’ve made myself a mini book so I can truly commit. In fact, I went ahead and made a book bag and a stack of bookmarks too. You can find the minibook here with instructions and tips as this week’s free class at Two Peas—it’s the fourth in June’s Make Mine Mini series. The book bag and other goodies are here. There is also a discussion thread here.

As a little bonus, this class includes a free printable sheet of colourful library cards. I really want to covertly change all the cards in my local library to these pretty colours! But since they have gone all electronic, I’ll just save the pretty colours for the scrapbook I suppose. You can download the free printable library cards here (you’ll need to click one more time to download the PDF – but it’s there in the description).

If you take inspiration from any of these projects this week, you can enter to win a prize from Two Peas—you’ll need to upload your project to the gallery there and check the box for ‘Make Mine Mini’ when you get to the list of challenges. That challenge runs for a week, but of course the library cards are yours to use for your projects any time!

What’s on your summer reading list?

xlovesx

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