paper: Glitter Girl and her tips for scrapbook journaling | pretty paper. true stories. {and scrapbooking classes with cupcakes.}

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Inspired by this conversation on the General Scrapbooking message board at Two Peas, Glitter Girl brings you thirty minutes of scrapbook talk this week, all about journaling. She shares her tips for product choices that will make journaling easy, designs that allow you to incorporate your writing without losing other page elements, and other tips for seeing your writing as an integral part of any page. I hope you enjoy!

See this post for all the supplies for this project, plus further details including Glitter Girl’s challenge to you this week.

Those photos were taken in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, inside a market hall. I know the colouring looks a little blue, and I toyed with ‘correcting’ it, but the light truly looked like this inside and in the end I decided I wanted to stay true to the look and feel of the memory rather than changing the colour to look like it could be anywhere. But the story is about our adventures in drinking beans, which sounds strange, but I assure you is actually pretty fabulous. We were introduced to this idea in Vietnam when part of a cooking workshop took us through the local market to sample different local ingredients. There we met someone who was introduced only as ‘The Bean Lady’, and she sat outside the market with half a dozen pots of different slow cooked beans. This summer concoction is made with azuki beans that have been slow cooked with sugar until they are very sweet, then layered with sweetened condensed milk, shaved ice, and caramel. (In the winter, there is a warm version with similar ingredients.) Different regions have different ways of making and eating this and indeed different pots of different things from all the local bean ladies! As we went further south in Vietnam, bean ladies became harder and harder to find, so when we stumbled upon one in Cambodia, we were excited to try her version, which happened to be the sweetest we ever tasted. So for my journaling on this page, I didn’t just want to focus on the moment at hand, but also include some of that backstory – the context of other memories that makes you see why I felt these photos were worth taking and why they are something I want to preserve in my scrapbooks.

For more inspiration on journaling at Two Peas, follow this Pinterest board, where I’ll continue to add my favourites as I spot them in the gallery and other resources there.

If you’re looking to take your writing further in your scrapbooking, True Stories is a resource you might find useful. It’s my journaling class and I’m joined by guest artists and a guest teacher (Relly Annett-Baker, who is a writing expert outside of her scrapbooking side, and contributed a second point of view to each prompt, which provides a great balance and extension of ideas). The pages I made for True Stories are probably my favourites I’ve ever made for any class, because the chance to focus on the writing (but still have fun with photos, patterns, and embellishment) made these pages dear to my heart. I worked on them when we were at an interesting cross-roads in life, as well, and I am grateful that I took the time to document things like decision making processes and conversations between old friends. This class is available any time as a self-paced project, with fifteen prompts for £10 or $15, and you can sign up here.

Onward, covered in glitter, my dear scrapbookers!

The Adventures of Glitter Girl is a weekly series on Two Peas in a Bucket, and goes live every Wednesday. I’ll share each adventure here shortly after that. I hope you enjoy her quests for crafting happiness, and if you ever have a scrapbooking dilemma yourself, you can always call her to action on the message board.

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24 January 2013

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