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

The next scrapbook page from the August 2020 Best of Both Worlds kit started with a discover of what did NOT work! I love this really simple mixed media technique of applying a mix of dye ink and water to a relatively plain background with either a paintbrush, an acrylic block, or a scrap of something textured, like cling film (plastic wrap, for some of you). With most dye inks, you can stamp the ink pad directly onto a resistant surface, like a craft mat, a plate, or an acrylic block, then add some water, and you’ll have a mix similar to watercolour. Using ink comes with the bonus that you can later stamp on the layout with an exact colour match. I’ve been stamping with a variety of the Scrapbook.com Hybrid Inks and somehow had never noticed they do not mix with water at all – I just ended up with water with specks of pigment, instead of a pool of colour!

Live and learn – I swapped to another (non-hybrid) dye ink in my stash and it worked just fine. I used an old Jenni Bowlin ink, but Distress Inks and lots of other inks would work for this too. You can also use plain old watercolours (even a children’s set) for this technique, if you’re not bothered about stamping to match.

The cut file for this page is a free download from the Summer 2020 issue of Scrapbook and Cards Today magazine, and I cut it at the size it opened – about 10 inches wide – from plain white cardstock. (If you don’t have a cutting machine and these page ideas give you a headache, I have a video coming next week with ideas and techniques for how you can adapt the ideas to a cutting-machine-free craft table!)

For the supplies and indeed all about this first month of Best of Both Worlds scrapbooking kits – including how you are totally welcome to play along with the supplies you already have in your stash – please check out this post.

If you make a page inspired by this project and share it online, please tag me @shimelle and add the hashtag #shimelleBOBW so we can all share ideas together!

A second live video, a second layout finished with the August Best of Both Worlds kit! If you’re starting here, pop over to this post to get up to speed with the whole Best of Both Worlds concept!

Today I started putting the summer issue of Scrapbook and Cards Today magazine to use! Take a look at their summer sketches – I used the sketch at the top right, but adjusted the design to two small portrait photos. (By the way, if you like the idea of scrapbooking videos from page sketches, I have a class on that and it includes 45 videos to work through at your own pace!)

Today’s is a live video, so it’s a chatty one, though not as far off topic as I sometimes find myself! We do cover my joy of secondhand copies of American Girl books. As you do. And also that ‘sup? is the perfect greeting for chickens. Please do join us with that the next time you pass friendly poultry.

I’ll be live again with this kit at 9:30am UK time this Friday, and I’ll be using the summer cut file from the magazine extras. (It will be available as a replay video as soon as it finishes.) But next up is a YouTube video that’s heavy on those camera stamps! See you soon!

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Annnnnnd thinking ahead to September, the next shopping list is now live! Here’s a look at everything on the list, and a few things to keep in mind! (Please note, these are affiliate links – thanks for your support!)

*This is rather a big kit, because I added a few things of opposite styles. If you love florals, you’re good with the Crate Paper stickers and die cuts, but not everyone loves a floral. Or a pink paper. Or primary colours. There’s a Pebbles cut apart that is quite friendly to card making, so if you don’t make cards and don’t love the b-side, skip that one. When I designed my AC collections, I always started with a really varied colour palette (Christmas Magic excepted) to make sure there would be potential for lots of scrapping topics – even if the collection at first glanced seemed very pink or purple or blue. This mix of papers is my way of bringing that logic to the kit. As always, choose the things that work for you!

*I’ve been asked a few times recently why I love mixing woodgrain with light and bright colours, so I’ve included two different woodgrain patterns in this kit to demonstrate just that. If you’re shopping your stash, my Glitter Girl collection might be useful for this.
*I’m going to keep the Scrapbook and Cards Today magazine on the list every month, but it comes out quarterly. If you ordered it with last month’s kit, that would be a duplicate. (The magazine is free with your order but you have to remember to add it to your cart, hence why it’s on the list.)

*The stash-building elements of this month’s selection are a Distress Oxide ink, a stencil, and a sticker book. These are all elements we can keep using well beyond the projects of the papers and embellishments in this kit.

Thank you so much for your support and enthusiasm for this project! It is truly brilliant to see and has made my heart so happy.

By the way, I’ve turned off comments on all my recent posts not because I don’t want to hear from you! It’s because I’m just getting a deluge of spam and some of it was most definitely NOT family friendly! I run a clean ship here! So comments are off, but you can always email me or get in touch via Facebook or Instagram. Thanks for understanding!

Kit all unpacked and ready to go, and I’m straight in to make that first page with the August Best of Both Worlds kit! This one is from a Facebook Live scrapping session, so it has lots of non-scrapbook chit-chat. (If that’s not your style, please don’t worry. There will also be strictly-on-topic YouTube videos of projects with this kit!)

Everything about the kit concept and the supplies used can be found in this post and I’ll be working with this kit again on Monday’s live session at 1:30pm UK time, on my Facebook page.

If you share projects made from your version of this kit, please tag me @shimelle and add the hashtag #shimelleBOBW so we can all share inspiration!

Have a fabulous weekend!

I love the idea of a scrapbooking kit: a collection of beautiful crafting items curated by a designer who has an idea for how they will go together, but sets you free with the supplies to make unique projects in your style. But subscribing to a kit is a delicate matter, because budgets change, styles change, favourite products and techniques change… but with a kit subscription, you’re stuck with everything that arrives in the box. No more, no less.

On the other hand, you can shop from scratch. But for most of us, that’s now an online activity. (If you have a local store, support it! Go shopping!) It can be tiresome to look at the screen for a long time, trying to imagine what the products look like in person, guessing what green will go with that yellow. It makes it dangerous to take a risk on a new brand or colour or product, because it might not be as useful in real life as I imagined.

To me, the Best of Both Worlds is a monthly shopping list that gives you the ease of a curated collection with the flexibility to add, remove, and change items from the list. It’s something I used to do seven or eight years ago, and it was great fun to put the kit together then use it up with videos to share those projects. But the shop I worked with then is long gone, and the idea went with it. But I think it’s just the right time to bring it back. Best of Both Worlds, from me in 2020, with affiliate shopping links to Scrapbook.com! It’s all ready to go now!

Here’s the schedule for things: I will update the shopping list just before the first Facebook Live of a calendar month. (My Facebook Live broadcasts are Mondays at 1:30pm and Fridays at 9:30am, both UK time.) I’ll be ordering then too, and it takes a while for an order to make it from Arizona to me here in London! But that’s okay – because I’ll be making projects with one kit while the next kit is on its way! This first kit went live on the 6th of July and arrived with me on the 30th, so I started creating with it on the 31st of July, but let’s call it the August kit. The September list will be available for shopping on Monday the 3rd of August, but I’ll be making stuff with it throughout September. I will be sharing process videos using the kit supplies on both my Facebook Live videos (where there is lots of informal, non-scrapbook chit chat) and my YouTube channel (where there is no off-topic discussion and I focus on scrapbook talk only), and then I very much hope I can stay up to date with sharing all of that here so it’s in one place and easy for you to come back and reference.

Here’s a video walk through of what’s in my August 2020 kit! Remember, this is the kit that went live at the beginning of July, so many items on the shopping list are now sold out. But that’s okay! You are welcome – even encouraged! – to shop your stash for similar products that could work just as well without you needing to shop. And if you prefer, you can take the shopping list to another store of your choice! If you are shopping, leave out items you won’t use or double up on papers you love. Make it work for you. I originally had the turquoise (swimming pool) enamel dots on the shopping list and they sold out very quickly so I changed the list to yellow (bumblebee), but you could choose any colour in the kit for your enamel dots or use a variety of colours if you have a stash of half-used sheets at home. If you don’t stamp, don’t add the stamps and ink and you’ll have a less expensive kit without waste. If you do stamp but already have lots of camera stamps or plenty of ink pads, you can leave those off too. That’s the Best of Both Worlds idea: you can keep it simple and add one of everything to your cart or you can shop selectively to suit your needs perfectly.

The Best of Both Worlds shopping list can be found here, and will automatically change over to the new list on the first Live of each calendar month – you won’t need a new link. So here’s also an itemised list so you can see the individual items I’ll be working with over the course of August 2020.

Thanks so much for your support and interest in this project! If you share your supplies all gathered (from a shop or from your stash) or any projects you make with this kit, please tag me @shimelle and add the hashtag #shimelleBOBW so we can all see the different projects made from the same supplies. I can’t wait to see what you make!

Okay, third day in a row and now I’ll be all caught up sharing my makes for Paige Taylor Evans’ blog! This time I went with her Seashell cut file to scrapbook some photos of Ariel and Eric from The Little Mermaid!

You can find the full write up on Paige’s blog, or watch this video to see how it all came together.

You can find Bloom Street and the Silhouette Cameo to order through that dandy affiliate link (thanks!) and find the cut file here or by searching for it on the Silhouette Design Store.

Have you spotted that all the pages I’ve made for Paige’s blog are Disney projects? No coincidence there – there’s a lot of magic in Paige’s designs! This and a few other seashells she offers are great for photos of meeting Ariel, be it at Bon Voyage Breakfast like this (a character meal with two princes! Huzzah!) or with her feeling a bit more under-the-sea in her grotto at the Magic Kingdom.

Shhh, don’t laugh at me too much but I got a bit behind in posting my pages for Paige over here, so I have another one today. And also tomorrow. Ha! At any rate, today it’s all about an easy-peasy start to mixed media with your cut files. You can find this project on Paige Taylor Evans’ blog and this time I went with her Best Friends Forever cut file for a big title that could also hold some photos. The title was cut from smooth white cardstock and most of the rest of the page comes from Paige’s Bloom Street collection.

You can find the full write up at Paige’s blog, or watch how it all came together in this video. This is a very easy intro to mixed media and I promise you can do it!

You can find the Bloom Street collection and indeed the Silhouette Cameo to order through that dandy affiliate link (thanks!) and find the cut file here or by searching for ‘Best Friends Forever’ on the Silhouette Design Store.

Here’s also a look at the layout that inspired me to keep going with the Best Friends theme! This is one I made with my Never Grow Up collection plus a bit of Sparkle City while scrapping on Facebook Live.

Hello hello! It’s my turn to share a design team page on Paige Taylor Evans’ blog and this time I went with her Speech Bubbles Background. Once that was cut from smooth white cardstock, I set myself the challenge of using just one 12×12 paper pad and one #StickerBook to complete the whole page.

You can find the full write up at Paige’s blog, or watch how it all came together in this video.

You can find the Bloom Street Paper Pad and the Paige Evans #StickerBook to order through that dandy affiliate link (thanks!) and find the cut file here or by searching for it on the Silhouette Design Store.

This photo was from a solo day at Disneyland back in January of this year. I can’t skip character meets just because I’m by myself – it’s part of the fun and definitely part of the magic! But there’s not always a substantial story for these photos beyond the fact that they make me smile a lot, so I love pairing them with big designs that offer a chance to just play with product and make something new to me!

_{Scrapbook page by Victoria Calvin of Victoria Marie Scraps}

I’ve been curious about how scrapbookers would take to Patreon, an online platform that processes subscriptions for creators to offer perks to those extra special followers. I’ve followed Victoria Calvin on both Instagram and YouTube for a long while now, so I suddenly had to ask myself why I hadn’t joined her Patreon community, so I made my pledge and signed right up. It turns out there is a wealth of content included in the membership and all my quarantine insomnia need not fear, because I can just sit here and watch Victoria scrapbook 24/7 if I need to, and actually, that doesn’t sound like a bad idea at all.

This page is one I made recently on Facebook Live, but it was entirely inspired by a sketch and accompanying process video Victoria posted in her Patreon community. And yes, that photo is most definitely a throw back – that’s Wonder Boy’s first EVER character meet! I’ve scrapbooked this photo years ago, but I just love this image and working with that memory was exactly the creative pick me up I needed for the day!

(I scrapbook live on Facebook twice a week – Mondays at 1:30pm and Fridays at 9:30am, UK time – almost every week of the year. You can find more info here.)

Although Victoria and I definitely have differences in our creative styles and our video delivery, we also have a lot in common, and if you like the sorts of videos I upload to YouTube and include in my classes, I would bet you will also enjoy Victoria’s videos. They are straight forward and her education background is clear, and the pages she makes are layered and lovely! I love Victoria’s enthusiasm for the craft and also for telling stories. I always want to read the journaling on her pages.

_{Scrapbook page by Victoria Calvin of Victoria Marie Scraps}

You can find Victoria on YouTube and Instagram as well as her Patreon community. Her Patreon membership tiers range from $5 to $10 USD per month, which includes a great deal of video content, and when you join you can access everything from the past too, so that’s a serious amount of videos to watch. There are sketch videos but also other themes, and there are some live lessons, like a recent session covering ideas for what to do with a surplus of 3×4 and 4×6 cards when you create more traditional full-sized pages than pocket pages. Patreon memberships don’t have a set time frame, so you’re not tied down if one day you realise you don’t have the spare cash or the spare time to scrapbook!