Writing a letter can be one of the simplest ways to get out of the feeling that writing on a scrapbook page is some sort of exam or essay that will be marked and red penned. I probably write more handwritten letters to places (see also this page) than to actual people, which is probably something I should address in my own world, but nevertheless, it serves me well when trying to get my ideas across on my scrapbook pages.
Sometimes my journaling on page feels like a letter in my head without actually writing the ‘Dear…’ at the beginning and the ‘Sincerely yours’ at the end. That works too. I could definitely write a letter of admiration to the good folk at Sensory Lab in Melbourne. Except I would need to be careful because it would be really easy to ask an honest question in that letter. When can we move in? (I am rather grateful that they have opened a sister coffee shop and restaurant here in London, but there was something extra fabulous about our twice-daily sojourn to this spot while we were there.)
And now for guest artist Jill Sprott, who knows a thing or two about writing letters!
On every layout, we pose and compose ourselves, and thus, the journaling that we include on layouts is, by nature, personal. Journaling in the form of a letter is, perhaps, the most personalized approach to documenting our feelings. On this layout, I took up a challenge that I had been posed a few years back — to imagine a letter written to me by a future student — and so absorbed did I become in the process, that it filled an entire page! In that moment, a two-pager was born, with one side featuring the journaling, and the other including some surprise snapshots my daughter took of me at my desk the other day, worked into the page with patterns and colors that remind me of school. I love that the words “voice” and “teach” happened to peek through the die-cut letters as I assembled the page. Kismet!
About the Artist
Jill Sprott lives on Oahu, Hawaii, with her husband, daughter, and their menagerie of pets. She is a high school English teacher, which makes for pretty busy days, but on the weekends, when not grading papers, Jill shifts from working with words to playing with words and pictures, surrounded by patterned paper. Like teaching, scrapbooking is a creative, challenging, colorful, and rewarding endeavor. Jill is currently on the design teams for October Afternoon and Jenni Bowlin Studio, and is a Garden Girl at Two Peas in a Bucket. You can follow Jill on her blog, Word Play Word Work.
Your twelfth challenge is to write a letter! Entries close at the end of next Sunday, the 12th of May. Please check back on the 14th of May to see if you have won a prize.
You know, for someone who loves sparkle as much as I do, I have a relatively low glitter factor on my actual pages. In almost every case, the glitter on my scrapbook pages comes in the form of glitter Thickers letter stickers, which is a relatively low-mess way to add a bit of sparkle to any design. Definitely less messy than the glue-cover-pour-back-in-the-jar method we all learned as kids. I’m quite a fan of that process, but not such a fan of the complaints I get from anyone who steps foot in my home and wonders why their feet are now so sparkly. Frankly, I don’t see why this is a problem. To me, it sounds like a reason to celebrate. To each their own, I guess.
I think I’ll continue to celebrate all things sparkly, so here’s a bit of inspiration from the glittered archives. It’s a card that ends up quite sparkly, but surely the idea could work for the background or embellishment on a scrapbook page? (And back in our die-cutting post, you might have noticed a way to use glitter as a finishing touch – perfect as a replacement for gems, pearls, or enamel dots.)
And now for our guest artist, Jennifer Grace, a fellow fan of all things sparkly!
A sparkly challenge is right up my alley – to me projects don’t feel finished without a little bit of twinkle! Of course I still had a challenge to work quickly, and I pushed myself to use several types of sparkle without overwhelming the page. I store my stash by manufacturer; each brand has a pizza box that’s filled with papers and embellishments all together. So when I’m crafting quickly I grab one of these boxes – for this challenge I used Crate Paper – and I use mostly their supplies for the project. If I remember something else I want to use, like the wood veneers or the Glitz rhinestone then I will go and get them, but I don’t go looking through other supplies without knowing what I want, or I’d be there all day! I made sure I used fast drying glue like Mod Podge and Glossy Accents, so adding glitter to wood veneers didn’t slow me down. I also use my newest supplies as they are the ones I’m most excited about – those Maggie Holmes glitter alphas make the layout feel perfectly finished, even though it was all put together quickly!
About the Artist
Jennifer Grace is a mum-of-two from Dorset, UK. She blogs at www.jennifergracecreates.com, where she shares layouts and other papercrafts, as well as holding online bi-annual blog events with tutorials, giveaways and more – there’s one coming next weekend! She Designs for SJ Crafts, The Counterfeit Kit Challenge Blog, and PaperHaus Magazine, and has had projects featured in books, magazines, and on manufacturer blogs like Crate Paper, My Mind’s Eye and Glitz Design. You can also find her on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.
Your eleventh challenge is to make it sparkle! Entries close at the end of next Sunday, the 12th of May. Please check back on the 14th of May to see if you have won a prize.
Lately we call them mood boards. A few years ago we called them inspiration boards, and before that they were just bulletin boards, but they all serve the same purpose: a place to pin visual inspiration to help curate your style and develop new ideas that combine different aspects of a bunch of other things. I still love a physical mood board for inspiration, and have always had one in my crafting space in one way or another, though it does seem that they have gotten prettier over time looking at the significantly older board on the left! But if you prefer a paper-free, clutter-free way to collect visual information, then Pinterest is certainly your friend in this day and age. I’m rather fond of the resulting mood board from last month’s colour theme at Two Peas, for example. It has such a beautiful rainbow effect as you scroll down the page! Makes me want to make a page in each colour imaginable.
Making a mood board is simple enough: collect different images (either physical items like pages from magazines, postcards, and photographs or digital images from the vast catalogue of the internet) and place them together. It’s a different process than taking just your scrapbooking supplies and putting them on the desk. You’re taking inspiration in different forms – maybe some for colour, some for pattern, some for texture, some for theme, some for typography. That means your inspiration might be drawn from a photo of an interior, a collection of threads in a bowl, a well-crafted label for a brand that catches your eye, and a beautifully worded and typeset quotation. All different corners of the creative realm brought together to that one place on your mood board. Then you can take bits and pieces from all those different images and translate them to your scrapbook supplies. The photo of a fluffy yellow curtain in the sun leads you to choose layers of yellow washi tape or a sheer ribbon, perhaps. Another photo might lend you a colour scheme, and so on until the work is certainly your own but with this bit of a creative bicycle in your head where the mood board is the wheels but you are very much driving the pedals.
I love the In the Mood to Scrap video series at Two Peas, and Wilna’s videos and scrapbook pages always inspire me, even though our finished pages never look much alike. This combination of videos helps illustrate how I take inspiration from the series – starting with Wilna’s mood board and project presented here…
…and Glitter Girl then used that same mood board and made a few changes in line with her own style to come up with her own page. I love how mood boards can be used for multiple projects in this way and still produce different looks. (For further details on these projects, see this page for Wilna’s project and this page for Glitter Girl’s Adventure.)
_I compiled my mood board on Pinterest, and you can find it here to see all the pieces I collected before I started to create my layout. The first piece I chose for the mood board was the yellow flag banner, because my first thought when I saw it, was how simple it would be to make it from yellow ribbon or washi tape. I then came across the photos of the watercolor paints, and thought about all of my mists and paints gathering dust on the shelf, and that wonderful sheet of orange ombre chevron paper from Amy Tangerine’s Yes, Please line. That lead me to select some photos of orange, pink, and coral ombre for my next choices for my mood board. I saw some photos of colorful watercolors and flowers that fit the feeling I wanted for my page (warm, pretty, and girly).
At this point, It was time to get out my pretty papers, and start playing! I started with a 12×12 sheet from Crate Paper DIY Shoppe, and then scattered blocks of paper that I cut down from several 6×6 pads. I misted and dripped my Heidi Swapp Color Shine mists across the page on the diagonal, and then watered down a bit of the Primrose color to paint a watercolor/shimmer frame around the edge. I die-cut the title from the Amy Tangerine paper, and painted it with varying shades of the Primrose paint (watering it down more to paint the word Always, a little less for Radiate, and full strength for Sunshine), to give the ombre effect to the title. I attached a strip of Webster’s Pages washi tape across the blocks of paper to ground them, and ruffled a bit of yellow tulle from Glitz to add to the dreamy effect of the page. I mounted my photo on a piece of the Amy Tangerine paper, and inked and ruffled the edges with my fingers a bit for texture. I added the photo with pop dots. I dripped more color shine across the page, and then set about making my banner from ribbon. I took a piece of stretchy yellow trim from Glitz as the base (any bit of twine string would be fine for this part), and all of the yellow ribbons from Dear Lizzy Lucky Charm. Making the banner itself was a simple matter of folding it over a bit of glue dot adhesive, and trimming the edges in various lengths. I tucked in a tag with a bit of journaling, and called it finished!
About the Artist
Margie Visnick is a full time stay At home mom to four children; Caitlin, Evan, Natalie and Cecilia. She has been involved in artistic endeavors all of her life, and started scrapbooking as a creative outlet when she was pregnant with Caitlin over 14 years ago. She has been on the Lindsay’s Stamp Stuff digital stamp design team, the Sketches 4 All design team, and, most recently, the Counterfeit Kit Challenge blog design team. You can find her at her blog, Two Peas In A Bucket, and Pinterest.
Your tenth challenge is to use a mood board! You can make your own, or use the boards from Margie or Wilna. Entries close at the end of next Sunday, the 12th of May. Please check back on the 14th of May to see if you have won a prize.
When I think of my crafting tools, I tend to thing of things that are all powered by hand in one way or another – stamps, punches, even my printing press doesn’t work without its share of elbow grease! There are relatively few things in my crafting space that actually have to be plugged in – the sewing machine, the embossing gun. But fancy electronic cutting tools? While they are more mechanical than I tend to think of in my creative process of making things by hand, they do open up a world of possibilities for creating things that would be either impossible or ridiculously time-consuming to cut by hand. I needed about fifty of those delicate little ‘marvel’ titles for example. No way was I going to cut all those by hand, nor would fifty people in a workshop be very happy with me if I started by saying they needed to cut that with their scissors and a craft knife! And yet that delicately cut paper is so pretty on a project. All hail crafting technology!
There are several different brands of digital cutter and different workflows for whether you cut from a cartridge of designs or download individual files online or draw and type your own designs to cut. I use a Silhouette cutter, which doesn’t have cartridges and allows you the freedom to cut your own designs or designs you download from their site or others. As I tend to want one shape here and there for different themes rather than fifty different shapes on one theme, I prefer the individual download option to the cartridge set up. I have tried systems with cartridges and I always found myself debating each purchase because I might really like three or four of the cuts per cartridge, but that makes the cartridge price pretty expensive – and I would prefer to spend that on paper and embellishments! But there is a certain allure to how you don’t need to open the computer to use a cartridge-based machine, and if you work within certain themes often, it would be a great choice.
Glitter Girl doesn’t use a digital die-cutter all the time, or on even the majority of her projects, but she does find it a rather useful tool from time to time. (Interestingly neither Glitter Girl nor I feel we use the digital cutter enough to warrant an upgrade to the fancier 12×12 machine. We both still cut on the Silhouette SD, and although there are some lovely improvements that make the Cameo a fabulous machine, we just don’t feel we would get enough use out of it to warrant replacing something that is working perfectly fine. But if we didn’t have one already? Then we would probably spring for the Cameo!) I’m also quite a big fan of how the Silhouette store’s own library has quite a few older paper collections represented. It’s perfect if you have older papers that present a challenge to your newer embellishments – simply cut something in the matching motif and you’re all set without needing to scour eBay for half a sheet of stickers to match your remaining papers. (See this page for further details on this Glitter Girl Adventure.)
And now for our guest artist, Becki Adams, who has given the brand new Two Peas cutting files a try!
My creative process may seem backwards to most. I almost always start with a product and choose photos toward the middle or even the end of the project. I find that this eliminates the stress of finding the perfect products to go with my photos. Because this project required a cut file from the Two Peas store, that is where I started my project. The photos came second to last only being followed by the title. If I need to complete a project quickly, I change the way I begin the project. Changing things up a bit helps me see the project differently and sometimes leads to great new ideas that I would have missed following my usual process.
About the Artist
Becki Adams lives in a small town in Idaho, USA, with her husband and three kids. She enjoys reading, spending time with her family, and of course creating whenever she can. She designs for Bella Blvd, Paper Issues, and Life.Paper.Scrapbook. You can find all her work and links to social media sites on her blog.
If you’re a digital cutting fan – or a fan of printables or photo processing help – definitely take a look at the brand new digital store at Two Peas. This isn’t a shop for digital scrapbook pages – it focuses on just the digital products that can be easily used for paper scrapbooking: actions for processing photos, printable designs to create your own embellishments, and cutting files for digital cutters. There are some free downloads you can try to start, and pay attention to the top left corner of each product, as it will tell you if that file is only available in the store that month. (And just to clarify: it will be available in your downloads permanently – just only available for purchase that month, and then retired from the shop. That way this section of the store should stay easy to navigate and not just stack up with heaps and heaps of files to overwhelm you!) Take a look here and see what you fancy.
Your ninth challenge is to do some fancy cutting! (It can be with scissors or a manual die if you don’t own a fancy gadget!) Entries close at the end of next Sunday, the 12th of May. Please check back on the 14th of May to see if you have won a prize.
There are definite downsides to scrapbooking since 1998: I remember all too well the time when the supplies were so few and far between and not particularly inspiring, it took me a very long time to develop a style I really like while I see new scrappers now jump right in with beautiful pages, and I survived the days of when it a significant part of the hobby had a slightly more narrow view of its potential: that scrapbooking was just for pictures of your children or grandchildren. The upside is that having seen the huge change over the years, it is a tremendous feeling to know more and more scrapbookers have embraced the idea of scrapbooking about themselves, and writing their own memoirs one scrapbook page at a time.
After fifteen years of scrapbooking without kids, it’s safe to say I have quite a few pages about myself in one way or another! And I’m okay with that. I know it has helped my perspective on life and it keeps my memory pretty darn clean, both of which are happy side-effects of this hobby. I know if you don’t scrapbook about yourself or purposely stay behind the camera to avoid being in the pictures, it seems so very hard. Even when you get used to being in the pictures, there are times when it’s not easy! I go for ages without wanting my face in a photo – unhappy with my hair or my skin or just feeling awkward. Welcome to real life, right?! The thing that helps me push through this is to use teenage photos as a big note-to-self. I was harshest on myself in my teenage years – something I’m sure many of you understand! Of course I thought I needed to fix about a million things about myself just to be acceptable, and yet when I see those photos now, I realise that wasn’t really the case. There are plenty of things I wish I had appreciated then, and I try to tell myself that the same will be true with today’s pictures years from now. I’m especially dedicated to getting more group shots now – pictures with family, friends, and all the important people in my life – with all of us together rather than just one person per shot. I know that even though group shots may be less perfect in photos, they grow to be far more precious, showing more context of that particular moment in life.
Glitter Girl has a few ideas for scrapbooking herself, complete with a rather unfortunate hairstyle at the Junior Prom. Bad haircuts are not a requirement for this challenge, but I am inclined to give you bonus points for bravery! (See this page for further details of this Glitter Girl Adventure.)
And now for our guest artist, Janna Werner, who has far better luck with white and cream papers together than I do! When I read the topic of this challenge I knew immediately that I wanted to scrap about “some serious stuff” – scrapbooking is a great way of documenting the fun parts of one’s life, but also to express thoughts, struggles and sad stories. I named my page after a song by OneRepublic, called “Stop and Stare”, where the singer sings about finding yourself in a place or position you never wanted to be in and to realize you are kind of stuck, living something that you aren’t and don’t want to be. I can relate to this feeling, I think it’s the normal struggle of finding yourself in a position you never wanted to be in, being the grown up you never wanted to be when you were a child and having responsibility for lots of things you never imagined. My experience is that I can not change everything that I would like to change, but I do have control about a few things. Sometimes it requires to step back, to stop and stare, to trust that I am being loved and that there is something out there – whatever it might be – that guides me through life and helps me to become the best me possible.
About the Artist
Janna Werner is an artist, freelance writer and teacher. She lives in North Germany, together with her husband of nearly 3 years. Janna´s love for papercrafts and mixed media art evolved in 2010 when a friend introduced her to scrapbooking. Since then she has been working together with well-known papercrafting companies, magazines and international artists. She is currently doing design work for Crate Paper, entreArtistes magazine, Sizzix and Two Peas in a Bucket. You can find her on her blog and her other Social Media sites: Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, Facebook, and Youtube.
Your eighth challenge is to scrap about yourself! Entries close at the end of next Sunday, the 12th of May. Please check back on the 14th of May to see if you have won a prize.
And now it’s time to step back from the craft room shelves and find inspiration in the everyday items that surround us. SJ Dowsett has wandered round her house for you and made some scrapbook embellishments from items we wouldn’t normally use on our pages. Toilet tissue for example!
She explains that making a 3D embellishment from toilet paper and glue is wonderfully simple. All you need is some heavy card, toilet paper and PVA glue. I added some water to my PVA to thin it slightly as it had been sitting on the kitchen window sill for some time and had thickened! – then all you do, is “draw” your chosen design (you could even print it!) on the card. Twist lengths of the toilet paper into rope and then glue down following the design. Because the toilet paper is so fine, it almost melts with the glue and you can mold it with a paintbrush if you needed once it is on the card. Leave to dry somewhere sunny or warm for around 24 hours. Once it is dry, you can either paint the whole card, or do as I did and trim your shape out. Covering it is the fun part, use washi tape, paint or even wrap it in wool. I made a big ampersand shape which I covered in chevron design tape. I am going to be using it as a filler card for my project life album.
I sing a song by Mindy Gledhill called Hourglass to my son every night before he goes to bed, it is a precious time for me, which I know won’t last. When he is grown and I become a hindrance rather than an wonder to him I want to look back on the time with fondness. I made a felt rocket from colours my son chose, he also chose the size and shape and letter for the front.
His involvement in the process made it even more lovely. The start of the song is our favourite part, which mentions flying to Neverland – so this is the section of the song that I decided to remember in layout form. Whilst I was needle felting, I knocked up a little list embellishment to go on a project life insert.
Other things I made were journal card embellishments for her project life using cross stitch fabric and simple straight stitch.
About the Artist SJ lives by the sea and runs a little business called Little Musings from where she sells Personalised prints, hand painted quotations and Craft Stamps. She loves photography, typography and daydreaming.
Her typography prints are the end product of the peculiar thoughts that drift around her head. Whilst you and I might wait at a bus stop pondering the yellow-sticker-reduced price-food-bargains in the supermarket, SJ ponders such things as:
What is at the edge of space……
Do Whales worry they have too much blubber?
Where are all my hair bands?
I wonder if Jane Austen ever had a pyjama day?
Isn’t Pyjama a funny word?
And other such nonsensicals that she traps in a jar in her mind, and stores up for later.
Your seventh challenge is to use unexpected supplies! Entries close at the end of next Sunday, the 12th of May. Please check back on the 14th of May to see if you have won a prize.
Scraplifting is a pretty simple and useful concept for getting through a creative block or just diving in when you have minimal time to create – look at a completed project you like and take a little or a lot of inspiration from it to make your own page. It works well with galleries and blogs and magazines. But it can also work with your own albums! This layout, for example, is actually a scraplift of this page, which is still one of my favourites in the Sketch to Scrapbook Page series.
This is another design I find myself using time and time again, just with different papers and embellishments. In fact, I use it so much that I devoted an entire prompt to it in Scrapbook Remix, including four different versions made side by side to show just how easy it is to use the same design and not have to worry about it being obvious in your albums at all. Two 4×6 photos on a 12×12 page remains my very favourite ratio of the space.
And now for our guest artist, Laura Craigie, with double the pages, double the fun! (If you just had to finish the ad jingle in your head, I’m very sorry. I’m laughing a little, but I’m very sorry.)
I think sometimes as scrapbookers we feel this pressure to always reinvent the wheel with each new page, which when you think about it, is rather silly. My favourite thing to do when I get stuck in a crafting rut is to pull out a page I’ve already done and simply scrap lift myself. All the hard work is already done for you, and it just makes the decision process of where to place things so much easier. I chose a page I did a few years ago which I still love to bits. On a side note the entire background, and patterns are from the back of an American Crafts adhesive package, probably not acid free of course, but I still love it. As you can see in my new page I kept the placement of all the elements the same but with different product choices the pages still look unique to themselves. I hope you can see the value in scraplifting yourself and I do hope you play along with this challenge. I’d love to see your finished pages!
About the Artist
Laura Craigie lives with her husband and three busy boys on the west coast of Canada. She started scrapbooking in 2004 while pregnant with her first son, the rest as they say is history. Laura is proud to design for Pebbles, Fancy Pants Designs, and work as a Garden Girl at Two Peas in a Bucket. She can’t quite decide if she’s a “Scrapbook making Card maker”, or a “Card making Scrapbooker” or if it even matters. Bottom line is she is happy making either and loves nothing more than a quiet evening crafting. You can catch up with Laura on her blog PaperLulu , or on Instagram.
Your sixth challenge is to scraplift yourself! Entries close at the end of next Sunday, the 12th of May. Please check back on the 14th of May to see if you have won a prize.
We’ll take a little break now and be back very soon with more NSD fun to keep you busy!
Sometimes our most basic tools and supplies get a little bit ignored in a world of craft supplies that can just be stuck together with a bit of adhesive. Yet those basics could potentially go with just about anything! Brads and eyelets are some of the most versatile embellishments around, since they can go with any theme and come in any colour, plus they can be as plain as can be or super-dressy like the floral lacework brads on this layout.
On one hand, it feels like I made this video a million years ago, but actually it was just Christmas-before-last, and indeed that is back when we lived in this flat the first time! I’m finding that is very strange working in the space again. I adore it and it is definitely the best place I’ve ever worked, but as I haven’t quite finished getting things back in their place, it can be even more confusing. Sometimes I instinctively go to where I kept something when we lived here before, only to open a drawer or cupboard and be shocked to find it looking a bit different. Now is that a random tangent from brads and eyelets or what? Suffice to say my memory would tell you that my brads are in a jar right behind me, on the bottom of two shelves. My eyes would tell you that shelf is still sitting on the floor in pieces, so the brads are clearly somewhere else. But they really did live there when I made this video, I promise.
And now for our guest artist, Jennifer Gallacher, who is a serious expert on this sort of thing!
I love the concept of using up my supplies, and one thing I have collected, stored, and continued to use over the years are eyelets. Eyelets were all the rage several years ago, but were recently replaced with brads. Yet many of us still have these fun embellishments in our stash.
Here are three ways you can use up your stash of eyelets when creating a layout or card:
Idea #1: Create a border strip with eyelets. Use eyelets to fill the space on a strip of cardstock or patterned paper. Mix and match sizes, colors, and styles for an even more eye-catching border.
Idea #2: Reinforce tags or change an embellishment into a tag. The journaling tag on this layout is reinforced with a green eyelet. While the chipboard embellishment was not originally a tag. To make it into a tag, I used my Crop-a-dile tool to punch a hole through the top. Then I added an eyelet to the shape. To hang both items from the frame, I hung them with twine.
Idea #3: Tie elements to eyelets. For this concept, I simply threaded brown twine through one of the holes and tied it into a bow. You could also tie additional elements such as tags or pennants to the twine or replace the twine with ribbon.
These are just a few uses for eyelets. You can also fill a shape, such as a sunshine with yellow and orange eyelets. You could use the dots on patterned paper as a guide for placing eyelets inside. And you can add eyelets to any paper or chipboard embellishment you like for some added texture.
If you like the concept of stretching your supplies, be sure to check out my new workshop for Two Peas in a Bucket called, Tool School. In this $12 workshop, I share over a hundred ideas for using punches, die cutting machines, and many of your basic tools. While some basic knowledge of a digital die cut machine, manual die cutting, and punching is required, you aren’t required to purchase any additional tools for the workshop. Instead I’ll walk you through the steps I take to creatively use these common tools in new ways. The workshop includes a private message board forum, a 37 page instructional PDF with complete instructions and supply lists, and over 120 minutes of video tutorials.
Your fifth challenge is to use brads or eyelets! Entries close at the end of next Sunday, the 12th of May. Please check back on the 14th of May to see if you have won a prize.
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