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

With a mix of sunshine and showers but warmer temperatures, it definitely feels like spring in my neighbourhood, and suddenly I’m in the mood to scrapbook with flowers and sunshines and… kites. I mean, I own a kite. It’s here somewhere. I can tell you it’s red even though I can’t tell you the last time I attempted to fly it or exactly where it’s stashed away. But I loved these kite stamps designed by Lindsay Letters for Studio Calico, so I needed to figure out how to put them to use on something quicker than I could locate a kite in the cupboard!

For the kites at the top of this page, I wanted to try using one colour of ink but in two shades, so the text and the outline are stamped with a freshly inked stamp, but the solid block of colour is first stamped on scrap paper so a second stamping gives the paler colour. I love this with stamp sets that have the separate pieces for the outline and the block!

Other supplies for this layout include an older sheet of Cosmo Cricket paper for the background and a mix of Crate Paper designs for the other paper elements. The gold chipboard hearts were in the Studio Calico Essentials line and the enamel dots were from a Prima collection many moons ago.

The ‘Be Brave’ sentiment stamp in this set encouraged me to transfer a journal entry to a few 4×6 cards in Wonder Boy’s baby book. Forgive the sappy writing, but basically I wanted to share a very specific memory I have of when I remember that I needed to stop being scared of everything in the world, and how it made a big difference to my life. (Don’t get me wrong: I am still scared of a great many things, but I just remember a very philosophical moment when I was twelve when I let some of the sillier fears go!) Anyway, the stamping: If I use water and Distress Inks for a painted effect, I usually do all the black stamping first then fill in with the colour. I wondered if changing the order would make any difference to the look, and it does. I stamped the solid shape in Cracked Pistachio Distress Ink and then softened it with a paintbrush and plain water. Once that was dry, I stamped the outline and sentiment in black dye ink over the top. It’s a softer look where the watercolour paper had already soaked up all the colour. Not a huge difference, but sometimes little differences are lovely.

This stamp set also has a lovely ‘string’ for the kites that can be used on its own. It’s a good size for a 4×6 card and adds a nice little flourish to the divide between journaling and pattern on a card for a Project Life album. There are cute words too! (The flair badge is from Hey Little Magpie, the washi tape is from a Studio Calico kit.)

I recently added a few grey Copic markers to my collection, mostly purchased for shading and adding shadows, but I wondered how they would look on their own for something very simple. A quick bookmark with the kite coloured in with those pens plus a generous spray of shimmer let me see how they were blending, but I guess I really shouldn’t use a shimmer-topped bookmark in a library book, now that I think about it.

Another scrapbook page! I’m working on a series of pages like this with Wonder Boy’s monthly portraits printed at 8×12, with a description of him at that particular age. I love how the string from the kite and the sentiments worked on a layout like this, where it feels like the areas of embellishment deserve to be extra dressy since the photo takes up the majority of the page. In that detail shot, you can see how my scrapping process makes this a little imperfect, where there is that gap in the stamped image because I’m stamping over the various layers. If this sort of thing really bothers you, just stamp twice – once on the flattest layer (so the photo in this case) and once on your layered embellishment, not yet attached to the photo. Then put the two together so they fit and the image will be seamless. One day I will learn to think ahead rather than just adding things as I go, but that day was not this day and those layers were already stuck in place. Also handy to know: if you’re using a photographic print and stamping with staz-on ink, you can use the staz-on cleaner to remove just the ink from your photo and stamp again. Obviously that will not work with paper, and will not necessarily work with images printed rather than being exposed on photo paper, but you could always test on off-cut or under a layer if you’re not sure. (The difference in those printing methods is something we talked about on the Story-Centered Albums course and I found myself stuck for the names of the different processes. Turns out there is a decent explanation of the two ways to print photos on Wikipedia. I prefer the second option, though I do print some photos at home as well.)

The large stamp set I used here is the alphabet that comes with the Make it Big online class Paige Evans is teaching at Studio Calico. I contributed another page in this series of big photo pages to her class.

And two quick cards to finish, using Distress Inks as watercolours. Taking some of the other elements away, these stamps take on a bit of an argyle feel that made me want to use just a few diamonds together for simple designs. For the blue card, I stamped the black kite outline on watercolour paper, filled in the shape with water, then added colour from the Mermaid Lagoon Distress ink pad by stamping the ink onto my acrylic block and applying it with a paint brush. Very simple! For the second card, I put the colour in the background by again stamping the ink right onto my acrylic block, but then applying that to wet watercolour paper and just continuing to add ink and water until the three shades blended together. (I used Mermaid Lagoon, Abandoned Coral, and Cracked Pistachio.) Once it was definitely completely dry, I stamped the kites and sentiments on top in black ink. The middle kite with the text in negative needed some cleaning up with a pen because the watercolour paper is quite textured, but it didn’t take much to clean up those lines in the centre. The enamel hearts are from this True Stories pack.

Phew. In the time it took to read all that, I could probably find the kite in the cupboard. Hope you have a high-flying weekend!

Comment [13]

I find it physically impossible to leave a shop filled with cute Japanese stationery without buying at least a tiny notepad or sheet of stickers, so I’m a little confused with myself when it comes to my scrapbooking style and embracing supplies on the saccharin end of the cuteness spectrum. Even with baby pages I’m not finding myself gravitating toward all things smiley face and kawaii. The more I looked at what I had left from that combination of the Walden and Underground kits I’ve been working through, the more I realised how I kept pushing the cutesy stuff aside until my desk was basically left with just that. Time to take all the cute-yet-random and try to put it together for another page.

I’m sharing these a teensy bit out of order so this was the fourth layout I made with this combination of kits and the page I shared yesterday was actually the fifth. I find this background paper an interesting conundrum: do you feel sky papers should be… sky coloured? I love working with blue sky prints and it took me a little while to come round to the idea of the orange paper with its happy little clouds, but once I embraced the idea of all the cute, then I somehow found it a bit easier to just detach from reality and accept all the colours, patterns, and motifs together on one 12×12 canvas. I will say it’s a little different from the vast majority of my pages, but I hope it is just enough in line with my style that it will work as I turn the pages of the album.

I ended up with a grammar issue again. And had a moment about the definition of cider in two different countries. Those two things combined with the cutesy angle somehow make me feel like this is some sort of time warp and I’ve narrated this video at age twenty, completely in awe of the entirety of the world. Sigh. This ‘as it happens’ concept may be the end of my illusion that I do not obsess about small things with no big purpose in the world, one scrapbook page at a time.

Definitely feeling ready to move on to new supplies for new pages and videos now. What to pick, what to pick!

Comment [13]

I’ve been working my way through those two Studio Calico kits and inevitably I got to a point where I just have less stuff left on my desk than what I would normally pile onto a layout. I’m not the heaviest embellisher in the entire world, but I like my pages with ‘stuff’ and I always get to the same decision point: do I continue to use just the kit and end up with a page that is significantly different in style, or do I supplement the kit with supplies from my own stash to create a page more in line with everything else I’ve been making. Surely this is a pretty common conundrum if you’re using most of your kit supplies, so I posted an ‘in progress’ shot of this layout on Instagram and asked which option you might tend to take. The vast majority said they would add in more stash.

And that makes sense, and was definitely where I was headed because the more I looked at the sparse version of the layout, the more it felt unfinished to me. And it makes more sense when I step back and look at how many supplies I have waiting to go onto pages… there is no need to keep things sparse unless that is a design decision! It seems a little overwhelming now to know that there were so many years when I was scrapbooking with so very few supplies because they were hard to source and my budget was almost nothing, and then I went and did that thing I always said not to do about shopping when I wasn’t scrapping and I’m surrounded by supplies. Like to the level that I pretty much wish I could host a crop at my house and tell people just to bring their photos, scissors, and adhesive and I will provide the rest because we need to work our way through this stuff. I don’t do well with an overwhelm of supplies and would prefer to get pretty things on pages in albums and scale back on the rest of what is waiting! …that was a really long-winded way to say it was really obvious at that point that I should go with the ‘add more stash’ option.

I knew I wanted a grey and pink colour scheme for this page, inspired by raspberries and grey sweatshirts. This was the first time I had actually cooked something for Wonder Boy, rather than steaming some carrots and broccoli, so it was a monumental occasion in my mind, but also a very messy one and I knew we would both be covered in raspberry pink by the end, so this old grey sweatshirt became my uniform for those first few weeks of messy meals and he had a few plain vests with raspberry evidence on the ends of the sleeves, no matter how many times they were washed. This time of year was quite bleary and grey as well so all those shades of grey and the one colourful punch of magenta really stuck in my mind, so I knew from the beginning that’s where I would take this page in terms of colour. I started with those pink cards from the Project Life kit, plus the card that would work well for journaling a list of first favourite foods, and the food-themed sentiments from that tear-apart sheet, all on grey cardstock. The letter stickers and wooden arrow were from the kit too, but then I added the floral tags, some black rub-ons, silver gems, washi tape, and a chipboard border. That seemed to bring things more in line with my style but it all still seemed a bit sparse and I’m sure that’s because it’s on solid cardstock rather than patterned paper, so I cut the background down and added the whole thing to an older sheet of Dear Lizzy paper for just a bit more happy colour. The ‘Ate This’ stamp is from an older Studio Calico kit, I believe, and I have a similar one in a Kelly Purkey set too.

I realise ‘this is my jam’ isn’t really a food-related sentiment. Except when the This is My Jam website was starting up, someone sent me an invite when it was in beta and there wasn’t a lot of information in the email invitation. I hadn’t made the leap that it was about music at all, and thought it was going to be a website where people shared pictures of what they were making, like crafts and jam. As in jam in a jar to eat with tea and toast. It turns out I was really wrong about the website, but it has made me forever associate that phrase with food. I’d still join a website with pictures of jam, to be fair.

And there are one million websites to read about parenting decisions so I don’t have any plans to talk about it here, other than to say ‘BLW’ is short for Baby-Led Weaning, which is what worked really well for us with Wonder Boy so far. He loves food and it has been a huge joy! But I don’t want to say anything further really, for fear I jinx myself and end up with a picky toddler who gives me sleepless nights for wanting to only eat choc ice and chips. Since these photos, he has found a few more complex favourite foods, but he is still a big fan of pancakes and asparagus. Not together, necessarily, but I can’t think that I’ve ever tried.

Comment [12]

It is suddenly and beautifully spring here, complete with days where one can go outside for an extended amount of time without an actual coat! Take that, Winter! There are pink trees and baby ducks and ample opportunities for vitamin D. It’s exciting stuff. So I’m scrapbooking autumn pictures of people bundled in coats and hats and blankets. Of course.

Maybe all this spring outside my window is what made the green leaves feel completely appropriate with the autumnal theme. I can even make a leap to think I might have been inspired to use the black and white background paper with the brightly coloured photos and embellishments by the leap from the grey of winter to the colours of spring. Possibly. I’m not sure at what level of my consciousness that thought was present while making this page, but it seems completely plausible. And you can hear whatever else stumbled across my consciousness as I made this layout in the latest As It Happens video – it’s about sixteen minutes this time.

This page is the third I’ve made from the combination of the Walden scrapbook kit and the Underground Project Life kit, both from Studio Calico. I don’t have a monthly kit subscription as I like a bit more freedom in my supplies (and I enjoy shopping piece by piece when I can!) but I also like to change things up and work within the confines of a kit now and then. I tend to be most inspired to work with kits when there is a sale or a special offer. Funny how that works!

I could try to impress you by pointing out that I have technically scrapbooked a non-baby photograph here! Look! That photo on the right is just trees! But apparently it doesn’t count when I stick the tree photo next to a baby photo. Well, I’m calling the tree progress. Just the right amount of progress. I think I’ll scrap a non-baby layout soon, but probably not the next page. Or the one after that. But soon.

Have a happy weekend filled with crafting or baby ducks or something just as exciting.

Comment [13]

If it’s working, carry on with it, right? And so goes the idea of just turning on the camera to capture a scrapbook page as it happens, the supply set of Studio Calico’s Walden scrapbooking kit and Underground Project Life kit, and the idea of scrapping Disney in colours other than red, yellow, black, and white.

I said last time that I made one terrible error in taking Wonder Boy to Disneyland. It was not remembering that the Peter Pan ride is entirely in the dark. It was the first thing we took him on and it scared him to bits. Apologies to the lovely, well behaved young ladies in the next ship who wondered why someone was screaming as if it were a death-defying roller coaster! But he soon recovered in the sunshine and that was really our only meltdown of the day. (Truth be told he wasn’t hugely keen on Dumbo. But he loved-loved-loved the Toy Story laser tag thing. A story for another page.)

Thankfully the queues weren’t all that bad since January is the off-season, but in truth, the queue was pretty fun with the combination of baby and friends! Plenty of conversation and plenty of giggles, and of course plenty of him flirting with strangers. We took quite a few of our photos while we were waiting for rides, and that difference of what sometimes seems like drudgery was something I really wanted to record somewhere in these pages. This seemed as fine a time as any!

So many thanks for the amazing response to Monday’s flash sale on classes. All registrations have been processed now, so you should have a welcome email and the ability to see your classes at our forum. There are a few orders here and there that didn’t specify a class or the email came up as invalid and I’m trying to track all of those down. If that’s you or you don’t think you’ve received what you should have, please don’t hesitate to get in touch. If you missed the sale, I’m sorry to hear that, but I hope you’re happy to hear there are new classes on the horizon. All existing classes are always open for registration, always include permanent access, and I always endeavour to make sure you’re getting good value for the purchase price, not just on sale days. Thanks again for your support!

Comment [11]

I know it’s early days, but so far I’m making good on my quest to get using those supplies I ordered when I wasn’t really stepping anywhere near my scissors and glue. It means I have a page that is out of season for this hemisphere, but I’ve never really been one for having to scrap in line with the calendar anyway, so why not a bit of crunchy leaves and knitted hoodies?

In pretty much every video I’ve ever shared, I’ve had a specific goal from the beginning, like a technique, design concept, or some sort of problem and solution that guided the process. I decided to throw all that out the window and see what would happen if I just made the page and narrated it as I went, and kept the editing pretty minimal. The answer is about thirty-two minutes long. Sigh. That will not be everyone’s cup of tea. I’m warning you now, so if half hour videos of a single scrapbook page are just not your style, please don’t watch and then invoice me for those thirty-two minutes of your life. I can’t give them back, I can only warn you in advance.

On the other hand, if you want to see what random thoughts come to mind as I scrapbook in pretty much real time, then the ‘As it Happens’ concept is for you. You just may want several cups of tea ready to go before you press play.

The supplies for this page came from two Studio Calico kits I purchased a few months back: the Walden scrapbook kit and the Underground Project Life kit.

May your autumn bring you plenty of pretty, crunchy leaves… whether that is now or in six months!

Comment [39]

For the second video in the series with Studio Calico’s November kits, I opened the first add-on kit, Bobby Socks, and combined that with the main kit. Bobby Socks is quite a neutral kit – lots of grey, white and cream – with a shot of turquoise and red. All the grey drew me to a black and white photo I’ve been meaning to scrapbook, and the stamp set was a good theme match for the story, so that seemed to set the wheels in motion. It’s quite a simple page really, but with the writing on the tiny lines I don’t think I would want to cram too much more onto the 12×12 space.

But enough chit-chat: the video will cover all those details!

The Bobby Socks add-on kit is already sold out, but you can find many of the items available individually here, including several items discounted until Friday in the hot products sale.

If you’re liking the idea of Sock Hop, you can start a subscription with the main kit at 40% off with code Shimelle40 for a limited time. See this post for further details.

That was just the first add-on, so there are plenty more pages (and videos!) to come from the November kits. I hope you’ll stop by tomorrow for the next project!

xlovesx

Comment [10]

I should probably like… post something. On my blog. Or something. Right? I think I can manage that. This week, I have a series of new videos for you, featuring the November kits from Studio Calico. You can use them as inspiration if you get the kits themselves or you can try the same designs and ideas with your own stash if you’re not a subscriber. Either works!

All the supplies for this project came from the Sock Hop kit, courtesy of Studio Calico. I usually put together a separate shopping list for cases like this in case you’re finding this post after the kit has sold out or you’re not able to purchase a full kit, and I have done that here but because the Sock Hop kit includes many exclusives plus it features some papers that have not yet arrived in most stores, it’s not possible to make as close a list as usual. But I have compiled a list here to act as a bit of a help. In includes some options, like the green arrow washi tape isn’t available but there is green tape and there is arrow tape, should either sway you! But right now the Sock Hop kit is available, so that would be your best bet if you wanted the exact supplies used.

…Now, if you wanted to subscribe would a special offer help? For just a few days, you can take 40% off the first month of a new subscription with code Shimelle40, which expires at midnight EST on the ninth of November. You can find that here and click the option to subscribe rather than buy the single kit. Enter the code when you check out to get your 40% discount.

In the time since I’ve last seen you here, I’ve been spending lots of time mixing patterned papers and scrapping with the Scrapbook Remix crowd (you can still join in, if you fancy!), packing approximately one point six zillion Christmas in a Box kits and anxiously awaiting the last item to arrive at Two Peas to link you up to the worldwide edition of that same kit, proving to powers that be that I am a real website and not a spamhead who deserves her entire site to be scraped off the face of the internet, having the time of my life with a kidney stone, complaining about the cold weather, deciding we really need a holiday, and… getting ready for JOURNAL YOUR CHRISTMAS. Oh huzzah. There will be new details about that posted here this week but you are welcome to sign up with the 2011 details at any time as once you sign up, you have access to material from all years.

But yes, consider me back to work here and I hope you’ll stop by for plenty of video fun this week!

xlovesx

Comment [33]