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

Welcome to the September Gardeners’ Digest, with updates from the Garden Girls! So far this September, Glitter Girl has been on several new adventures, covering creating page designs with elements that feel they connect, mixing old papers with new embellishments, and a special episode designed for those who have taken a break from scrapping or are suffering from scrapper’s block.

Here’s that most recent episode, which you can follow step by step, but still create a layout that is very much unique, thanks to a bit of help from the beauty of Pinterest.

This project from Garden Girl Jen Kinkade is one of my favourites so far this September. I have plenty of tags sitting in my collection of supplies – time for me to take her advice, I do believe!

As far as shopping inspiration this month, you have a great choice of brand new or on sale, and in a few instances, even the brand new is on sale! Here’s a quick summary of what’s in the store today:
30% off all Teresa Collins products
25% off the Studio Calico Here and There collection, including Mister Huey sprays
25% off BasicGrey’s Carte Postale collection, which I’ve been using so much lately
25% off over a hundred Echo Park products
50% off selected Freckled Fawn products, including wood veneer frame and many washi tape designs
Plus brand new collections include Amy Tangerine Cut & Paste, Dear Lizzy Polka Dot Party, lots from Bella Blvd, autumn and heritage collections from Echo Park, both everyday and Halloween collections from Pebbles, baby and travel collections from Studio Calico, Close Knit and Maggie Holmes Flea Market collections from Crate Paper, autumn and chalkboard themed releases from We R Memory Keepers, and a serious amount of gorgeous paper and embellishments from Webster’s Pages.

So yes… should you fancy some nice new pretty paper, I think you’re all set there! If your order qualifies, ZWPKWA is the shipping discount code for September 2013.

I’m the last stop on the hop today, so you can jump to Jen to find the beginning and follow right on through to see what the Garden Girls have to share with you! Enjoy! And you can find the full list of links on the Two Peas blog.

Now… there’s no giveaway today, because we have some big, sparkly news tomorrow, and that will come with a giveaway, so I’m going to hold out till then, but you will need to check back Monday to see the news! Thanks for stopping by the hop today!

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!

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I know I’m dreadfully behind at keeping up with Glitter Girl’s adventures here. She has eighty-seven episodes now! She has never missed a week since starting her Wednesday videos at Two Peas and YouTube at the beginning of 2012. Now, I definitely have plans to get that Glitter Girl archive up to date here soon, but I’ve also had some requests for a sort of quick guide that would allow you to jump right to the project you need. With that many videos, it’s easy to get them muddled in my mind, and I have to help that Glitter Girl person film and edit them every week! They display at Two Peas and YouTube with a sneak peek thumbnail and the titles are a little less than straight forward sometimes, so it’s time for a simple guide that includes the full layouts and a description of each episode.

You can find exactly that now on Glitter Girl’s pin board over at Pinterest. Each week’s adventure will be added, so you’re welcome to follow the board for updates if you like. Or just bookmark if it you tend to get stuck looking for an old adventure you remember but can’t quite identify from titles and thumbnails. If you’re more interested in catching the new videos each week rather than going through the archives, it may be best to subscribe to either my YouTube channel or the Two Peas channel. Glitter Girl’s videos are hosted on the Two Peas channel, but they are also featured in a playlist on my channel, so both channels give subscribers a reminder link when the video is up each Wednesday!

I hope you find the pin board helpful, and Glitter Girl asked me to thank you for your ongoing support for the series!

xlovesx

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Welcome to the July Gardeners’ Digest, with updates from the Garden Girls! Since last month, Glitter Girl has been on several new adventures, covering scrapbooking panoramic photos, adding stamps to your journaling, creating title pages for albums, and using map prints without travel photos.

Here’s a look at Glitter Girl’s latest adventure, and you can find her new video weekly here at Two Peas. Are you up for her scraplift-yourself challenge?

This month one of my favourite projects in the garden is by Jen Kinkade. I had to pick her bespectacled project in the Scrap your Stash series! As a girl with glasses, I’m loving this trend. Unfortunately it does make me want to shop for funky new frames all the time and glasses are significantly more expensive than paper and stamps! Guess I’ll have to settle for new frames on my pages but maybe not on my face. See more of Jen’s project here.

With it being CHA week, new products will start to arrive in the droves next month! But there are a few new things at Two Peas this July that have caught my eye. First up is the Hello Again collection by Carta Bella. It’s designed by Kaitlin Sheaffer, the lovely lady behind Ormolu designs, and I’m excited to use that style in paper form! Some other new picks that have jumped into my cart include this cut apart sheet by Echo Park, chalk tape by Fancy Pants, and plenty of new items from BasicGrey’s Capture and Carte Postale collections.

Want a little more scrapping inspiration? One comment left on this post by the end of the month will receive a class pass to Celine’s new Two Peas workshop, Mini Books, Big Style. (You can see the full workshop details through that link.) This workshop includes minibooks and technique videos to break down Celine’s gorgeous mixed-media style. Although it’s designed for mini books, you can definitely use what you learn in this workshop on your standard pages too. No need to wait to see if you’ve won- if the winner has already purchased the workshop, the class fee will be refunded. Make sure you include a valid address in the email box when you leave your comment, and your Two Peas username would be a great help too, though not a strict requirement. Good luck!

I’m the last stop on the hop today, so you can jump to Paige to find the beginning and follow right on through to see what the Garden Girls have to share with you! Enjoy! And you can find the full list of links on the Two Peas blog.

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!

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Welcome to the June Gardeners’ Digest, with updates from the Garden Girls! Since last month, Glitter Girl has finished her mini series on scrapbooking weddings and moved on to a few new ideas, including an episode with printables and paperclips and this week’s adventure wherein she goes a bit crazy with different embellishment motifs!

Here’s a look at Glitter Girl’s latest adventure, and you can find her new video weekly here at Two Peas.

This project from Garden Girl Lilith Eeckels has inspired me to get back to some interactive layouts soon. I love how she compromised between a single and double layout by adding a section to a single page that folds out to include more, and the photos, colours, and design are just beautiful. See more of her project here.

Plus if you want some drama in a scrapbooking video, don’t miss Wilna’s latest In the Mood to Scrap. I always love all of Wilna’s videos and projects, but this particular episode is amazing as Wilna worked around one of the biggest accidents to happen while filming: spilling an entire bottle of mist on her layout!

Plenty of new items have arrived at Two Peas lately, and my favourite is probably the entirety of the Travel Girl collection by October Afternoon. Can I pick an entire collection as my favourite product? I’ve also been excited to see the new Project Life collections arrive in the store even though I don’t keep a weekly Project Life album. I just want to use the cards on my standard 12×12 pages, and to help with that, I’ve split several collections with friends so we could each have a variety of the cards rather than a full set of each colour scheme. I do think the full core kit (plus page protectors and an album) is a great way to introduce a new scrapbooker to this hobby, and it would make a fabulous gift! But if you’ve been scrapping already, you’re probably a fan of the variety, so splitting the kits with other scrapping friends (either in real life or online friends you can swap with by post) makes for a great way to get just enough and not have to commit to just one design. My favourite collection was midnight, but this week I’ve been working with Honey and Blush, and they are both lovely too! The bright colours are great and mix well with other collections. Plus Two Peas has the coordinating 12×12 papers for the collections, and I’m looking forward to working with those soon.

If you’re a big Christmas scrapper, definitely check out the sales at the moment. In the 75% off section, there is a lot of Christmas stuff, including some really fancy embellishments that have gone from pricey to bargain with that discount, plus there are papers and other themes too. Definitely worth a look.

Want a little help with your shopping? One comment left on this post by the end of the month will receive a $10 Two Peas gift certificate to buy whatever you fancy. Make sure you include a valid address in the email box when you leave your comment. Good luck!

Now it’s time to hop on over to the next Garden Girl, and that’s the lovely Janna Werner, who will have more fun to share with you! Enjoy! And you can find the full list of links on the Two Peas blog. Don’t miss Jamie Sorenson’s pregnancy album series while you are there – if that’s something you might want to make (for yourself or a friend!) she is sharing some fabulous tips and her album is just delightful.

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!

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I’ve been spending quite a bit of time at my desk preparing for something that should appear here on Friday (I mentioned it at the end of yesterday’s Paperclipping Roundtable episode) but wanted to take a quick break to join the Garden Girls for this month’s Gardeners’ Digest blog hop.

Since we last caught up with all things Garden Girl, Glitter Girl has been on a few adventures, including rather lovely fashions from the late twentieth century, a focus on the embellishment process, balancing the scrapbooking of new and old photos for your albums, making stuff with background stamps, and an extended episode on planning a new album. That extended episode is the first in a little mini-series of four adventures jokingly known around here as Glitter Girl’s Guide to Wedding Scrapbooks, but there should be plenty in each episode that will apply even if you don’t have wedding pictures to scrap. It was rather lovely of my sister-in-law to plan her wedding for just the right time for the mini-series! As always, you can find all my Glitter Girl pages and videos here.

I’ve really been thinking and taking notes on double page layouts recently, and this edition of In the Mood to Scrap by Kristina Nicolai-White really caught my eye. I love how this is a video where she shows you how she changed her plan part-way through the design and had to take the layout apart and put it back together again to make it work – but it definitely did work and no tears shed. I do love a bit of reckless abandon with paper! But actually Kristina made it look all rather calm and clear. The end result is beautiful, and a very different use of the two page design concept.

So many of the mid-release collections are just lovely this spring. My top five suggestions this month include The Pier Ephemera pack by Crate Paper (die-cuts and sequins – lovely!), a cut-apart paper from My Mind’s Eye (glasses! huzzah!), the new font from Jillibean Soup letter stickers (I ordered them in every colour, I think), the Amy Tangerine embroidery kit (I’ve been using this often when a page just needs a little something more), and a freebie – this cutting file sampler. There are several lovely cutting files, but I like that there are a few you can download for free to give it a try and make sure it works. Free is my favourite price!

This month I have a class pass for Jen Gallacher’s new workshop, Tool School, to give away to one commenter. Just leave a comment on this post to enter, and entries close at the end of this month. Be sure to leave a valid email address so I can reach you if you win, and if you have a Two Peas username, that would be great too. Thanks!

After you leave a comment to enter the giveaway, click over to Melissa for the next stop or take a look at the Two Peas blog to catch the details.

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Today is moving day. Yes, we are moving house (and my studio) again. Yes, that is three moves since the end of 2011. Yes, that is more packing tape and cardboard and bubble wrap than I would care to see in a lifetime, but this time we are very happy to be making this move, hassle aside. We’re actually moving back to a place we never wanted to leave, which is a long story for another day perhaps.

But in addition to moving day, it’s also Gardeners’ Digest day, so I just wanted to drop by quickly to share a few things with you from my Two Peas world and then get back to the moving van, I’m afraid! The sooner I can reconstruct my studio, the better. I may have danced with joy to return to that room today with its giant wall-sized window. Oh, natural light. I love you so.

Since we last caught up with all things Garden Girl, Glitter Girl has been on a few adventures, including the one above, wherein she made two pages with the same construction process, and an episode wherein she was very brave and scrapbooked with some of her oldest scrapbook pages. As always, you can find all my Glitter Girl pages and videos here.

New in the Garden this month is the lovely Celine Navarro, who has joined as a new Garden Girl and is part of the 213 in 2013 video series. Take a look and see what you can pick up from her beautifully artistic style! You can see even more lovely work from Celine in her gallery.

Now… usually I would share links to five products I’ve purchased (and loved!) from the Two Peas shop this month, but because I only have a moment to pause the loading-boxes-into-the-van activity, I have a little challenge for you! In Glitter Girl’s latest video, she shared some of her latest product acquisitions with you! In the comments, tell me your favourite of her new products, and I’ll pick one for something a little special.

I’m the last stop on the hop this month, so if you’re jumping in now, click over to Celine for the first stop or take a look at the Two Peas blog to catch the details.

Wishing you a very happy weekend, and if you don’t see me soon, send in a search party to make sure I’m not under a stack of cardboard boxes!

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This week Glitter Girl returns to an old question that comes up now and then: all about mixing patterns. Funny that Glitter Girl likes that topic, since it’s one of my favourites too! Okay, rubbish jokes aside, the Out of the Box adventure was one of the most popular episodes in 2012, and similar questions come up on the board quite often, so with a brand new order on my desk, this was a great time to revisit the idea of mixing products from a variety of collections and manufacturers with an up-to-date look at current lines and trends.

You can find all the supplies for this project here at Two Peas, and there are plenty of new things in the shop, of course, like all those lovely new papers, overlays, and embellishments from Allison Kreft’s new lines at Webster’s Pages.

And yes, that is a Hello Kitty bandage. It turns out Glitter Girl is not immune to cardboard cuts and packing up the studio for this week’s move was a bit treacherous. I hope it wasn’t too distracting! Clearly hand models are not allowed to pack their own homes when moving. Oh well: welcome to my real world, plasters and all!

This January was the first time I had been to a Disney park since the grand opening of Epcot, so that would be long, long before I was a scrapbooker, or indeed holding a camera! Now I suddenly understand the entire Disney-related challenges brought to scrapbookers. I’ve heard about them for years but never really imagined them in full. I was only at Disneyland for a few hours really and have plenty of photos to scrapbook, but not really enough stories to fill a full separate album. And of course, I’ve now done the child-free version of Disney, and that’s a very different experience. I have come up with a few stories I want to tell that are more reflective (especially as I don’t think there are any photos from my childhood adventures at Disneyworld, so this is as good an opportunity as any to recall what memories I still have) but some are quite simple and everyday, like this particular page recounting how it was definitely worthwhile for non-morning-person me to get up and go to the park as soon as it opened, since we had very short queues and gorgeous blue skies – until around midday, when more people started to arrive and the haze of white rolled over in the sky. I’m still thinking about what I’ll do with the slightly less obvious photos from the day. Exactly what journaling might go with photos of the birds in the Enchanted Tiki Room? Yeah, I’m not quite sure either! We shall see.

Of course, Glitter Girl always challenges you to join in, and this time it’s to make your own mix of materials for your next page. Upload it to Two Peas to share it with us!

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A month has passed and it’s time for a new Gardeners’ Digest to catch up with the Garden Girls, the scrap booking design team at Two Peas in a Bucket.  Since we last hopped through the team, Glitter Girl has gone on adventures through wood veneer embellishments, the design principles of white space, and most recently the world of travel writing for your scrapbook.

For more details on this project and further Glitter Girl Adventures, find her under the video tab at Two Peas more details on this project and further Glitter Girl Adventures, find her under the video tab at Two Peas.

I’m always inspired by Garden Girl Wilna Furstenburg, but this month even more so between her fab In the Mood to Scrap video and the launch of her brand new workshop, Art Class. I’ve signed up and I’m working my way through, rationing each chapter so I make sure I put all these great ideas to work.  The workshop is filled with great tutorials and Wilna’s beautiful examples. More about that in a moment…

It’s a great time to go shopping at Two Peas, with new products arriving pretty much daily! Including the new lines from Amy Tangerine, Dear Lizzy, American Crafts, Crate Paper, Studio Calico, Glitz, and Echo Park! That’s some major good stuff, and you’ll be seeing lots of these new letter stamps from Amy Tangerine on my upcoming projects!

Speaking of upcoming projects, stop by this weekend for a special two day adventure through sketches and scrapbooking videos, right here at shimelle.com. Perfect if you’re snowed in, but snow is not a requirement.

Your next stop on the hop is brand new Garden Girl Celine Navarro.  Be sure to check our her blog and her beautifully artistic style!

But before you go, I have something for one of you! I have a class pass for Wilna’s Art Class workshop so you can join me and plenty of other scrapbookers for this creative adventure.  To enter, just leave a comment on this blog post.  Entries close at the end of February, London time.  And if there are 500 or more comments by the end of the month, I’ll throw in a prize pack filled with Wilna’s product picks so you will be all set to take part in the class and follow along. So tell a friend, won’t you? if the winner has already signed up, we will refund the workshop – so there is no need to wait and see. Sign up now: and get started straight away!

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