paper: The Story-Centered Album - A Scrapbooking Course for Listening | pretty paper. true stories. {and scrapbooking classes with cupcakes.}

The first time I was a guest on the Paperclipping Roundtable, I sat in the basement of my grandparents’ house, and I distinctly remember my feet bouncing on the floor the entire time from nerves. Somehow I don’t remember how we planned that particular date, as it fell during a visit to my family that I now refer to as ‘the summer my life became an episode of Glee’, because I booked a trip home and then my mother told me I had a part in a musical. Because that is the kind of stuff that happens in my family. I digress. That summer was many years ago now and that first episode of the PRT for me was their thirty-eighth recording: A Metaphysical Bandwagon. Since then, I’ve joined the panel on a total of twenty-three episodes, most recently the CHA report, which is the only episode where we all sit in one room and can actually see each other’s faces. After that recording, Noell asked if I could stick around and discuss something, and she had a great idea that I’m now thrilled to share with you: an all-audio scrapbooking class.

Noell and I recorded about six hours of discussion on a theme: how albums can tell a specific story. This is mostly the two of us discussing our album philosophies in detail with concrete examples, so we share what does and does not work for us, but we also share how it works so you get an idea of all the different page themes and journaling ideas that help us create albums we feel can be read like a story. This is something that inspires both of us creatively and also something that helps the people in our lives who are not scrapbookers to understand our passion for this hobby, because the album makes sense to them even if they have no idea what paper collection is on trend or how to operate a manual die cutter. Izzy also makes a few appearances, getting us to clarify things and sharing ideas for how he sees the story concept working, as someone who isn’t sticking pretty paper together all the time. (He also did the audio production for this course, which is something he does all the time, so the sound quality is professional.)

You can download all the audio files and listen to them on your iPod, phone, computer, or whatever other gadget you use (sorry, don’t think we’re releasing this on vinyl record but otherwise you’re good), and there’s a thread on the Paperclipping forum for discussion if you want to chat about anything. We’re also hosting a webinar for those who sign up straight away, so if you have any questions, we can answer them easily.

You can find all the details and sign up for The Story Centered Album – A Deep Dive Audio Course here.

Those of you who follow my classes here may know I have a more visual course on my own album philosophy, and that continues to be available! It’s called Cover to Cover and includes twenty-five colour PDFs and a series of videos to complement the reading. Cover to Cover discusses more than just my story-centred ‘upgrade’ albums, and really outlines my whole process of all my albums, my photo storage, how I add more photos to my albums, and so forth. Cover to Cover also includes a video workshop I originally taught for True Scrap called “Go with the Flow”, about designing with continuity in embellishment, colour, and other visual cues throughout one album. The early feedback from those who have taken both courses is that they are a good set together, since they each have some ideas in common (the album that tells a specific story) but plenty of different material too (Cover to Cover is just my own process, so you’re not hearing from Noell or anyone else; Story-Centered Albums is focusing on a single type of album, not the entire process). I hope you find that to be true if you’re interested in taking both – it was certainly our aim.

Other things you might find interesting as a complement to the audio course:
The Perfect Collection and Return to the Collection – video workshops on creating stacks of pages (for one album or many) from one collection pack of paper. The first is more focused on stretching the paper to many pages; the second looks more specifically at embellishments.
This post with a look at my ‘early years’ album.
This Glitter Girl episode that shares the Alice album and some title pages from albums we discuss in the new course
The Story Albums episode of the PRT, with Noell and I but also Stacy Julian and Ashli Oliver for a shorter audio discussion but with more voices.

Thanks so much to Noell and Izzy for inviting me along on their new innovation, and thanks to you for checking out this latest scrapbooking course!

Read more about: classes paperclipping-roundtable

15 May 2015

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