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

In sketching out a whole collection of page outlines to get things planned for 2013, I realised just how much I like a very simplistic sketch to get scrapping. Yes, it can be lovely to have so many little extras built in, but it can also be so helpful to have just a few basic things in place and then have the freedom to add and subtract without feeling like it’s an abandonment of the original idea. So don’t be surprised at just how simple some of these sketches may be: that way they are yours to dress up or keep simple as the mood hits!

I imagined this sketch with two photos printed slightly larger than my usual, and in fact I printed mine at 5×6 inches. If two photos is too few for you, never fear, as today’s guest has made it work with four images instead. And if you fancy making this into a two page layout, look at the middle line of this sketch and pretend that is the centre of the two pages. Then just extend the design outward, possibly with two portrait 4×6 pictures side by side instead of the single 5×6 pictures. Does that help?

This marks my third full project with the January kit, which is now starting to look well-used but there are still some full sheets untouched that I want to use as backgrounds. Because this page will go in my Round the World album, I added a sheet of kraft cardstock so it matches all the other pages in those books, plus some glimmer mist to paint on that frame around the edge, but everything else is from that same set of supplies.

If you check out the Black Water Rafting website, you’ll see just how alike all the photos are, but if you ever find yourself touring New Zealand, it is certainly an interesting item for your itinerary. It’s called ‘black water’ rafting because you’re in a cave and entirely in the dark. Well, maybe not entirely, as there are glow worms on the ceiling that make it a bit like looking up at the stars, except once you find out what a glow worm really is, it’s not nearly as romantic as it sounds, but it is still pretty cool. It’s very cold (even in a wet suit) and very touristy, but New Zealand was our stop of ‘let’s do all the things they show in leaflets’, so indeed we went rafting, paragliding, and scuba diving to ship wrecks. (I say ‘we’. When it comes to the scuba diving, I mean ‘he’. But still.) And at the end of the rafting adventure, they give you hot chocolate and a DVD of pictures from your day, perfect for a scrapbooker.

Today I’m thrilled to welcome Ashli Oliver (also known as SoapHouseMama in the world of scrapbooking message boards) with her beautifully layered and detailed style. She had no trouble converting this sketch into one with additional photos, so I know you’ll find her ideas inspiring, no matter what your style may be.

When I saw this fun way to incorporate four photos onto one page, I knew I would be heading straight to my stack of Disney pictures. After all, I took loads of fun pictures and I need to maximize my page real-estate! As you can imagine, this album of our vacation is chocked full of fun and whimsy, so I just overlapped and tilted my photos a bit to maintain this consistency. Not to mention that I just couldn’t bring my self to cover up that fabulous polka dot print from Dear Lizzy 5th & Frolic. The choice of the gold dot vellum also allows for the pattern to peek through a bit, while adding a nice touch of sparkle. In addition to the who, what, when, and where journaling, these photos have a bit of a longer story that I wanted to tell. So, I added a little pocket from Whiskers Graphics to include more journaling. A touch of gold in the title work helps pull in the gold sparkle from the vellum and some doodles finish it off. Plenty of room for pictures with still enough space left for embellishments… This is a sketch that I will be returning to again and again, I just know it!

It is such an honor have joined you this week. Thanks you for having me, Shimelle! I hope to see you all over at purplemailbox.com. You can also find me on Pinterest, Instagram, and Twitter. I look forward to “seeing” you soon!

And now it’s your turn! Create a page in your style with this sketch, post it online, and share it with us. You can upload to your blog or to a scrapbooking gallery like Two Peas or UKScrappers, then just follow the steps to link to your project wherever it can be found online!

Comment [13]

I have my work cut out with me creating posts for all the remaining CHA booths and I’ll be on that straight away now that I’m back home in snowy London! (To be fair, Southern California wasn’t that much warmer, though there was a great deal more sunshine.) And to make up for a bit of lost time while I was off staring lovingly at all the new paper for 2013, this weekend I have two scrapbooking sketches for you – both with videos and guests, of course.

This second sketch of the year uses my favourite photo combination: two 4×6 prints in the same direction (portrait, in this case). It stays pretty simple from there too: a title, writing space, and three areas of embellishment. Of course, what you choose for those embellishments is totally up to you!

This is my second page to come from my January kit, though you might have noticed Glitter Girl sneaking a title from my kit lettering options last week. I added some thread and a tiny bit of gold mist (it sells out fast but it is restocked often – click the ‘request & notify me’ button if you’re still searching for some and that way you have a good chance of catching it as soon as it arrives), but everything else is from the kit.

I did add one tiny bit of additional embellishment not on the sketch – two initials and the date at the top left corner. I like having just a few things that repeat on every page in a specially themed album, and in the Harry Potter album, it’s the initials ‘HP’ somewhere on each page. It just seemed a bit more balanced to place them in the top corner rather than add them into one of the existing areas of embellishment since those three were so similar and the initials would make one grouping so different.

The scrapper behind this gorgeous page is this week’s guest, Melissa Mann. I love how she repeated one motif in two unique ways through the die-cut background and the patchworked embellishments.

I loved that this sketch included two 4×6 photos. I usually stick to one photo scrapbook pages or multiple smaller photos. I stuck pretty close with the sketch but changed the place I put my title. It didn’t seem to flow as well with the title in the lower right hand side. That is the one thing I love about sketches! You can duplicate the sketch in its entirety or use it as a jumping off point. I really wanted to use the lime green card stock on this layout, but it was too bright in my opinion to use as the base. I layered it on top of some dark gray card stock and stitched it down with my sewing machine. I then layered a piece of white card stock that I ran through my Silhouette Cameo and cut a triangle design on and stitched it down on top of the lime green card stock. I matted my two 4×6 photos with a piece of patterned paper that had more geometrical designs on it. I created my own custom arrow embellishments by cutting the arrows out of cardstock. On two of the arrows I layered strips of paper across and trimmed off the excess. On the biggest arrow, I punched out squares of patterned paper and laid it down on top of the cardstock and again cut off the excess. All three arrows were stitched around the border with my sewing machine. A couple of stickers and brads were placed around the photo and the title was placed above the photo mat. The supplies I used are by American Crafts, Studio Calico, Basic Grey, Ki Memories, Tim and Beck, and October Afternoon. The cut files used were by Studio Calico and Silhouette.

You can find more of Melissa’s work on her blog or her galleries at Two Peas and Studio Calico.

And now it’s your turn! Create a page in your style with this sketch, post it online, and share it with us. You can upload to your blog or to a scrapbooking gallery like Two Peas or UKScrappers, then just follow the steps to link to your project wherever it can be found online!

Comment [7]

One of those things I’m excited to share with you every week this year is a new scrapbooking sketch! Having a guest each week is going to keep me on my toes and I’ve already seen the first several pages they’ve made and I love them. I hope you will enjoy this new take on the old sketch posts too!

I’m starting the year very simply, with a sketch that includes one large photo and two smaller images. I printed all three at home (rare for me!), printing the large image as a borderless print on an A4 sheet of photo paper and the two smaller images at 2.5 inches square. If you’re looking to order large prints, I suggest Photobox in the UK and York Photo or Persnickety Prints in the US – all three offer large prints, including 12×12 photos, and you upload your photo online then the prints are delivered to your door.

For this video, all of my supplies came from the January Best of Both Worlds kit that I’ll be using all month, with the exception of the baker’s twine, which I had in my stash (plus ink, stamping block, pens and adhesive, of course).

The sketch itself includes a bit more embellishment at the top left of the large photo, but adding something there would have covered the lovely faces in this case, so I just swapped sides and added that top embellishment at the right. But our special guest kept it in its original location!

I’m delighted Rhonna Farrer could join us as the first sketch guest of the year! I love her beautiful digital take on the large photo idea. And her creative process for the page makes it even more special:

The New Year is on my mind the past few weeks. I wanted to document my approach to this New Year in a scrapbook page. This is created digitally with my elements in my Rhonna Designs Insta Fonts and Brushes. I plan on printing this out & hanging it on my Inspiration Board so I am reminded everyday of my one little word & goal for 20.thirteen. I took the sketch & added photos that will inspire me: my family and a photo of my mountains. The sketch is perfect for drawing my eyes to the sky… looking up… focusing. Each element is placed there for a reason: to draw my eye first to TODAY at the top. Then, flowing through the entire layout to remind me to BE STRONG in one thing each day. That feels doable. I know I can do that.
I used one of my favorite color schemes with colors from 2012 & a POP of the 2013 color of the year: emerald in my family photo!

You can find more of Rhonna’s gorgeous work on her blog and shop, plus you’ll find her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.

And now it’s your turn! Create a page in your style with this sketch, post it online, and share it with us. You can upload to your blog or to a scrapbooking gallery like Two Peas or UKScrappers, then just follow the steps to link to your project wherever it can be found online!

Comment [6]

I know: calling it scrapbooking sketch of the week at this point is entirely too cheeky. But I don’t know what to change the graphics to say, so for the moment let’s just say I have a really creative definition of a week. Or something.

This time around, I had a few bits and pieces left over from working with the May papercrafting kit from JBS Mercantile, including most of a printed transparency sheet. I love transparencies but don’t love just layering them all the time – sometimes I like keeping the transparent element in the album, but that takes a little thought about what can go on the back of that page, else it can end up pretty awkward as you turn the pages. So this sketch was designed with a transparency in mind, with a simple design to the rest of the page so it can be repeated on the back to keep that transparent element in the album. Of course, that works best with a pattern that works from both the front and back of the page! Stars, chevrons, lines, checks, polka dots, clouds and all sorts of geometric patterns work better for that than anything with text!

Of course, you don’t have to use a transparency to use the sketch. You could simply piece together the background layer with two pieces of cardstock or two patterned papers. Easy enough! But if you do have a transparency kicking around that needs to be put to use, consider this your challenge!

(Oh, and I may have posted things in a different order to what I expected, so that starting point is already live for you! Find it here.)

As this goes live, a few each of both the main kit and the dime store kit are still available. You can find the main kit here and the dime store kit here, and you don’t have to subscribe to order either kit.

I loved the absolute variety of page themes posted for the last sketch. Here are four favourites: one, two, three and four. Give them a look to see each page in more detail and meet the scrappers who created them!

Sketch of the Week (or whenever!) is always just for fun, and you’re invited to join in with some photos of your own. Grab any supplies you want to use, create a page and share it with us via an online page gallery or your blog. We would all love to see where this sketch takes you on your scrapbooking adventures!

Comment [10]

Lo and behold, I have finally come out the other side of a giant stack of deadlines that meant I could return to something I’ve been wanting to do so much: Sketch to Scrapbook Page. I’m going to see if I can make this a weekly event but that’s not a guarantee – just an aim at this point. If you’re relatively new around here, you can work your way back through plenty of sketches and videos here, by the way.

I don’t always work with a sketch, but I find I scrap more quickly when I do. This week I wanted to create a sketch from an existing layout – one of my favourites from my 2010 album. From this page, I took the idea of the two landscape 4×6 photos in the top left corner, plus three blocks of cardstock and a bunch of journaling cards and came up with this as the page sketch:

I combined that sketch with a stack of various American Crafts products to make a new page. And you can watch that entire process if you like:

I’m not quite sure why I’m drawn to so much orange lately, but I loved this mix of papers even though every single paper was from a different collection. And I have to admit Gardenia is a lot more fun in person than I first thought. For some reason it struck me as a line that would be a bit tough to use (maybe because it has some gardening themes and we don’t have so much as a potted plant?) but once I had it on the desk and started chopping it up, my opinion changed. I love the richness of the colours and I have a few more Gardenia projects coming up soon.

You can find all the supplies for this page here, at the bottom of the page.

Here’s a closer look at that finished page. My only wish was that we would have had a photo of the two of us together for the top left corner, but we don’t, so that’s how it is! I do have a picture of The Boy in that same spot, so I’m going to scrap that on the facing page in the album. Hoping that will work to emphasise that’s an ‘our favourites’ rather than just my favourites! It’s a plan. (And also, we’re working on our self-portraits.)

In other news, this layout was featured here on the American Crafts blog, and their blog includes plenty of inspiring projects made with all sorts of American Crafts products. Worth checking out if you’re not already a reader there!

Why not grab this sketch and two of your own 4×6 pictures? Give it a go and share your page with us!

Comment [7]

This week, how about a special Christmas edition of the sketch of the week? I revisited my 2010 Christmas journal to find a page to inspire the sketch, then scrapped a different kind of Christmas page with these two photos of what we did on actual Christmas day last year. Don’t worry – we had a more traditional Christmas with family and friends before we left home, though I could get used to fresh watermelon smoothies and waterfall hikes at Christmas every year, I think. Or it might just be the cold talking: I finally caved this week and started wearing my gloves. It’s only downhill from here in shivering on train platforms and so forth! (But I do have a rule for cold weather: if it’s going to be cold, bring on the snow!)

By the way, the video this week includes that revisit to my 2010 journal, so if you wanted to see what a sample Christmas journal looks like in my world, this is the video for you.

This sketch started very simple and in the end my embellishments became far more prevalent, but I wanted to include the simple sketch here so you can work with either option. Keep it more minimal like the sketch, or add more embellishment in the top left corner and surrounding the circle accent. Whatever suits your crafty this week!

Here’s a look through my 2010 Christmas journal, plus a quick look at how the ‘different Christmas’ layout came to be. It’s never too late to join Journal your Christmas but prompts start on the first so go ahead and join in so you can start with everyone! You don’t need to have anything prepared, I promise. It’s okay to jump in at any time.

As always, the weekly sketch is no-stress and just for fun! If you use it, I’d love to see, so please leave a link if you post your page online. I have to admit I am short on time and need to do a few round-ups of layouts from the past few sketches, so I’ll get on that for next time with a sort of omnibus sketch post!

Now… are you up for some sketchy scrapping this week? I’m quite excited to see this sketch adapted to different styles. Give it a go and share it with us!

Comment [9]

A crafting weekend here wouldn’t be right without a sketch, would it? So a sketch this week with two examples – one travel page and one Christmas page, complete with silly childhood photo!

This sketch will work with any paper you like, but it’s particularly useful with patterned papers with a framed edge. I find those papers such a challenge with the frame around the edge, but easier when the frame can be turned inside-out as it were! I used two portrait 4×6 prints on this example and one 4×5 Polaroid on the example below, but this sketch will work with a variety of photo options, so adapt it to the pictures on your desk.

Of course, this is Christmas crafting weekend so it just wouldn’t be right to not include a Christmas take on the sketch!

Your challenge: use this sketch to create a holiday-themed layout OR to prepare a page in your Christmas journal, ready for photos and journaling later. Take a picture and upload your page to your blog or an online gallery. One randomly selected entry will win a $10 gift certificate to Two Peas in a Bucket to go shopping for scrapbooking supplies! Entries close next Sunday, the 20th of November.

Comment [9]

Sketch of the week, huh? Right about now I’m sure there are some internet police ready to come get me for not living up to the ‘of the week’ and getting myself in a muddle with videos and things. Do you suppose I can distract the internet police with copious amounts of pretty paper? Please officer, I know I am having issues with my Wednesday schedule, but just look at this album about Australia. I know you’ll love it and forget all about my Wednesday problems.

That’s my plan, anyway.

It’s also my plan to post this anyway even though it is Thursday now and this was last week’s sketch and so forth. Sometimes you have to call an amnesty, and right now with my entire flat covered in screen printed Advent numbers and postage labels, and a now-official moving date for casa de cupcake, I am calling an amnesty. I’m still calling this Sketch of the Week, for whatever that seems to mean!

So for this sketch, you’ll need one square photo (or it could easily work with a portrait 4×6 print too), three patterned papers (one full sheet and two partials) and then a handful of small embellishments you can scatter across the page. This layout won’t take you long at all, and it’s perfect for a photo that just makes you smile, with some pretty papers you love.

If you were ahead of the game and popped over to Youtube, you may have seen this already. I am yet to figure out why it took almost a full day to upload, when nothing else seemed to causing any trouble, but we’ll just forge ahead and one day I shall understand the inner zen of Youtube.

Speaking of zen, as always, the weekly sketch is no-stress and just for fun! If you use it, I’d love to see, so please leave a link if you post your page online.

This was the last sketch of the week, and
Click the corresponding link to see any of these layouts in more detail and get to know the scrappers behind the pages. Clockwise from top left, they are from Becky, Jenn, Mel and Tilla.

Now… are you up for some sketchy scrapping this week? Let’s see if I can have next week’s sketch up on Wednesday and no more visits from the internet police. I’d love to share your page next week, so give it a go and share it with us!

The special offer for free shipping at Two Peas in a Bucket ends today – so do your Christmas shopping now! Click here to shop and use code RLRXWA at checkout for free shipping on a $35 order (physical, non-clearance goods) to a US address or $5 off international shipping for the same order. By the way, the Twig collection from Little Yellow Bicycle is now in stock – it’s a lovely wintry blue line with birch trees.

If you’re planning to take part in our Christmas-themed online scrapbooking weekend on the 11th to 13th of November, today would be a great day to order any supplies you would want for prepping your Christmas journal, making Christmas cards, Christmas scrapbook pages, handmade decorations or pretty gift wrap touches. Happy shopping!

xlovesx

Comment [10]