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

Oh Sketch of the Week, what do you have against me right now? Is it because I was perhaps a little too excited about the online cropping this weekend? And finishing up the last few days of Explore and polishing up a special surprise to end the class? Sketch, I’m really sorry if I hurt your feelings. All I know now is the video I tried to make is broken beyond saving and this post is now late and video-free. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.

On the upside: it’s here now. And if you’re an early bird who can’t wait to get cropping, you can consider this your very first challenge. See, Sketch? I love you really.

Recently, Julie has been working on a special series of crafty things on her blog called Going Postal, with all sorts of things inspired by postage stamps and real letters. I thought I’d see what happened if I made a scrapbook sketch inspired by a postcard, and this is the result. I used a postage stamp punch for the embellishment to make it a bit more obvious, but that’s not a requirement! I just liked the idea of a rectangle divided into two sections (like the note and the address on the back of a picture postcard – but here it’s the photo and the writing) then something at the top right corner to mimic the stamp and postmark. If not a postage stamp, what embellishments do you fancy for this sketch?

This week, I started with one landscape 4×6 photo but also printed three smaller images in a line on one 4×6 sheet of photo paper, then just cropped the extra white space away to have the strip of three pictures. So this sketch can be viewed as one photo (eliminate the extra photo strip), two photos (include the photo strip with a panorama or cropped image) or four photos (include the photo strip with three images as shown).

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 to share your work!

Last week Relly gave me a sketch to change things up a bit and I love the variety of pages inspired by it. You can see all the pages shared here but these six jumped out to me to show the different styles that all started from the same design. Click the corresponding link to see any of these pages in more detail.
Top row, L to R: one, two, three.
Bottom row, L to R: four, five and six.

And now it’s almost time to kick off the fun with three days of online cropping! The first giveaway post will be here at 11:00am UK time.

xlovesx

Comment [61]

Good news, I think. After a two-week-and-one-day hiatus, sketch of the week is back. That’s good, right? I mean the coming back part. Not the hiatus part. But onward.

Also, this week’s sketch is a little different to the normal drill in that I didn’t draw it. Amidst a day that mixed work, craft and coffee with Relly Annett-Baker (find her here on Twitter until she finishes her scrapbooky web presence), she drew me a sketch and challenged me to scrap from that. She also gave me strict instructions, like “use pretty things”. I am hoping I pass muster.

This week’s sketch includes one 4×6 portrait photo and a smaller square image, which I printed at 3 inches. I used vanilla cardstock, woodgrain paper from Hambly, Thickers letters by American Crafts and stickers and die-cuts from Colorbok, along with Jenni Bowlin paint and Glimmer Mist. But of course you can use any colours and supplies you fancy!

The Miss Erin in the picture is Erin Loechner, by the way. She blogs at Design for Mankind.

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.

All those many moons ago, the last sketch included three photos in a sort of grid. These are six of my favourite interpretations. Click the corresponding link to see each page in more detail and get to know the scrapper who created it.
Top row, L to R: one, two, three.
Bottom row, L to R: four, five and six.
Thank you to everyone who joined in!

Now… are you up for some sketchy scrapping this week? I hope you’ll give Relly’s sketch a try!

ETA: Relly has made a page from her own sketch too. Find it here.

Comment [16]

It’s Thursday today. Somehow Wednesday seemed to completely disappear from my life this week. I’m not sure how that happened, other than spending most of the hours driving to a school prom, photographing a school prom and driving home from said school prom. Except we don’t have a car anymore so part of that time was interesting process of walking to the next town to pick up a car I can drive. Because although I can steer an elephant, I cannot drive a manual transmission.

True story.
Apologies if you now think less of me as clearly everyone cool should know how to drive a stick-shift, but I have tried to learn three times and each time I have decided I would just be a terrible driver with all that extra stuff to remember. I figure there is enough unpredictable stuff out there on the road that I want as few unknown variables behind the wheel as possible. And while The Boy can drive a car that lives at the end of our road, I have to journey to the nearest available automatic. Not that you really need to know any of this. I just somehow got onto this topic and I’m a bit unsure how to get to scrapbooking now so I’m just going to put the next image here and we’ll all quietly act like that was a seamless textual transition, okay?

This week’s sketch features three photos on three boxes and that means it a bit of a variation of March’s 4×6 Photo Love, but this time the pictures are smaller and there’s nothing hidden on my layout. On my page, I tried moving things around a bit and making the design a bit less like a grid. Now I’m thinking I’d like to try a second version and keep it just like the sketch, so that may appear here soon.

The red and green colour scheme is a little unpredictable, but those photos are actually from Christmas day, so I wanted to do something a little holiday-ish without going over the top with Christmas embellishments. I tell you that because The Boy looked at this layout and immediately asked, ‘Why did you make it look all Christmas-coloured?’ and when I reminded him we spent Christmas with elephants, he hadn’t remembered that. Today’s validation for why I scrapbook.

So no matter what your theme, colours or preference for nicely lined-up grids or haphazard boxes, I’d love to see what you create from this sketch!

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 so we can see!

There were so many great pages submitted from the sketch last week. I loved them all! These are nine of my favourites, each with a little twist on how they adapted the sketch to work for their choice of pictures and and design. Click on the corresponding link to see each page in more detail and read about how these pages came to be.
Top row, L to R: one, two, three.
Middle row, L to R: four, five, six.
Bottom row, L to R: seven, eight and nine.
Thank you to everyone who joined in last week!

xlovesx

Comment [28]

Switching it up for this week’s sketch with a bit of an older layout and no video this week while I’m working on the road (not to worry – the video will be back next Wednesday) because this layout has a few things I’ve been wanting to discuss on a sketch day. Things like using four small images as a photo strip in place of larger images. Or opting for black and white photos but pairing them with plenty of colour. Or the differences from a sketch to a finished page.

When I look at this design in sketch form, it already feels quite busy to me, but if you compare it to the layout, I actually added way more stuff than what’s here on the sketch. Recently someone mentioned they felt my layouts were coming out more “dynamic and alive” from the sketches and goodness, that was just such a lovely thing to say! But it also made me want to identify what it is that created that feeling she wanted to recreate on her own and I think the extra stuff is part of that. When I scrap from a sketch, I start with those basic shapes, but then I put the sketch aside and start adding more bits and pieces with extra layers. A lot of it comes in paper strips – either just plain rectangles or scalloped pieces from die-cuts or border punches. Then I realised I needed more room to journal and added two journaling die-cuts. Then layered those circles to become embellishment rather than just a shape. And eventually decided some butterflies could tie all those different shapes together. (Also I am very excited to tell you this time butterflies are actually relevant, since these photos are from Laura’s wedding and there were butterflies in her wedding decorations!) Perhaps it also helps that when I add extra stuff, I try to add the same stuff in multiple places – so the butterflies repeat, the ribbon repeats, the dotty label stickers and so on. I don’t often scrap from just one collection of supplies, but I do repeat the same elements in multiple places on a page to make it obvious that they belong.

You may want to add more stuff or you may want to stay more in line with the sketch – and either is fine, of course! I love hearing about our process in creating your page, so if you have a real system for how you build or interpret a sketch, feel free to share in the comments!

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 so we can see your work.

Last week left a few regulars really stumped with the mix of square and standard sized prints on one page, but I loved the variation in the layouts from those who were up to the challenge. Here are four of my favourites this week, and I love how all of them are clearly from the sketch but they have each chosen something in particular to change and make the design their own. Click the corresponding links to see any of these pages in more detail:
Top left
Top right
Bottom left
Bottom right
Thank you to everyone who participated in last week’s sketch! I hope you’ll join us again!

xlovesx

Comment [17]

A little later than I had hoped, but please forgive me for getting a bit distracted by getting to see my family now that I’m in Kansas City for a little while – even my new nephew! Now I’m all hooked up with wifi and have lots to share! This week’s sketch has one 4×6 photo and two smaller square images. I printed mine at 2.5 inches, but you could change that to suit your pictures. This week’s page is pretty quick to come together and is great for using several patterns from one collection. Most of what I used here is from the Salt Air collection by Cosmo Cricket.

This week I actually made a big change to the sketch while making the page. In the video, you’ll see that it started ninety degrees different, but I decided everything was a bit too vertical and it worked better like this. If your photos suit vertical a bit better, try turning the sketch back to the other side.

The horizontal sketch also reminded me of an older layout with a similar design but lots more detail — this one might be more your style if you like more stuff on your pages! But sometimes simple is just right.

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 in the comments.

Last week there was lots of single-photo fun! Thank you to everyone who shared their work. Here are a dozen of my favourites, and I can’t help but think the love of kraft cardstock is something many of us share! Click the corresponding link below to see any of these pages in more detail and meet the scrappers who created them.
Top row, L to R: one, two, three, four.
Middle row, L to R: five, six, seven, eight.
Bottom row, L to R: nine, ten, eleven and twelve.

xlovesx

Comment [21]

Time zones are confusing me a little today – it’s Tuesday where I am but I’ve just been talking to friends in London who are already at work on Wednesday! Funny old world.

There is a sketch coming today but I need a little longer to upload the video as I can’t do that from here. So here’s a little preview of the layout! If you want to find three pictures – one 4×6 and two smaller squares – you can get those printed and be ready when the video is up later today!

See you soon!

xlovesx

Comment [11]

Late Thursday is the new Wednesday? Something like that. My apologies for the delay and I hope you’re still up for a sketch this week! It’s a page from almost nothing – a single photo (landscape 4×6), a few strips or scraps of patterned paper and a handful of mismatched die-cuts. Easy on the stash and pretty quick to put together too!

Here’s the sketch brought back to basics, and you can keep it simple with just a few circles or you can layer as many embellishments as you’d like in that same space. This week’s video is pretty quick (just under eight minutes) so you can see how I got from A to B.

By the way, those three mists that I used really quickly at the beginning of the video are Tattered Angels Glimmer Mist in sand, Tattered Angels Chalkboard Mist in chalk (slightly opaque white with shimmer) and Studio Calico Mister Huey in Calico White (opaque white with no shimmer). I don’t always use both whites together but wanted to show them both so you can see the difference in the opaque quality. I love both but they are definitely not the same – one soft and shimmery, the other bold and matte.

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 in the comments.

I am pretty much giddy about the response to the big photo sketch last week. I thought for sure that many of you would take a week off because the big photo would be a pain to print perhaps… and instead more of you joined in than ever, I think! See the links at the end of this post for three dozen pages to inspire you to scrap your giant-sized prints! Totally love it. So I picked just a small group of favourites because it was pretty much impossible and I wanted to include them all. Click the corresponding link to see the page in more detail and say hello to the scrapper behind the page.
Top row, L to R: one, two, three, four.
Bottom row, L to R: five, six, seven and eight.

xlovesx

Comment [24]

A few little things came to mind last week while I was sorting albums – thoughts about handwriting but also thoughts about the size of the photos I use. I adore my 4×6 photos and the majority of my pages include that size, but I love the variety that an oversized picture can bring to the story. Larger pictures are great for adding contrast to an album and the pages come together very quickly. I really like enlargements for pages that become the start of a section of an album, and the day we spent with about four hundred dolphins? I may have taken enough photos to make it become a definite section of the album! (For the adventure-curious, The Boy swam with them and I took pictures from the boat. Worked perfectly!)

This sketch looks very plain, but I wanted to include this version here as it’s what I started with to create my page. Once I had followed everything that is here, I decided I needed more and added a cluster of embellishment to the bottom left, a small stamped border and three circular embellishments on the line of squares. You can stick to the original sketch, follow my adaptations or add your own extras. Here’s a look at how I created this week’s page:

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 to share.

There were so many fab pages submitted last week – it was certainly the most difficult week yet to pick favourites! Here are fifteen standouts – click any of the links below to see the pages in more detail and meet the scrappers who created them. (And click back to last week’s sketch for even more pages!)
Top row, L to R: one, two, three, four, five.
Middle row, L to R: six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
Bottom row, L to R: eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen and fifteen.

xlovesx

Comment [28]