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

It’s the last day of August already? Well, that lovely three-day weekend was brilliant and now there are only hours left until it is officially September. But I’m always excited for September as it’s the start of Learn Something New, an online class that lasts all month. And if you can write one sentence per day (even if it’s on your phone or on a bit of scrap paper), you can keep up with this project! Click here to find all the details and sign up!

A few pre-class blog posts have popped up from various participants already. I love this story of someone who paid it forward by anonymously gifting a class membership is so very sweet and inspiring. I love these photos that Christina took to get her in the mood and ready to learn this September! This handmade album by Connie is a fab mix of paper pockets and fabric – I can’t wait to see it come to life (and she’s used super lush papers from Studio Calico that I love). Alissa has repurposed an old book and it looks dreamy! And check out these projects started by Pascale, Tina, Sarah, Chris, Cal, Dolly and Sarah. I absolutely love how everyone adapts this project to a style that is all their own, no matter if it’s something simple or something oh-so-intricate.

You can join at any time but you don’t want to be late, so sign up now and be ready for your first day back to school! Or invite a friend to join you. Class starts tomorrow, the first of September! Click here for the full class details.

xlovesx

Comment [11]

Ready for a summer scrapbooking adventure? I hope you’ll join me for a new online scrapbooking class here at shimelle.com!

Love your Pictures, Love your Pages is a four-week, high-energy journey through July. Each week we’ll be taking pictures and scrapbooking and putting it all together to make something you love.

Starting on Monday, the 5th of July, full-colour PDF prompts come straight to your inbox. There are six prompts each week: the first three focus on photography and the last three focus on scrapbooking — but of course the two go hand in hand!

This is not a technical photography class. There are plenty of amazing classes already out there with people far more qualified to take you through the technical parts of your camera. Instead, we’ll be focusing on options for creative photographs — the kind of pictures that really inspire you to get scrapping. You don’t need a super-fancy camera to take part. The class prompts will show sample images from point-and-shoot cameras, dSLR cameras, toy cameras and mobile phone cameras. No matter what you’re using, you’ll find something just right!

As we start to scrapbook those photos, you can craft with paper or pixels! If you’re new to my classes, it’s worth knowing that there’s never a set of ‘do it exactly like this’ instructions. The class materials encourage you to use the supplies you have on hand and adapt any of the ideas to suit your own style. Of course, if you want to recreate things exactly as you see them, you’re welcome to do that too! Classmates share their work, creating even more inspiration to kickstart your creativity — it’s one of my very favourite things about hosting classes here.

The scrapbooking prompts give you the option of creating stand-alone layouts to go into your existing albums or you can create an album dedicated just to photos you take this summer. Most of the sample pages are 12×12 and can be adapted easily if you would like to work in a mini-book size for this project.

Here’s a look at exactly what’s included in Love your Pictures, Love your Pages:
…24 full-colour PDF prompts delivered straight to your inbox, Monday through Saturday.
…3 resource workbooks: A Month of Sketches with a full complement of detailed page sketches for your scrapping, Camera Basics with an overview of technical basics on a variety of cameras and Photoshop Magic with step-by-step instructions for some of my favourite photo-editing techniques. (Photoshop definitely isn’t required for this class — but this workbook can be useful if you do have it or you install a free trial download.)
…Exclusive designs in printable format for paper scrappers and image formats for digital scrappers
…Members-only access to chat and share your work with other participants, including a special section dedicated to helping you with specific shots you would like to kick up a notch
…Permanent archive of all class materials so you can participate whenever fits your schedule and know everything is always available for you in just a few clicks
…Special members only discounts to some of my favourite places, including Digital Photography School and Totally Rad Actions.

In total, the class comes in at just under 200 pages of material, even before we start talking on the message boards! You can sign up any time in your choice of currencies: £16 GB Pounds or $24 US dollars. Just click the image to join us:

Class starts on the 5th of July and the message board will open a few days before that — you’ll receive an email with all the details on how to sign in once the board opens!

Do keep in mind that the email address you use when you pay is the only way I can get in touch with you, so do make sure it’s a valid email that you can read. If you would like your prompts sent a different email than the one you use to pay, leave a note on your payment (or send me an email if you forget – shimelle at gmail dot com).

Any questions, just ask! And watch for a few sneak peeks of both the photo and scrappy sides of the project as the starting day draws near!

I’d love to see you in class!

xlovesx

Comment [40]

Thank you so much for the fabulous response to my new class. I have been bowled over by the great things friends new and old have been saying about their new commitment to using what they have so their hobby can be about crafting and remembering again rather than feeling overwhelmed by products! I love it so much when you get a group of people who really love to scrap all together at once. The atmosphere is lovely, even when you’re seeing them via a computer screen!

You can still sign up for the class at any time.

I’ll be back to blogging more in just a day or two! (And in the mean time you can see a little more about this card at the Frog Blog.)

Happy scrapping!

xlovesx

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Here’s a little look at just three of the projects guest artists have contributed to my new online scrapbook class, Something from Almost Nothing. Any guesses on who these guests might be? You’re going to love their ideas for creating new looks from your existing collection of scrapbooking supplies. They will even hold your virtual hand when you cut into a sheet of patterned paper, if that will help!

Class starts next Wednesday, the 10th of March, and you can sign up by clicking either payment button below or check out this post for all the details about the class! You can sign up at any time. Registration may take up to 24 hours – usually much less.

xlovesx

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Sometimes I am not so sure how I amassed quite so much scrapbooking stuff. When did I go from A few buttons would be useful to I can never have too many? When did the singular ribbon jar become the plural ribbon jars, sorted by colours of the rainbow? And patterned paper? Just possibly, I have quite a bit of that indeed.

The truth is that having a great deal of supplies isn’t something to get me down. Having them and not using them is an entirely different matter. So I invite you to join me for an online class in March: Something from Almost Nothing.

Throughout this class we’ll be focusing on getting more from the stash we have already acquired, no matter what your personal product of choice may be. We’ll go through a range of products you already have on hand and put them to use in new ways. We’ll step away from just gluing or stitching on a button and build something new. Plus it’s not just buttons we’ll be moving from stash to completed pages; we’ll also put stickers, ribbons, transparencies, papers, page protectors, chipboard and other supplies to work too. You won’t need to have specific supplies to follow along: we’ll focus on what you do have and offer plenty of alternatives along the way.

During the three weeks of class prompts, you’re invited to follow along and build an album entitled Celebrate Life. You can create this book in any page size you like with supplies you have on hand, and each prompt includes a page sketch and technique to help build the page as well as photography and journaling pointers to help with the complete album. But the class doesn’t end with just this album: each prompt includes a range of other techniques to try and projects to make. You can take inspiration from these at any time, just like a book or magazine.

I’m very excited that more than a dozen of my favourite scrapbookers will be joining me as guest artists for this class, and I’ll tell you a little more about them as we get closer to the first day of class.

Something from Almost Nothing includes:
…more than 60 pages of full-colour class materials, including work from guest artists and illustrated steps for more complex techniques
…3 video tutorials
…a live chat session
…printable accents for album project (purchased separately, these come to $9.90)
…bonus journaling and photography prompts for your Celebrate Life album.

Like all online scrapbooking classes at shimelle.com, this class includes
…permanent access to all class materials
…private forum for discussion and sharing your work
…prompts delivered straight to your inbox.

Class begins Wednesday, the 10th of March, with prompts delivered by email on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays until the end of the month. You can sign up at any time. Registration may take up to 24 hours – usually much less.

To sign up, just click! You can pay by in your choice of currency: £10 pounds sterling or $15 US dollars.

You’ll find additional class information and sneak peeks posted here on shimelle.com between now and the 10th of March, so don’t be a stranger!

I hope to see you in class!

xlovesx

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Comment [98]

My Christmas Journal currently looks something like this, a mix of the 15 pages I’ve created so far and spaces for 8×8 TTV photos on each facing page. I started printing those at home and it took a few days to make me realise just how much I was going to spend on ink and paper for those 8×8 prints when I knew I could order them all in one go, so now I am choosing one photo each day and will have them all printed together at the end of my journal in January.

I love seeing new journals come to life on the class forum and in blog posts. I always wish I had made a book just like one of those. I wish that about fifteen times a day! So it’s a good thing I can keep coming back to this project I suppose!

Here are some of my blogland favourites so far! Click each picture to see more pages.

Oooh, don’t you just wish you could flip through all those pages in a comfy chair with a gorgeous cup of hot chocolate? Love these and many more!

xlovesx

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Each prompt in Journal your Christmas includes not just my pages, but also pages participants have made during Christmases past. Part of the fun is going back through all the previously posted albums to see which pages make great examples each day. But I also wanted to share a few albums you can look through online. I love how each is unique to the style of the scrapper who created it.

The album above is by Kristina Nicolai-White, who many of you will know as Pea1 — she and her husband founded Two Peas in a Bucket more than ten years ago. I’ve seen this 2008 album in person (most of it…Kristina was still working on it then) and it’s huge and tactile and amazing to read. Kristina used a ton of different products but focused on a few types to make it all work together: letter stickers, labels and patterned papers cut into circles. Plus she added lots of fun smaller-sized pages in between the big pages, which makes it more interactive with so much to see. Kristina writes a great deal as well as including photos and the end result is such a treasure. She also put in a few of her own twists, like starting the album early to coincide with her family’s Christmas schedule. I absolutely love everything about this book. Check out the entire album here.

Ali Edwards first joined the class in 2005 and I love how these pages have elements of her signature scrapbooking style blended with the freedom of art journaling. Her stamped trees are some of my favourite page numbers to date and I marvel at the way she embossed this snowflake. See more pages here.

Natalia Harandon has been journaling her Christmas for several years now and you may have seen this fab ATC spinner in the Christmas issue of Scrapbook Inspirations magazine. At first I wasn’t sure the tiny ATC format would work for this project, but Nat’s collection is absolutely fabulous and I love the idea of a journal that comes out with the Christmas decorations. The small size kept her on track with the time constraints of a busy December and it also allowed her to stretch her favourite supplies further. See the full project here.

Alissa Fast has made several journals as well and her 2008 book is in my forever favourites list. It’s a book filled with depth and texture and colour but it still looks like every single little thing was just meant to be there. The shaped pages and mix of supplies and real-life ephemera makes this album both beautiful and very ‘real’ in the way it documents each day through the season. See the full album here

Jen Geigley makes pages that are bright and bold and happy without ever crossing from cute to cutesy, a bit like how raspberries are both sweet and not sweet and that is exactly what makes them so fabulous. I love watching her little girl grow up on the pages of her Christmas journals and her 2007 album is just divine. I love, love, love it. Jen also designed the numbers I used on my pages last year, and I had a few left over so I used a big 25 on the cover of my album this year. So in general, she rocks. See the full album here.

Julie Ann Shahin has created three digital scrapbooks that she prints at the end of the project. She has used a different format each year, and each one has been a winner. In 2007, she created each page to be the size of a 4×6 landscape photo so she could print the pages and turn it into an adorable hybrid album. I’m particularly fond of her 2006 album with double page spreads and some of my favourite digital artwork. You can see all three albums on her blog — start here with 2006.

Now, I really could continue with at least fifty more but I should probably get back to work. If you have more time, you should also check out albums by Sam, Iceboxpoet and Vee to get an idea of the variety of books that are created in this class.

Alumni, if your album is online, post a link in the comments of this post to share it.

Can’t wait for tomorrow! First Journal your Christmas prompt will be sent in a matter of hours now!

xlovesx

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Comment [16]

The giveaway prize of a place for you and a friend on Journal your Christmas goes to…

Kirsty Says:
28 November 2009, 20:08
The thing i’m most looking foward to this christmas is seeing the pure inocent joy on my childrens faces when they realise that Santa has been.I’m on borrowed time with my daughter as she is 7 years old and i can’t bear the thought of when she finds out that Santa is really mummy!.So i try to make each year a little bit better than the previous one.So that is the thing i’m most looking foward to & planning this xmas.xx

Kirsty, email me with the email address of your friend so you can both get started!

Thanks so much to everyone who entered! It’s not too late to join us, and you can find all the details here.

Check back later today for a post with some of my favourite Christmas journals from participants in past years!

Have a great week!

xlovesx

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