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

I found this page a few weeks ago, in pieces, sitting in a tray I had moved from my desk to a shelf to a drawer to a cupboard, pushing it further and further from my sight in hopes it would also be out of mind, I suppose. This is the layout I was working on when I received the email that Two Peas was closing. That was a year ago today.

Don’t worry, the date isn’t marked in my mind that dramatically. Timehop reminded me, of course.

That day wasn’t particularly nice and the days that followed had a fair amount of confusion. What is it that the kids say today? ‘All the feels?’ Yes. That’s what I had. It was a store and a job and yet I went through that whole disbelief, denial, bargaining, guilt, anger, depression stages of grief process, which from a distance is a little ridiculous. But I wasn’t from a distance. I was up close. Like finishing a Glitter Girl video close.

This time, when I came upon that nearly-finished layout on that tray, I didn’t push it further away and decided to complete it and get it into the album, so I guess that means I have reached the acceptance stage now. I still miss it. I miss the energy of the community and how I could pretty much always find something that appealed to the problem-solving side of my mind on the forums (hence the original format of the Glitter Girl episodes!) and I miss the inspiration of working with the team. Talented women in so many ways, from their beautiful pages to their unique perspectives on life and a great mix of humour and knowledge and just… that good stuff is what I choose to remember.

Outside of the Two Peas experience, this page made me laugh because the journaling was already in place. We took the cable car to attend the London Baby Show, my friend Laura with her baby and me with a giant bump, and I had done a lot of research about detergents that day. Random, I know, but I have heaps of trouble with reacting to detergents and it took me years to find a good system and I wanted to be as prepared as possible in case his skin was as sensitive as mine, but I kept hoping, quite vocally, that he would not inherit this trait and would laugh at my cupboard of carefully chosen soaps and shampoos.

Of course he inherited that. Of course he did. His skin is so sensitive, I have thermometers in every room because his skin gets upset if the temperature changes. I’m pretty sure he could break out over the wrong nursery rhyme. But hey, I can give you a mean monologue on surfactants should you ever need to know, and one day I’ll have to explain to him that he really isn’t the only child in the world who was allergic to bubble baths. I should probably get scripting that particular speech soon really. Maybe one day he’ll go through his own stages of grief at inheriting the worst of my genes, and I’ll cross my fingers that it ends in acceptance some time.

And yes, those are the two random thoughts in my mind that collided with this page that took me a year to finish, but hurrah: it is in my album now. Finally. Onward and upward we go.

Comment [20]

Yesterday scrapbooking lost something very special: Two Peas in a Bucket announced they are closing their doors. It saddens me as their shop and community have been part of my life for fifteen years. First as a customer, shopping for the latest supplies and waiting for the clock to tick over to the first of the month when their design team projects were posted, and then eventually I joined that very team. For nearly six years, I’ve worked on something for Two Peas every week of the year, eventually letting my sparkly friend take up her weekly video series and retiring from the individual layout assignments. For me, Two Peas has been a great place to work. I’ve worked with people who made me better. I am very sad to lose this avenue of working with the team and the community from Two Peas.

Since the announcement, I’ve had many questions about my paid workshops and the Glitter Girl video series. At this point, I don’t have answers you will love. All the work I’ve done for Two Peas belongs to them – I don’t currently have the rights to those workshops or videos. The FAQ on their site says workshops will not be accessible once they close the store in mid-July. So that is the short answer. I would love to find a better answer and I will keep you informed of any changes. I really can’t say more than that right now because I just don’t know what is possible. But I am aware of your concerns and am doing whatever I can.

The other question I’ve been asked is will I go somewhere else to teach and make videos. If you’re reading this, you’re at that somewhere. Shimelle.com existed before I became a Garden Girl, before I permanently lodged a tripod and camera over my workspace. I blogged here and taught workshops here and I will continue to do so. You can subscribe to the blog via a reader like Bloglovin if you like or scroll down the page here to request posts go direct to your inbox. If you love video, consider subscribing to my YouTube channel. If you want to take a workshop, find your options here. If you want to encourage a crafty friend to watch or read, please share a link now and then. I thank you for your continued support in any way.

I thank the Garden Girls I’ve worked with over the years, and the fearless leaders who have managed the team. They have inspired me at so many levels and I’m honoured to have worked with these women. If you would like to bookmark the current team, you can find them on the following blogs:
Céline Navarro
Jen Gallacher
Jen Kinkade
Jill Sprott
Laura Craigie
Lisa Dickinson
Marcy Penner
Mel Blackburn
Nancy Damiano
Paige Evans
Stephanie Bryan
Wilna Furstenberg
Many have YouTube channels you can find through their blogs.

And I thank Kristina and Jeffrey for building something full of inspiration and community as well as the best pick of craft products fifteen years ago. It was such an innovation to our industry and so much good came of it. I am so very sorry to see it go.

Details of the closing can be found here. Thank you for keeping things positive as I work to find any solutions for those invested in my workshops. It will take time, I’m sure, but I’m hoping for the best.

Comment [60]

Though I’m sure New Year was only three days ago, it appears to be February, and that means we’ve just finished our first full month of the 2014 inspiration and education programme at Two Peas. I love working with the Garden Girl team and this year’s programme has been so inspiring for me to create new content. But it is different to what we were doing in 2013, and we know change is difficult, even with the random little things in life, so I wanted to bring everything the team has done this month together in one review post. Fair warning: it turns out that a full month of content makes for one epically long post. But this includes all of Glitter Girl’s videos and layouts this month, plus a look at all the team projects and links to each of those to see more. I hope you find it useful!

_{Image sources, clockwise from top left: 101 woonideen, Studio 404 (includes links to different lettering artists), Melanie DeFazio, House and Hold, Avotakka, Sparrow & Co via DesignSponge, Rosellen Ralmond, GaliaAlena.}

One new thing for the team this year is a monthly mood board chosen by our fearless leader, Kristina. The January mood board was certainly wintry, and that might have something to do with the exceptionally snowy winter hitting Two Peas HQ while there has been just gallons of rain here in London. (To be fair, London can’t cope with a couple inches of snow once a year, so who knows what would happen in a true snowmageddon reality. The capital might just crumble while Scotland laughs at our southern failings.)

_{Image sources, clockwise from top left: Sandra Kleist, Michael Alberstat for House and Home, Antique and Vintage Woods, Oksana Nazarchuk, Noel Shiveley, Saartje Knits, Sasha Hollaway.}

We’ve had monthly topics to guide our page topics for the five or so years I’ve been a Garden Girl (this month’s theme was family) but the mood board is a new concept for the full team. Last year, four Garden Girls worked with a mood board they created each week for the In the Mood to Scrap video series, but this time there is one board for all of us to work with for the full month. I looked at the mood board in two parts: first gathering textures from the photos, like natural woodgrains and knitted patterns.

The second part was the colour scheme. For most of my pages this month, I worked with aqua and brown, accenting with other colours from the board, but once I even switched it up for aqua and pink. I’m pretty sure it’s not really possible for me to make it through an entire month without some aqua and pink together!

With this mood board in mind, we then have four weekly themes that structure the month, with videos every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Glitter Girl is still on Wednesdays and there’s a new series from Jen Gallacher on Fridays called Make it Meaningful. Glitter Girl’s format has changed just a little this year: after two full years of taking her weekly topics from the message boards, the topics were getting a bit thin on the ground and there were some more detailed scrapbooking dilemmas she felt the need to solve. But not to panic: the overall premise of saving the world one crafty dilemma at a time still stands, and she still has the Adhesive Avenger on hand to help too. He’s useful like that. Glitter Girl still reads the message boards and the comments in the gallery and on YouTube, and she still keeps an eye on the problems posted, but the new format is just enough of a change to keep things exciting behind the camera, and I hope you enjoy her adventures throughout 2014.

How do these four weekly themes work then?

Throughout the first theme of the month, we embraced the ‘inspired’ concept: telling our stories through art and design. This is the week that saw the most literal translations from the mood board, although we took inspiration from that throughout the whole month. Each of us working on a project for this first week picked up on a different artistic element we could share, so Inspired week is great for giving yourself a creative kick, and might be your favourite week on the schedule if you prefer the artsier side to scrapbooking.

Wilna Furstenberg kicked off our programme for the year with two videos: one on how to make the cover for this beautiful minibook in textured winter whites, and one for the interior pages with large black and white photos and beautifully layered embellishments. (Find both videos by scrolling down the page here.) Celine Navarro selected woodgrains and navy blues for this page on her love of winter days. Jen Kinkade dressed up basic tags with watercolours and turned her hand to script writing with this project. Paige Evans took inspiration from homespun quilts and shared her paper quilting techniques with a tutorial video. And Jen Gallacher started her brand new weekly video series, Make it Meaningful, with the challenge to create your own family crest to display on a scrapbook page or frame in your home.

Glitter Girl’s contribution to this Inspired week came in two parts: first, a look at how I translate a digital mood board to a selection of physical scrapbook supplies I can put to use on several pages. The supplies you see selected at the beginning of this video appear throughout my projects in January, and now I just have a few items left on my tray, so it was a pretty good approximation of what I would need for a month of Glitter Girl projects. The camera angle is different for this part of the video because I really wanted to show you this process in as close to my own viewpoint as possible. I don’t look at all my supplies from overhead all the time. When I’m pulling together inspiration, I constantly walk around my desk and look at things from a literal different angle to see what catches my eye. It’s one of the most invigorating parts of the creative process for me, and I hope sharing that look at how it works for me might be helpful. (I say ‘invigorating’ and yet the narration really emphasises out easily I get out of breath right now. Please forgive me – I’m having a terrible time taking care of my voice this winter, so all of my January videos seem to bounce between being out of breath and being completely hoarse. Thank goodness I don’t make a living as an opera singer!) My biggest inspiration when putting together this physical mood board was to mix two colour families: the warm, dark neutrals of the woodgrains and the icy, cool tones of the aqua shades.

I think in future months I might film this same process and just share it here on the blog and my own YouTube channel, as it wouldn’t necessarily add value to Glitter Girl’s lessons to repeat the same process every month, but some of you might be interested in seeing how each month’s mood board works for me. Thoughts? Let me know if that is something you would care to see on screen each month or if once was enough for it to all make sense.

The second part of the video is the creation of this Christmassy scrapbook page from start to finish. Interestingly, Celine and I chose a few things in common – even the picture of putting our feet up on a cold day! And yet there is quite a bit of difference between the two layouts. I find that sort of thing really interesting – what happens when multiple people start from the same inspiration piece. That big bokeh photo of the Christmas tree really makes me happy when I see this page. I need to remember to do that more often!

So all of that made up Glitter Girl Adventure 102: Inspired Colour Curation.

During the second week of the month, we take on the Storytellers challenge: using tools to tell our story. That doesn’t necessarily mean tools like punches and die-cutters. It refers to anything that is a building block as we make our pages. That makes a little more sense with a week of examples.

Lisa Dickinson started the week with a video on mixing words and graphics to create an ‘In Review’ page to tell the story of the year just finished. Nancy Damiano and Stephanie Bryan both created layouts in their own style inspired by the look of infographics: Nancy mixing journaling cards and textures and Stephanie working in layers of hexagons. Jill Sprott shared a video on using timelines for your journaling, and Jen’s next episode of Make it Meaningful focused on page ideas for offering advice to a loved one. Lots of tools and not one of them a punch of a die-cutter! Although those kind of tools make come up from time to time as well, what we really aim for with Storytellers week is a way to help you realise all the tricks in your arsenal, so you can continue to be creative with the way you tell your stories on paper, be it through the design, the journaling, or the photography.

Glitter Girl focused on group photos this week, like that annual challenge of getting a picture of the entire extended family in front of the Christmas tree using the self-timer. It always includes plenty of outtakes in my world, and sometimes those outtakes have some of my favourite moments and the truest facial expressions, so they can be just as scrapworthy as the final winning shot. The first part of this episode shares a few pages that feature self-timer photos over the years and some thoughts on this subject.

The second part of this episode shares this page from start to finish, putting some definite reality into my Christmas pages to tell the whole story for years to come. (Place your bets now on how many years until my nephew gets really cross with me for keeping that top photo. But I think he’s adorable there, of course!)

That Storytellers focus makes up Glitter Girl Adventure 103: Family Photo Faux Pas.

Our third week is dedicated to Moments: the stories we just have to scrapbook. I love this sort of topic – those times when you are thinking through the journaling or the page design as soon as you take the photo because the moment is so fabulous, you never want to forget a single detail. This is the electricity of scrapbooking to me. It literally makes the muscles in my upper arms tense up and my hands go into some sort of post-cheerleader spirit fingers mode, just itching to print that picture and get cutting, pasting, and writing.

We started the week with a video from Nancy Damiano, which at first glance is about a trip to a tree farm, but when reading Nancy’s words on the page, it is very much more. Beautiful pages from Lisa Dickinson and Jen Kinkade showcase two very different styles of capturing winter moments on a scrapbook page. Laura Craigie contributed the next video, with ideas for turning a standard school portrait into a real time capsule of a child. Jen’s Make it Meaningful episode took its inspiration from the moments you capture relationships on camera. Celine Navarro rolled the clock back with an older moment, scrapbooking a childhood memory.

Paige Evans shared how she balances the typical moments in her family adventures with her detailed scrapbooking style, and Stephanie Bryan shared our first Project Life spread of the year, capturing a few weeks of moments in her life.

Glitter Girl took on a pretty big moment for this week’s layout. I braved scrapbooking the day I found out I was pregnant. I have to say this was one of the more intimidating episodes to upload! But it one of the most gratifying pages I’ve ever made, and I’m really happy I took the time to tell this story of a day turned from so very bad to so very good. If this episode helps even just one person out there feel a little like that, then it’s worth the trepidation of sharing quite so much!

This layout tells the story of one day across two pages, with one full 12×12 page and one pocket page. The pocket page conceals even more journaling, with one part of the story I didn’t want to be obvious to everyone who looks at the page. It’s hidden simply with two journaling cards and bit of hidden washi tape. The use of several journaling cards really helped me tell this story, because I would naturally feel compelled to change the topic when moving to the new card, rather than going on a bit too long on the negatives before I turned a corner to get to the happier part of the day.

All that makes up Glitter Girl Adventure 104: Tear-Free Tell All.

Our fourth week of the month is called Capture. In this week, we focus on everyday stories, like scrapbooking chronologically and approaches like Project Life. If you’re doing an everyday documentation project like Project Life or something similar in 2014, this last week of the month is there to boost your productivity and help you end the month with at least some of your stories in the album!

Celine started the week with a fab video sharing how she catches up on a week of Project Life in under thirty minutes. Mel Blackburn and Laura Craigie both shared traditional pages capturing everyday moments with their family. Stephanie Bryan’s first Garden Girl video shows how she creates interactive scrapbook pages. Jen’s Make it Meaningful episode shares a minibook to make for a loved one. Laura also shared a second page documenting some more serious thoughts as she aims to catch the smallest details of her son’s first year.

Two more Project Life pages round off the Capture week: Stephanie shares how she works with a page and a half when that’s the best match for her photos, and Mel Blackburn shares a double page from a week of travel without relying on travel-themed products to complete the look, opting to get more from her favourite supplies.

Glitter Girl’s latest adventure is another with one standard 12×12 and one pocketed page, this time with 3×3 square pockets. This whole idea of being ‘caught up’ isn’t really something that has kicked in for me in the years I’ve been scrapping. Sometimes I want to scrapbook something straight away, and other times I like to go back and tell a story from the past with some distance, which I find adds to how I tell the story. I’m glad there are no scrapbook police to show up on my doorstep and arrest me for not worrying about or ever wanting to be caught up with my scrapping. Nothing would frighten me more than being out of stories to tell!

While many scrappers use divided page protectors to scrapbook by the week or month, there is certainly no reason to be limited to that. In this case, the pockets showcase a full year of memories, divided so each row is one season. These are all photos that I wanted to include in my album for 2013, but were really quite minor and didn’t warrant a full page on their own. But together, they tell the story of all those simple things I am happy to have back in our little world since we moved back to the place that feels like home.

That’s Glitter Girl Adventure 105: Seasons and Schedules.

That brought our January to a close and we’ll start with a new mood board for February tomorrow, heading back to that inspired topic for the first week and so on. January included seventeen videos and a total of thirty projects, so that might explain why it took a bit longer than the average blog post to wrap it all up here. I hope something here catches your eye and wish you a very creative February!

---

_{The Garden Girls are the design team at Two Peas in a Bucket. You can always find our latest projects in the designer garden, including both layouts and videos. Any time you purchase a product by adding it to your bucket directly from the shopping list below a project, you support that designer’s work, and we thank you for that! We know that it’s not always possible to support your favourite designers with purchases, and we also appreciate when you take the time to leave a comment, like, or thumbs up a project or video. The 2014 Garden Girls are Amy Tan, Celine Navarro, Jennifer Gallacher, Jennifer Kinkade, Jill Sprott, Kristina Nicolai-White, Laura Craigie, Lisa Dickinson, Melanie Blackburn, Nancy Damiano, Paige Evans, Shimelle Laine, Stephanie Bryan, and Wilna Furstenberg. Two Peas also has its own blog and YouTube channel where you can subscribe for regular updates in this year’s inspiration and education programme.}

Comment [40]

On the 22nd of every month, the Garden Girl design team from Two Peas in a Bucket does a quick blog hop to showcase what we’ve been making, what products we’re loving, and what ideas have been inspiring us in the Two Peas community. This month, we’re changing it up, and we’re answering 5 questions in 4 minutes. This is my stop in that little adventure!

You can also find the most recent Glitter Girl Adventure here. It’s number ninety-seven!!

I’m the last stop on this month’s Gardeners’ Digest Blog Hop, so you can go back to the beginning with Paige or stop by the Two Peas blog.

But before you do… I have one class pass for Wilna’s amazing new workshop, Art Class 2, to give away today! So leave a comment (with a valid email address) on this post to enter. Entries close on the last day of the month, and the winner will be contacted by email at the beginning of December! Good luck!

Comment [111]

On the twenty-second of every month, the Garden Girls from Two Peas in a Bucket check in with a blog hop showcasing our projects, what’s inspiring us, and our favourite products of the month. Welcome to the October edition of Gardeners’ Digest!

Since we last caught up, Glitter Girl has been on four new adventures, covering ‘Right Now’ pages for scrapping yourself, childhood pages for photos that don’t necessarily have direct memories that come to mind, a return to creating clustered embellishments, and some ideas for black and white photos. You can watch those four adventures (and more) through the playlist above, and find all her adventures here at Two Peas in a Bucket.

This project from Corrie Jones is one of my favourites in recent weeks. So pretty – and I’ve definitely inspired to try more with frames, especially with lighter colours, and maybe with a black and white photo too. Corrie’s work is always such a beautiful mix of creative freedom and great design.

In terms of products, I’d be silly to not say my own is one of my picks this month, right? If you haven’t signed up already, Glitter Girl’s Scrapbooking Survival Guide is ready for you to join in any time you want. It’s a new self-paced workshop with ten videos and five PDF chapters. There’s also a slightly different product in the shop from Glitter Girl: her guide to Stretching your Stash. This was offered as a bonus for earlybirds who signed up for the Survival Guide by the 2nd of October (if that’s you, you can access it under the workshops tab any time!) but it’s also available as a separate purchase any time for $10. Glitter Girl’s Guide to Stretching your Stash is all video – it’s over ninety minutes of video, in fact!

And for paper products, my desk has been covered in the latest Amy Tangerine collection for at least the last ten days. It’s lovely – I always love Amy’s autumn colour schemes the best, and I love it on its own or mixed with the older collections. You can find that here.

So… it would be lovely to hear from YOU! Who or what in this wide world is inspiring your creativity right now? Share with us in the comments, then your next stop on the hop is Michelle DeLeon, with beautiful paper goodness to share with you! Have a lovely day, wherever you may be.

Gardeners’ Digest is a monthly update from the Garden Girls, the design team at Two Peas in a Bucket. To keep up with the Garden Girls throughout the month, check out the garden gallery any time!

Comment [14]

I promised to come back with more details about my new workshop after this quick post, and it’s about time! My sparkly friend Glitter Girl, scrapbooking superhero, has a brand new self-paced workshop at Two Peas in a Bucket, Glitter Girl’s Scrapbooking Survival Guide. You can access all the class materials at Two Peas once you sign up, which includes five chapters each with a PDF and two videos (yes, ten videos in total), which adds up to forty-two brand new layouts, all of which are only available in the workshop. Of course Glitter Girl’s weekly videos will continue and you can watch those any time for no charge! But the workshop format allows for a more in-depth response to five big questions of scrapbooking, from photos to papers and stickers to tools and onto developing confidence in your own personal style. (The sign-up page includes further details about the content, but if you have any questions beyond that, just ask.)

It’s also possible to earn one or even two free bonuses when you sign up:
1. Anyone who signs up by the end of today (2nd of October, US central time zone) will receive an additional extended Glitter Girl video at Two Peas, all about getting the most from your stash. (This will be available as a separate purchase later, but it is free to those early birds who sign up by the 2nd.) You don’t need to do anything to claim this – I’ll go over that on the class message board tomorrow so you’ll be able to find it on your account there.
2. If you sign up through the links in this post (or the earlier post quickly introducing the class), you can claim a second bonus video that is just from me. This is only available to those who purchase by clicking through my link, and you need to follow the specific instructions that follow below to claim it. If there is interest, I may do the same as the Two Peas bonus video and make it available as a separate purchase at a later date. Just to be clear, the Two Peas bonus video is Glitter Girl. The video from my blog is just mild-mannered scrapbooker Shimelle Laine. And indeed, you can earn both if you’re quick!

To earn and claim the shimelle.com bonus video
1. Click from shimelle.com to Two Peas to make your purchase (as in click here to sign up for Glitter Girl’s Scrapbooking Survival Guide). It’s fine if you click around on the Two Peas site, add other stuff to your bucket, take stuff out of your bucket, read the message boards while you’re there, etc! But you need to have clicked from here to get to there. You can be clicking today to make your purchase or you may have clicked from my post last week – both are fine! Moving on.
2. You should have an email receipt for your purchase from Two Peas in a Bucket. Take that email and forward it to shimelle@gmail.com, deleting the original subject line and replacing it with ‘Glitter Girl Workshop Bonus Video’. Literally copy and paste that subject line: it must be the same or it won’t work, as there are computers involved instead of just people. So you removed all the original subject line and replaced it with the copied and pasted version, right? Perfect. Don’t add anything else to the message. I don’t need your mailing address so if that is showing on your receipt you’re welcome to delete it. Okay, now just hit send.
2a. If you didn’t get an email receipt for your purchase, you can also go to your order history at Two Peas (use the dropdown menu by your name at the top right of the screen to get to your shopping history). Find the correct order and you can screen capture the order from there. The capture must include the order number, date of order, the workshop as a named item on your order, and the fact that the order is complete. If that takes multiple screengrabs, fair enough, but if you can get it all in one image it would be really helpful. Attach that to an email to the same address as in step two, but for your subject line, you need ‘Glitter Girl Workshop Bonus Video – Screen Capture’. Again, copy and paste that subject line so it’s just like that. Hit send.
3. You must complete all these steps by the end of the 8th of October 2013, UK time. On the 9th and 10th, an email will be sent for all qualifying purchases with your details for that bonus video! If it’s the 11th and you have not heard, you can email me at the same address above (with a different subject line – no need for something so specific at this point) and I will do what I can to help.

Please make sure you follow these specific instructions as I cannot guarantee you will receive the video if you use a different subject line, send your message after the deadline, or don’t forward the right information. Thank you!

I think that’s about enough of all that email talk, so how about a little look behind the scenes at making a workshop like this come to life?

When I start working on a layout-based workshop like this one, it’s an album and a giant stack of page protectors that is my first step. It’s the only time I work on layouts in an album that won’t be their eventual home. Instead they live in this one central place while I’m working on the class materials and at the end of the workshop they go their own separate ways into the appropriate annual or theme album. I start with about fifty page protectors, knowing I can have way more page protectors in the album than normal because each page protector just gets one layout rather than the usual two. Then I start with patterned papers and fill thirty-five to forty of the page protectors with combinations of patterned papers I like. I don’t tend to do full page kits at this point, just papers at first, then I start matching photos to the papers. It takes a little more time selecting pictures than any other scrapping day because with day to day layouts I just want to scrapbook whatever I’m inspired to document. With a workshop, I want to be sure to offer a variety so there are large photos, small photos, and in between photos, there are single photo pages and multiple photo pages, square photos and rectangle photos – it’s an attempt at a balance while also staying true to what I want to work on. I’ve found if I am too strict with my planning, I will lose interest in the process of making all the pages and then I end up with examples that don’t make me happy. The balance for me is to plot out around thirty-five pages but still have the freedom to make some of the pages spontaneously (for this workshop there are forty-two brand new pages and one new version of an existing layout).

Next step: post-it notes! Each layout for the workshop has a place on my master-plan outline, like demonstrating a particular technique. So I write all those things on post-it notes and as I set to work on each layout, I choose something from the post-it stack to make sure I cover. When the page is complete, it goes into the album with the post-it note on the page protector. Because I tend to make that master-plan outline with the chapters in mind, this pretty much puts everything in the right order. A few changes will happen to the order as it all comes together, but for the most part once the layout is in a certain place, it stays there in that same chapter. As the layouts stack up in the album, the workshop really starts to feel like a true body of work, and since video is such an important part of workshops now, it also really helps keep everything organised to show the layouts in the chapter videos.

As for those layouts not started at the very beginning with the thirty-five partial page kits, they get made up here and there from papers that just end up anywhere in my crafting space. What I would show you here if I were twenty times as brave is the state of my studio when I finish a workshop. I tip the place upside down when I’m working on something so intensive, one page immediately following the next and so on. I just set up a giant box next to my table and when I finish one layout, I dump everything in the box and start again. I have a pretty good memory for what I’ve put in the box, so if I want to use the same stamps or Thickers on another page, I know they will be there and not in their usual spot. The box means I don’t have to clean up until the very end… but it also makes me a bit tempted to stick the entire box on eBay because I’m usually pretty sick of looking at those supplies by the end of a workshop and I just want them cleared away! I think that box is my big job for tomorrow, but it is difficult to just put scrapping stuff away all day – as soon as I have three sheets of paper in my hands, I would rather make a layout!

As each layout is completed, it’s photographed, and I also keep a notebook where I messily handwrite my notes on each page that I don’t film for a video because otherwise I will forget what I was aiming for in that layout from chapter one once I’ve finished all the pages right through to chapter five. I keep those notes as I go, but I don’t formally write the chapters till the end, and usually somewhere between the two the important points shake out as most important and that helps me put it all together with some feeling of continuity, I hope!

Now… there is more coming up. A few weeks back I mentioned on the Paperclipping Roundtable that I had started the year with this nice lovely calendar with things projected on different dates but life and work and calendars laughed at me with all that and now I have a bunch of projects that have ended up smooshed together on the calendar rather than spread out with all that balance I crave. The good news is that three of the four projects (this workshop + three things that have not yet launched) are self-paced, and all four will continue to be available, so although they will launch in a tighter timeframe than I planned, you won’t need to cram them all in together nor eek them out of a single month’s crafting budget. I know some of you are waiting for the layering masterclass video, and that is one of the three yet to come, as is the project with the Glitz Designs Wild and Free collection pack. More on each of those things as they are ready for you to dive in!

For now, don’t forget to sign up for Glitter Girl’s Scrapbooking Survival Guide at Two Peas and claim your bonus from signing up via shimelle.com!

And so many thanks for your continued interest in my classes and workshops!

Comment [22]

Morning! I have a video coming up later today to explain all this with the supplies and so forth, but in an effort to not keep you waiting if you just want to get shopping… a little update on Best of Both Worlds!

As you may have figured out from the launch of the new workshop, Glitter Girl has totally stolen all my scrapbooking time for the last couple months and it’s put me dreadfully behind in using my last two Best of Both Worlds kits. I want to catch up on that, and I know many of you would prefer not to buy a new kit until all those projects and videos are shown here. But there are also some of you who scrap more on your own (also awesome) and are ready for a new kit! I’ve tried a little compromise!

Most of the September kit is available and can be purchased here.

For October, I’ve selected things from the autumn sale at Two Peas, and that can be found here.

The shipping discount code for October is 5ZZKRD. Right now, that code gets you a discount for spending just $35 in physical, non-close out goods, rather than the normal $50, but I’m not sure what the end date is on that offer. I’ve tested it today and it’s working on my cart. Keep in mind the October kit goods are all on close out, so they wouldn’t count toward your $35 total, but you could add items from the September kit or your favourites from brand new collections like Amy Tangerine Cut & Paste, Dear Lizzy Polka Dot Party, or all the new Echo Park to take you up to the $35 needed.

I’ll be back with more later today… once Glitter Girl is done with my time again. Sheesh she’s demanding!

Comment

My sparkly friend and I are very excited to introduce you to something new: Glitter Girl’s Scrapbooking Survival Guide, a self-paced workshop available now at Two Peas in a Bucket. It includes five chapters and ten videos covering some of the biggest questions that come up on the scrapbooking message board!

I’ll be back with more details, but I wanted to let you know that it is now available, AND that if you purchase the class between now and next Monday using this link, you will also qualify for a free bonus video that can’t be purchased any other way.

Go ahead and check it out, or wait for my longer post with more details, but just be aware, the only way to get that extra video is to click here, then make your purchase. Save your email receipt – you will need it to claim the video. The next post will include instructions for that simple process.

Back soon!

Comment [23]