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

Many of you scrapbook along with me through the Best of Both Worlds project: it’s a shopping list each month to create a scrapbooking kit, either by shopping for new stash or choosing similar items from your own stash to use what you have. Then I scrapbook live on YouTube on Monday and Friday so you know you’ll always have ideas for what to make with those supplies.

The whole concept behind Best of Both Worlds is something near and dear to my crafty heart: my hope that we will all use what we buy. Years and years ago I wrote down my story of the special paper about the time I spent far too much on a paper I deemed far too special to use, continued to save, and eventually realised I didn’t like it at all. Not one bit. But when I use what I buy while I still love it, it goes into my album where I can look at it for years instead of just sitting in my stash and eventually making me feel like I made poor shopping choices. Sigh. It’s way more fun for me when I make sure to use what I buy!

Part of each Best of Both Worlds shopping list is what I call stash building items: ink pads, stamp sets, and stencils are all items I hope you will continue to use after all the paper and stickers from that month have gone from stash to finished pages. Plus I don’t know about you, but it’s not a rare occasion that I fill up my shopping cart and then add another stamp set or stencil or ink pad somehow. I always have the best of intentions but it’s easier than I care to admit to add those items to the drawer and forget to come back and use them as much as I hoped!

ENTER A NEW CLASS SERIES. Choosing one category of stash item at a time, four videos with four specific and versatile techniques you can use to put those purchases to work. To use what you buy! We’re starting with stamp sets, and the four stamp sets featured are all from previous Best of Both Worlds shopping lists, so you might already have all four sets in your stash already. But no worries if you don’t: each of the ideas is easy to use with other themes, motifs, or colours. Plus they are designed to be ideas you can use over and over again and each page will look unique when you try it with another set of stamps or another colour scheme.

Each of the videos is about 22 minutes, so you don’t need to watch for hours and hours to get started. Everything is focused instruction (as opposed to the livestream situation and our discussions of random rubbish!) and you can watch either by streaming or downloading and saving the videos. You can share what you make right there on the same forum where you watch the videos. And all four videos are right there ready and waiting for you now: it’s not the same format as a longer class where the messages are delivered by emails throughout a longer time frame. Like all my classes, your access to the materials is permanent so you can work on it this weekend and you can come back to it in a few years if you get stuck and realise it might be helpful again!

During August 2022, the stamp set edition is just $5 US dollars. Once we hit September, this will go up to $10, so if you want to sign up at the best price, that’s right now!

If US dollars isn’t the right currency for you, you can still click to sign up and the payment will be automatically converted to your currency. You can check XE for up to date exchange rates around the world.
If you’re a current pass holder, this class is already available for you – just sign into the forum and watch whenever you would like!

IF THIS IS YOUR FIRST CLASS, PLEASE BE AWARE: class registrations are not automatic! I add everyone to class myself. It can take up to 48 hours but I try to be much faster than that. If you don’t receive an email within that time, please get in touch. You can also use that same email to let me know if your PayPal email address is not where you would like to receive your class info.

If you signed up as an early bird, THANK YOU! You can already access the class now when you sign in at the class forum. Scroll down and it’s under the ‘Use What You Buy’ heading. If you’re signed in and still don’t see it, again send me an email and I’ll help you out!

Thanks so much and happy stamping and scrapping! Let’s use those stamp sets we’ve purchased so we don’t have any stamps left that haven’t been inky!

This scrapbooking class about colour – it’s a concept I have worked on so long, on and off, because I knew I wanted to say so much and I felt like every angle I chose left me with all these other elements I wanted to include. Fast forward through a lot of scribbled notebooks and I’ve come to my very happy conclusion: it’s not just one class.

Today I’m opening registration for We Can Scrap a Rainbow, which is what I’m calling the first class in my colour-based curriculum. There are at least two more classes to follow, each with their own angle, and the series will build one class to the next, so joining in now will make it easy to follow along as we move through an entire spectrum of colour conundrums, possibilities, and tangents.

I know you’ll be tempted to look at the layouts I’ve made over the last two years and assume ‘scrap a rainbow’ means pages with a literal rainbow of colours and literal rainbow motifs. But I’m keeping you on your toes: IT IS NOT THAT. Instead, this is a dive into each colour, one at a time. So we’ll look at red, then orange, then yellow and so on. I’m adding pink even though it’s not in the rainbow. There is a balance in each colour, so we’ll look at the colour on its own and then in several combinations, all with scrapbook page examples and process videos.

What you get:

*As soon as your registration is processed (which can take up to 48 hours after payment – it is not automated) you can watch a class I originally taught for Scrap Smarter. It’s all about making page kits and looking at the ways those colours work together.

*From Friday 25th of March to Friday 1st of April, we’ll work through a series of edited video lessons about quadrant page design and different ways to use colour in this set up. If you have taken Half and Half, you also get access to this on the same dates. This week of lessons bridges the last class, all about composition, to the new class focus on colour!

*From Monday 4th of April, we work our way through the rainbow! Each colour in the rainbow will include a brief prep session so you can gather your materials, an edited lesson video, and a live video session. These live sessions are not like my casual YouTube livestreams, but instead start and end with a brief Q&A session and have a structured lesson in the middle so you can scrap along with me in real time. I’ll save all the random rubbish chat for outside class! Each colour also includes printable lesson notes and a Pinterest board of resources.

Your access to all the class materials is permanent and all live videos can also be watched on replay. The quick prep session for each colour means you can post any questions you would like answered in the Q&A without needing to be there live, and then you can watch it back when it suits your schedule.

$20 USD

£15 GBP

You can choose US Dollars or UK Pounds to purchase the class, and if your currency is neither of those, you can just choose the one your prefer and it will automatically convert when you purchase. You can check currency exchange rates at xe.com if you need to translate it into number that will make sense for you! Once you click through, you’ll be given the option to pay by card or from your Paypal account – either option is fine. No transactions are done on my actual site – you can check the URL when it goes through and you’ll see the secure processing is done through Paypal’s servers and not here on my blog. I never see your payment details.

If you pay by Paypal account and your account there has a different email address than where you’d like to receive your class materials, please email me at shimelle@gmail.com and just let me know the two email addresses so I can sort that for you! You can use that email address to ask any questions as well!

If you are a pass holder, you don’t need to do anything – you receive this class automatically. If you purchased a class during the flash sale to get a discount on this class, do not purchase here at full price – you’ll get an email with your discount instructions. Thanks!

If you prefer to wait hear more than just what’s here, that’s fine! I’ll be talking more about the class on both my YouTube videos and Instagram posts in the time between now and the start of class!

Once upon a time, nine years ago, I recorded this video, which remains one of my most viewed scrapbook pages ever.

It started a wave of other scrappers giving that same sketch their own interpretation and each version posted made me smile. Over and over again. Because they took that same beginning and made it their very own. It all started with a sketch! I think it’s time to revisit that idea on a much grander scale, so I’ve put together a new (and much overdue) class on just that: a bundle of brand new sketches, interpreted and reinterpreted through scrapbooking process videos, with an armload of tips you can take away to use with these sketches, other sketches you’ve pinned, or sketches you’ve drawn yourself.

It’s called Start with a Sketch and it starts one week from today: the 17th of March 2020!

$30 US Dollars

£23 UK Pounds

Start with a Sketch includes…
15 scrapbook page sketches, each with 3 interpretations. All shown in video. That’s 45 scrapbook process videos.

The first interpretation is always the truest to the sketch and the simplest in terms of gathering supplies. No fancy techniques. No mixed media. No cut files. Just strong design, pattern, and colour tips to make your photos and stories the star of every sketch.

The second and third interpretations, however, give that sketch wings. You’ll see mixed media added to a sketch that doesn’t have anything that obvious to start. Turn a single page sketch into a double page layout. Change the number, orientation, or size of the photos on the sketch. Add a statement with a cut file, large sticker, or ephemera piece.

In addition, there’s a variety of story topics represented throughout. Each sketch has at least one layout with just grown ups in the photos. At least one will be kid photos. Some travel, some things closer to home. Some newer photos, some older photos. Some single photo pages, some pages with two photos, some pages with several more. All the photos can be printed on a 4×6 printer, as the sketches use 4×6, 4×4, and 3×4 photo sizes as a rule (I would print two 3×4 images on a single 4×6, and there’s a quick video to demonstrate that in the class resources if it’s new for you).

The schedule works like this:
Registration opens today (Tuesday the 10th of March)
Tomorrow (Wednesday the 11th) existing students from Level Up will receive a bonus set of three videos – a sketch and its three interpretations. That set is just for Level Up students and is not part of the 20 sketch count above.
Thursday the Start with a Sketch forum will open! Once you sign in, you’ll find some class materials ready to help you prepare and get the most from the class. That includes a printable with all 20 sketches and notes on what photos, paper collections, tools, and other supplies I used for each video, should you wish to have a plan and work along with me in real time. Of course I encourage you to use what you have and what you love, so don’t feel you need to go get what I’ve used! But if you already have it, you might not hurt to get it ready, right?
The first video will appear the following Tuesday, the 17th, and from there the schedule is basically video, video, video, day off, and repeat. So a week from today, you’ll see Sketch one, video one, then Wednesday is video two, Thursday is video three. Friday there’s no video and Saturday we go again starting with the second sketch. That means class finishes in the middle of May. But you have permanent access to all the class materials and there are absolutely no deadlines, no late marks, no ‘keeping up’ pressures in my classes. Go at your pace, dip in and out as it suits you, and come back to the materials whenever you’re stuck. In fact, that’s a big part of my aim with this class: giving you a resource you can return to when you’re creatively blocked and so desperately want to get back to making things you love. I hope this will be something you’ll find useful for many years to come!

$30 US Dollars

£23 UK Pounds

(You will be taken to PayPal’s secure website, where you may pay by credit/debit card or a PayPal balance.)

Once you sign up, you will receive a PayPal receipt email confirming your completed payment. The forums will open Thursday, and when that happens you will also receive an email from me welcoming you to class. If you have taken a class here previously and don’t remember your login details, or you just have any questions about any of this process, please email me.

A topical note that I probably should have been including in my classes since the very beginning: I’m healthy, my family is healthy, but people get ill, things happen. If I were to get sick or someone in my family were to get sick, it is very possible that I might run a little behind and we’ll adjust as we go. But hey, it’s an online class, so we can all participate even if we are quarantined. I just feel like maybe I should have always made it clear that if something runs behind schedule for something like illness, that’s all it will be – a little bit behind schedule. But I have done and will continue to do all I can to prevent that happening, and I wish you and your family all the same health and safety. Thanks for your understanding!

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With just the last tiny bit of August remaining, I’m breathing deeply and looking forward to September, a month filled with reflective tradition. While the resolution-crafting, be-your-best-self energy of the new year hits in January, I also feel that same hope at back to school time, even though I probably won’t find myself inside a traditional school in the month ahead.

That reflective tradition is an online class now in its ninth year: Learn Something New Every Day. It is something I started as a scrapbooking class, but it works well for a variety of memory-keeping formats, be that a mini book, a Project Life or pocket style scrapbook, a full-size scrapbook, a journal, a diary, a planner, a social media account, or a blackboard. Essentially, you need your pen and a few moments to reflect on the day. That’s it. If you want to add photos, then include some kind of camera. Everything can be as simple or as creative as you desire.

The entire idea of Learn Something New is to open your eyes, your ears, and possibly even your heart to the world around you and record one thing you learn from that world each day for a month. Sometimes we learn from our mistakes. Sometimes we learn from watching others. Sometimes we learn from things that seem more like school, from a training session or reading an article. Live the day, then take a moment to sum up something you have learned in a single sentence. Leave it at that, or complement it with photography, art, or more writing if you wish. That’s why it’s so easy to adapt to a variety of formats.

You can read more about the course here, including a bit about how I’ve used a few different formats for this project over the years.

Each day in September, class participants receive a PDF prompt by email with something to read and set you on the way to various ways you might learn from your environment, plus visual inspiration from a variety of crafters. There’s also a class forum to chat and share in a members-only environment, or hashtags to share your thoughts and images in a more open format. This annual class has a great wealth of materials from previous years, including video, galleries, digital templates, and printables, all of which you can access when you join.

This year, I will be adding a new video series to the class materials. It was developed from working through my lessons from September 2014 and how September was unfolding differently for me with a baby than in all those earlier years, but it’s not a parenting video series in the slightest and my hope is that it’s useful for a variety of life circumstances. I simply had a different perspective in that particular September and wanted to share how that made a difference to my process with this annual project.

Learn Something New has a one-time registration fee of £10 GBP or $15 USD, and then you can participate as many years as you would like at no further cost. I’d love for you to join us!

These buttons will allow you to pay by your choice of credit/debit card or Paypal account – your choice. Please make sure you are using a valid email address. Registrations can take up to twenty-four hours to process. If you do not receive an email in that time, please check your spam folder, then email me at shimelle@gmail.com. If the email address on your paypal account is not where you would like to receive class materials, please let me know that too. You can leave a note on your payment, or send an email if you miss that bit. (If you would like to gift the class to a friend, just sign up as normal and in the comments or an email, let me know her email address. Simple as that.)

Previous class participants, the first message goes out on the first of September, and includes an easy way to opt out of mailings if you prefer not to have emails this year. If your email address has changed in the past year, drop me an email and let me know so I can update that for you.

May back to school be wonderful for you in whatever form it takes!

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Tomorrow is the first day of a brand new online class – Explore! To celebrate, today I’m giving away a class pass for one winner and a friend to enjoy the class for free. Plus it’s not too late to sign up and join in the fun of twenty prompts, four videos and more to keep you inspired, documenting and creating!

To enter the giveaway, just leave a comment on this blog post. Easy! (If you’re new, it’s worth knowing you need to click the preview button when you post your comment.)

I’ll pick a winner bright and early tomorrow so you can start with everyone and not miss any of the fun. So be sure to leave a valid email address on your comment so there’s no delay if you win! If the winner has already registered for the class, that’s okay too – I will send a full refund of the class fee and you’ll still get the extra pass for a friend to join you.

Throughout this four week course, we’ll be exploring the world, even if you’re not going anywhere. Each prompt covers a different aspect, from days when we’ll focus on photography to videos that cover crafting techniques to do something new with your existing supplies. We’ll be taking pictures, making journaling easy and stretching ideas so you’ll keep creating long after the final prompt appears in your inbox. If you’re worried about being too busy for the next four weeks, then the workbook is your answer! You can print it from day one and follow along in a quick format then come back to the full prompts when you have a bit more time to explore those ideas.

Ready to sign up? Click one of these!

Registrations are processed individually, within 24 hours of a completed payment (though usually faster). A welcome message will be sent to the email address on your payment — if your paypal address is not where you would like your prompts to be sent, please leave a note on your payment or email me. If you have not received a welcome email within 24 hours, please check your spam folder. If it’s not there, please email me at shimelle at gmail dot com so the information can be resent.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch through the comments or by email. I’m so excited to teach this class and I very much hope you’ll join me for the fun!

Right – time to leave a comment if you’d like to enter for a free place for you and a friend and spend the next four weeks taking part in a brand new scrapbooking class from the comfort of our own home!

xlovesx

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More and more I’m learning that travel is all about perspective for me. I love to go somewhere new because I love to be surrounded by something that will inspire me in a new way. But when I return home, that feeling of awe and awareness continues as I try to look at my own surroundings as an explorer. Whether you love to travel or prefer to stay close to home, I would love to share that process with you. And that’s the basis behind a brand new online scrapbooking class starting here soon. It’s called Explore.

Explore starts Monday, 18th July 2011 and runs for four weeks with prompts Monday through Friday. These prompts take you through an adventure from your perspective. Everything is written in a way that you can participate from home – this is not a travel album. Instead there are prompts on using your camera, your pen and your crafting supplies to look at your surroundings and your memories in a new way. There’s a new adventure in every prompt.

Many of you have said your favourite classes here at shimelle.com are those that result in a completed book that you make day by day, so a mini album with daily entries is one way you can participate in this class. The day by day entries can be small and not take too much time, so I think this will be a popular option! But there are additional ideas included if this isn’t right for you. You can follow along by filling in a printable workbook or by writing blog posts or by writing in a journal or by creating fewer pages in a larger format so you can add them to your 12×12 albums. There are even ways you could explore the class prompts through other kinds of creativity if you prefer to paint, stitch or otherwise make beautiful things. Everybody is welcome.

Explore includes…
…twenty full-colour PDF prompts, which can be read on your screen or printed onto paper.
…four tutorial videos to expand on the printed materials.
…a printable workbook to follow along by filling in the blanks.
…a bonus printable minibook to continue your exploration after the class has finished.
…a private message board for participants to chat and share their work.
…full, permanent access to all the class materials so you can participate on your schedule, even if that means this live run doesn’t suit your calendar.

Some special guests will stop by during the class to share their perspective with inspiring stories and projects. A few surprise opportunities will present themselves throughout the course. And if you join us on the message board, you will find so much support from others working right alongside you. By the end of the class, you’ll not only have the experience of this specific project, but also photography, journaling and crafting ideas you can take forward into your own future projects.

You can sign up any time and in your choice of currency: 10 UK pounds or 16 US dollars. If neither of those is your native currency, you can check exchange rates here then click whichever currency you prefer. You can pay by credit/debit card or from your Paypal account – click the currency button of your choice then follow the prompts on the next screen for your payment method.

Ready to sign up? Click one of these!

Registrations are processed individually, within 24 hours of a completed payment. A welcome message will be sent to the email address on your payment — if your paypal address is not where you would like your prompts to be sent, please leave a note on your payment or email me. If you have not received a welcome email within 24 hours, please check your spam folder. If it’s not there, please email me at shimelle at gmail dot com so the information can be resent.

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to get in touch through the comments or by email. I’m so excited to teach this class and I very much hope you’ll join me for the fun!

xlovesx

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Something a little special, just for today.

Sign up for any online class at shimelle.com today, and you can invite a friend for free. That’s Buy-One-Get-One-Free on online classes!

To take part in this offer, sign up for any class as usual. Click the buttons in the sidebar there —-> to find a class! During the checkout process, there’s a ‘message to seller’ box, and you can leave the email address of your friend there. If you miss this step, you can also email me (shimelle at gmail dot com) with your friend’s email address.

All classes include permanent access to all the materials, and classes that run annually (like Journal your Christmas and Learn Something New) include participation every year at no extra cost – so you could do some early Christmas shopping or treat a friend to a back-to-school class and get the ‘live’ experience at the Buy One Get One price.

This offer is valid today only and orders will be processed within 24 hours. There is no limit on how many times you can use the offer today, so you can sign up for as many classes as you would like, but you’re getting two places on each class – not one place on two different classes. You can pay by credit/debit card or from your Paypal account. Please make sure your Paypal account has a valid email address or I can’t get in touch with you!

Of course, you could also plot this out with a friend and pay half the price each… so feel free to ask around, but don’t wait as it’s a special for Scrapbooking Day only!

…and for those of you who celebrate Mother’s Day tomorrow, you could always choose a class to do together!

Happy Scrapbooking Day!

xlovesx

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I started blogging a bit after I started scrapbooking, and for quite a while the two things lived quite separate lives. Blogs very rarely had pictures back then, and perhaps that was why the leap to the visual took a while for me to grasp. Of course, my scrapbooking style has certainly evolved and likewise, the blogging changed too. Eventually I left that exceedingly random and picture-free blog behind and started things with a bit more thought here at shimelle.com… and now a thousand posts later I still find I have ideas I want to convert from head to notebook to blog to scrapbook (sometimes missing out any of those steps) and I think I’m far more in love with blogging now ever. Part of that is from Blogging for Scrapbookers, a project that originally started in late 2009, but revisited over the past month. Scrapbookers getting together to blog about what they love. I love it when things come together like that – it’s simply electric. And so, it’s time to push all that to the next level of inspiration. With a new class: Beyond Blogging for Scrapbookers. It starts Monday.

Over three weeks, we’ll cover:

Getting to know your readers: who is reading and who do you want to be reading? We’ll make stats and analytics easy to use and understand, we’ll work with concrete ways to start conversations on your blog that get your readers talking in the comments and we’ll define exactly what’s best for how you want to blog, whatever that angle may be. Using videos, series posts and other ideas, we’ll make sure blogging is fun for you and your readers.

Simple ways to serious storytelling: how to eliminate boring blogposts forever. You are worth more than that! Taking your blog posts to the next level makes a direct impact on your scrapbooking, as it becomes second-nature to tell stories in meaningful ways. We’ll even cover a list of things never to write so you’ll have a warning system in place to prevent blog post boredom! Photos also come into play in your storytelling, both on your blog and your scrapbook pages. We’ll look at ways to take engaging photos (no matter what your camera) and how to best display them on your blog so they grab everyone’s attention and develop your style.

The blogosphere: blogging is very much a community and the more you contribute to that, the more the community gives back to you in comments, links, praise and support. In recent years, this has developed its own little world that includes social networking and sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, just to start. Some bloggers can get great benefit from these tools – but they are no means a requirement of having a great blog. We’ll work together to find the right balance for you and make sure you’re sharing just what you want to share with the audience you want. If you want more readers for your blog, this will include how to find them while always staying within the happy lines of internet etiquette!

Of course, blogging takes time and sometimes blog posts come easier than others. We’ll look at forward planning, brainstorming and how and when to take a break from your blog – without losing your readership! If you’re interested in making a bit of spare cash from your blog, we’ll cover that too – just at an introductory level so you can be aware of your options and choose what’s best for you. (If you really want to focus on earning from your blog, you can also join us in May for a special online business workshop.)

And we’ll always keep the focus on scrapbooking, so you’ll get scrapbook pages as inspiration in the daily prompts, we’ll cover many topics that will apply both to the way you blog and the way you scrapbook and we will continue to make the two work together, just like we started in Blogging for Scrapbookers.

A note about that actually: do you have to take Blogging for Scrapbookers in order to join us for Beyond Blogging? I’m not going to enforce this as a strict prerequisite. If you want to jump in now, go for it! However, we aren’t going to go back to the basics that are covered in the first Blogging for Scrapbookers class. If you’re new to blogging or you find the technical side of changing your template or formatting a post difficult, then I would highly suggest you sign up for Blogging for Scrapbookers as well, so you can download the Blogging Blueprints workbook as a manual and have a look at the prompts so you know where we’re coming from. You can sign up for Blogging for Scrapbookers at any time and have full, permanent access to the class materials and the message board. A quick review of the first class will also help you embrace the ‘assignment’ format for the classes. At the end of each prompt, there are suggestions of how to put that day’s topic into action. But we are all busy people with varied amounts of time to apply to different things! So each prompt has three options for how to apply what you’ve just read and watched. The first is a quick option for just five to ten minutes! The second option has a bit more detail for someone who wants to spend thirty minutes to an hour on a fun project, and the third option requires more time but is meant for a longer-term project, like planning future posts and developing your style over time. There is absolutely no pressure to keep up with any sort of daily assignment on a deadline and the schedule is entirely up to you – just know there are options for improving your blog just five or ten minutes at a time when you can’t devote hours!

In Beyond Blogging for Scrapbookers, I’m excited to share two new elements with you: a series of videos that cover additional material and profiles of fifteen different scrapbooking bloggers, who share their perspective on blogging and how it works hand in hand with their scrapbooking. There are also more options for customising your blog design covered in this workshop, in case you fancy giving things a bit of a visual shake up! But mostly, I hope you’ll join me to create some amazing blog posts over the next three weeks.

Class includes:
…15 full-colour PDF prompts delivered to your inbox, Monday to Friday
…Series of videos with further instruction
…A special series of profiles of a variety of scrapbooking bloggers, discussing why they blog, their creative process and other insights.
…Blog graphics in a choice of themes that you can customise to create your own blog design
…Private message board for class members
…Permanent access to all class materials

Class starts Monday, the 18th of April, but you can join at any time and have full access to all the materials. If you would like your class materials sent to a different email address than that of your paypal account, please be sure to leave that information in the notes to seller box or email me to let me know. Class registrations can take up to 24 hours to process. Thanks!

If you have any questions, please let me know and I’m happy to help you decide if this is the course for you!

Hope to see you in class on Monday morning!

xlovesx

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