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

Though I’m sure New Year was only three days ago, it appears to be February, and that means we’ve just finished our first full month of the 2014 inspiration and education programme at Two Peas. I love working with the Garden Girl team and this year’s programme has been so inspiring for me to create new content. But it is different to what we were doing in 2013, and we know change is difficult, even with the random little things in life, so I wanted to bring everything the team has done this month together in one review post. Fair warning: it turns out that a full month of content makes for one epically long post. But this includes all of Glitter Girl’s videos and layouts this month, plus a look at all the team projects and links to each of those to see more. I hope you find it useful!

_{Image sources, clockwise from top left: 101 woonideen, Studio 404 (includes links to different lettering artists), Melanie DeFazio, House and Hold, Avotakka, Sparrow & Co via DesignSponge, Rosellen Ralmond, GaliaAlena.}

One new thing for the team this year is a monthly mood board chosen by our fearless leader, Kristina. The January mood board was certainly wintry, and that might have something to do with the exceptionally snowy winter hitting Two Peas HQ while there has been just gallons of rain here in London. (To be fair, London can’t cope with a couple inches of snow once a year, so who knows what would happen in a true snowmageddon reality. The capital might just crumble while Scotland laughs at our southern failings.)

_{Image sources, clockwise from top left: Sandra Kleist, Michael Alberstat for House and Home, Antique and Vintage Woods, Oksana Nazarchuk, Noel Shiveley, Saartje Knits, Sasha Hollaway.}

We’ve had monthly topics to guide our page topics for the five or so years I’ve been a Garden Girl (this month’s theme was family) but the mood board is a new concept for the full team. Last year, four Garden Girls worked with a mood board they created each week for the In the Mood to Scrap video series, but this time there is one board for all of us to work with for the full month. I looked at the mood board in two parts: first gathering textures from the photos, like natural woodgrains and knitted patterns.

The second part was the colour scheme. For most of my pages this month, I worked with aqua and brown, accenting with other colours from the board, but once I even switched it up for aqua and pink. I’m pretty sure it’s not really possible for me to make it through an entire month without some aqua and pink together!

With this mood board in mind, we then have four weekly themes that structure the month, with videos every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Glitter Girl is still on Wednesdays and there’s a new series from Jen Gallacher on Fridays called Make it Meaningful. Glitter Girl’s format has changed just a little this year: after two full years of taking her weekly topics from the message boards, the topics were getting a bit thin on the ground and there were some more detailed scrapbooking dilemmas she felt the need to solve. But not to panic: the overall premise of saving the world one crafty dilemma at a time still stands, and she still has the Adhesive Avenger on hand to help too. He’s useful like that. Glitter Girl still reads the message boards and the comments in the gallery and on YouTube, and she still keeps an eye on the problems posted, but the new format is just enough of a change to keep things exciting behind the camera, and I hope you enjoy her adventures throughout 2014.

How do these four weekly themes work then?

Throughout the first theme of the month, we embraced the ‘inspired’ concept: telling our stories through art and design. This is the week that saw the most literal translations from the mood board, although we took inspiration from that throughout the whole month. Each of us working on a project for this first week picked up on a different artistic element we could share, so Inspired week is great for giving yourself a creative kick, and might be your favourite week on the schedule if you prefer the artsier side to scrapbooking.

Wilna Furstenberg kicked off our programme for the year with two videos: one on how to make the cover for this beautiful minibook in textured winter whites, and one for the interior pages with large black and white photos and beautifully layered embellishments. (Find both videos by scrolling down the page here.) Celine Navarro selected woodgrains and navy blues for this page on her love of winter days. Jen Kinkade dressed up basic tags with watercolours and turned her hand to script writing with this project. Paige Evans took inspiration from homespun quilts and shared her paper quilting techniques with a tutorial video. And Jen Gallacher started her brand new weekly video series, Make it Meaningful, with the challenge to create your own family crest to display on a scrapbook page or frame in your home.

Glitter Girl’s contribution to this Inspired week came in two parts: first, a look at how I translate a digital mood board to a selection of physical scrapbook supplies I can put to use on several pages. The supplies you see selected at the beginning of this video appear throughout my projects in January, and now I just have a few items left on my tray, so it was a pretty good approximation of what I would need for a month of Glitter Girl projects. The camera angle is different for this part of the video because I really wanted to show you this process in as close to my own viewpoint as possible. I don’t look at all my supplies from overhead all the time. When I’m pulling together inspiration, I constantly walk around my desk and look at things from a literal different angle to see what catches my eye. It’s one of the most invigorating parts of the creative process for me, and I hope sharing that look at how it works for me might be helpful. (I say ‘invigorating’ and yet the narration really emphasises out easily I get out of breath right now. Please forgive me – I’m having a terrible time taking care of my voice this winter, so all of my January videos seem to bounce between being out of breath and being completely hoarse. Thank goodness I don’t make a living as an opera singer!) My biggest inspiration when putting together this physical mood board was to mix two colour families: the warm, dark neutrals of the woodgrains and the icy, cool tones of the aqua shades.

I think in future months I might film this same process and just share it here on the blog and my own YouTube channel, as it wouldn’t necessarily add value to Glitter Girl’s lessons to repeat the same process every month, but some of you might be interested in seeing how each month’s mood board works for me. Thoughts? Let me know if that is something you would care to see on screen each month or if once was enough for it to all make sense.

The second part of the video is the creation of this Christmassy scrapbook page from start to finish. Interestingly, Celine and I chose a few things in common – even the picture of putting our feet up on a cold day! And yet there is quite a bit of difference between the two layouts. I find that sort of thing really interesting – what happens when multiple people start from the same inspiration piece. That big bokeh photo of the Christmas tree really makes me happy when I see this page. I need to remember to do that more often!

So all of that made up Glitter Girl Adventure 102: Inspired Colour Curation.

During the second week of the month, we take on the Storytellers challenge: using tools to tell our story. That doesn’t necessarily mean tools like punches and die-cutters. It refers to anything that is a building block as we make our pages. That makes a little more sense with a week of examples.

Lisa Dickinson started the week with a video on mixing words and graphics to create an ‘In Review’ page to tell the story of the year just finished. Nancy Damiano and Stephanie Bryan both created layouts in their own style inspired by the look of infographics: Nancy mixing journaling cards and textures and Stephanie working in layers of hexagons. Jill Sprott shared a video on using timelines for your journaling, and Jen’s next episode of Make it Meaningful focused on page ideas for offering advice to a loved one. Lots of tools and not one of them a punch of a die-cutter! Although those kind of tools make come up from time to time as well, what we really aim for with Storytellers week is a way to help you realise all the tricks in your arsenal, so you can continue to be creative with the way you tell your stories on paper, be it through the design, the journaling, or the photography.

Glitter Girl focused on group photos this week, like that annual challenge of getting a picture of the entire extended family in front of the Christmas tree using the self-timer. It always includes plenty of outtakes in my world, and sometimes those outtakes have some of my favourite moments and the truest facial expressions, so they can be just as scrapworthy as the final winning shot. The first part of this episode shares a few pages that feature self-timer photos over the years and some thoughts on this subject.

The second part of this episode shares this page from start to finish, putting some definite reality into my Christmas pages to tell the whole story for years to come. (Place your bets now on how many years until my nephew gets really cross with me for keeping that top photo. But I think he’s adorable there, of course!)

That Storytellers focus makes up Glitter Girl Adventure 103: Family Photo Faux Pas.

Our third week is dedicated to Moments: the stories we just have to scrapbook. I love this sort of topic – those times when you are thinking through the journaling or the page design as soon as you take the photo because the moment is so fabulous, you never want to forget a single detail. This is the electricity of scrapbooking to me. It literally makes the muscles in my upper arms tense up and my hands go into some sort of post-cheerleader spirit fingers mode, just itching to print that picture and get cutting, pasting, and writing.

We started the week with a video from Nancy Damiano, which at first glance is about a trip to a tree farm, but when reading Nancy’s words on the page, it is very much more. Beautiful pages from Lisa Dickinson and Jen Kinkade showcase two very different styles of capturing winter moments on a scrapbook page. Laura Craigie contributed the next video, with ideas for turning a standard school portrait into a real time capsule of a child. Jen’s Make it Meaningful episode took its inspiration from the moments you capture relationships on camera. Celine Navarro rolled the clock back with an older moment, scrapbooking a childhood memory.

Paige Evans shared how she balances the typical moments in her family adventures with her detailed scrapbooking style, and Stephanie Bryan shared our first Project Life spread of the year, capturing a few weeks of moments in her life.

Glitter Girl took on a pretty big moment for this week’s layout. I braved scrapbooking the day I found out I was pregnant. I have to say this was one of the more intimidating episodes to upload! But it one of the most gratifying pages I’ve ever made, and I’m really happy I took the time to tell this story of a day turned from so very bad to so very good. If this episode helps even just one person out there feel a little like that, then it’s worth the trepidation of sharing quite so much!

This layout tells the story of one day across two pages, with one full 12×12 page and one pocket page. The pocket page conceals even more journaling, with one part of the story I didn’t want to be obvious to everyone who looks at the page. It’s hidden simply with two journaling cards and bit of hidden washi tape. The use of several journaling cards really helped me tell this story, because I would naturally feel compelled to change the topic when moving to the new card, rather than going on a bit too long on the negatives before I turned a corner to get to the happier part of the day.

All that makes up Glitter Girl Adventure 104: Tear-Free Tell All.

Our fourth week of the month is called Capture. In this week, we focus on everyday stories, like scrapbooking chronologically and approaches like Project Life. If you’re doing an everyday documentation project like Project Life or something similar in 2014, this last week of the month is there to boost your productivity and help you end the month with at least some of your stories in the album!

Celine started the week with a fab video sharing how she catches up on a week of Project Life in under thirty minutes. Mel Blackburn and Laura Craigie both shared traditional pages capturing everyday moments with their family. Stephanie Bryan’s first Garden Girl video shows how she creates interactive scrapbook pages. Jen’s Make it Meaningful episode shares a minibook to make for a loved one. Laura also shared a second page documenting some more serious thoughts as she aims to catch the smallest details of her son’s first year.

Two more Project Life pages round off the Capture week: Stephanie shares how she works with a page and a half when that’s the best match for her photos, and Mel Blackburn shares a double page from a week of travel without relying on travel-themed products to complete the look, opting to get more from her favourite supplies.

Glitter Girl’s latest adventure is another with one standard 12×12 and one pocketed page, this time with 3×3 square pockets. This whole idea of being ‘caught up’ isn’t really something that has kicked in for me in the years I’ve been scrapping. Sometimes I want to scrapbook something straight away, and other times I like to go back and tell a story from the past with some distance, which I find adds to how I tell the story. I’m glad there are no scrapbook police to show up on my doorstep and arrest me for not worrying about or ever wanting to be caught up with my scrapping. Nothing would frighten me more than being out of stories to tell!

While many scrappers use divided page protectors to scrapbook by the week or month, there is certainly no reason to be limited to that. In this case, the pockets showcase a full year of memories, divided so each row is one season. These are all photos that I wanted to include in my album for 2013, but were really quite minor and didn’t warrant a full page on their own. But together, they tell the story of all those simple things I am happy to have back in our little world since we moved back to the place that feels like home.

That’s Glitter Girl Adventure 105: Seasons and Schedules.

That brought our January to a close and we’ll start with a new mood board for February tomorrow, heading back to that inspired topic for the first week and so on. January included seventeen videos and a total of thirty projects, so that might explain why it took a bit longer than the average blog post to wrap it all up here. I hope something here catches your eye and wish you a very creative February!

---

_{The Garden Girls are the design team at Two Peas in a Bucket. You can always find our latest projects in the designer garden, including both layouts and videos. Any time you purchase a product by adding it to your bucket directly from the shopping list below a project, you support that designer’s work, and we thank you for that! We know that it’s not always possible to support your favourite designers with purchases, and we also appreciate when you take the time to leave a comment, like, or thumbs up a project or video. The 2014 Garden Girls are Amy Tan, Celine Navarro, Jennifer Gallacher, Jennifer Kinkade, Jill Sprott, Kristina Nicolai-White, Laura Craigie, Lisa Dickinson, Melanie Blackburn, Nancy Damiano, Paige Evans, Shimelle Laine, Stephanie Bryan, and Wilna Furstenberg. Two Peas also has its own blog and YouTube channel where you can subscribe for regular updates in this year’s inspiration and education programme.}

Comment [40]

Welcome to February! Today I have a new batch of scrapbooking product picks to make up the Best of Both Worlds kit for the month. It includes nine papers, all brand new releases, including some that hit the store just yesterday! It’s also a bit of a pink, turquoise, and grey party. I make no apologies: I will never have too much of this colour combination. There are some heart prints here that could go all Valentine if you wished, but I’ve selected these papers so that’s just an option, not a requirement. For example, that all-over heart print? The back is just wide textured stripes in shades of of pink. I used the aqua version of that paper for this layout and loved it so much I had to put the pink on this month’s list.

Click here to shop for the February Best of Both Worlds Scrapbooking Kit.

The embellishments this month are a desk full of happiness. I find turquoise to be one of the most versatile colours for letter stickers, so I went to town with those and there are turquoise Thickers, a pack from October Afternoon that includes both a larger script font and a small block font, and there are tiny turquoise letter stickers on the Amy Tangerine sticker sheet too. I can’t wait to work with those four all together. (But if that is seriously an overdose in one colour for you, I would suggest the option of swapping to these white Thickers which will also look lovely with the kit. They were my second choice.) In addition to all that sticker goodness, there are shaped paperclips, wood veneer hearts, and enamel shapes. Those wood veneer hearts are the same set Glitter Girl has used a couple times this January, here and here.

There is also a special wood veneer card you can only get at Two Peas with the artwork that appears in the new Amy Tangerine Plus One collection, with script writing by artist Kal Barteski. And the stamp set! This is a large stamp set so it is a higher price than some of the stamps I’ve picked over the past months (though not ridiculously expensive – it’s $9.99). Although my kit hasn’t arrived here just yet since quite a bit of this didn’t arrive at Two Peas until 48 hours ago, I had a chance to try these stamps at CHA and this is a really versatile set with a great look on paper. It takes on a completely different look whether stamped simply in black dye ink or dressed up with colours and embossing powders. Really striking! But if stamping is not your thing or if the kit comes up a bit out of your budget this month, taking the stamps out would be your biggest savings.

Speaking of which: if you’re new to the Best of Both Worlds kit, that’s basically the deal. There is no subscription and no requirement to buy everything on the list. If you want the kit just as suggested, add one of each to your bucket and place your order! But if there is something you already have or don’t love, you can leave it out. Likewise, you can add more of what you really adore (like extra papers for double page layouts, for example) or you can make substitutions (like trading turquoise letter stickers for another colour). The kit is posted here on the first of every month, and it’s first come, first served, so some items may sell out. They are usually restocked, but of course that doesn’t happen instantly. (The January kit is a mix of in stock and out of stock, for example.)

The February shipping discount code is 2AMEXK. You can use this with an order of $50 in physical, non-close-out goods. That’s a bit more than the kit, but there is plenty of brand new stuff in the shop, so it’s a good time to spend up a little if you like! If you’re in the UK and wondering about shipping prices, I ordered about $30 of extra stuff with my kit and the shipping was $25.36 before the discount code, and the discount code takes off $5 for international orders. Two Peas ships anywhere in the world and you can see the shipping price before you check out, so you can have a look and see if it works out for you or not.

I think that is pretty much it! There will be a guest artist again this month, and I will be posting pages when I am able. And something we’re trying this month is incorporating one of the printable designs. All of the Two Peas printables this month would go really well with the kit, but I’m thinking this one or this one are the best options. See if either suits your scrapping style!

Click here to shop for the February Best of Both Worlds Scrapbooking Kit.

Comment [4]

Hey guys!
Laura Craigie here today, and I’m excited to share five scrapbook pages that I made with the January edition of The Best of Both Worlds kit! I can honestly say that this kit was love at first sight. It has such a diverse colour palette, and the perfect amount of embellishments and alphas. I was able to make five pages, and I have SO much product left to work with, and the adorable stamps I know I’ll use again and again.

The first page I made kind of fell together. I opened the package of 3×4 Simple Stories cards and started pulling out ones I was drawn to, and the four of them just worked so well together I decided to base my whole page off them. Because the four cards fill up so much space on an 8.5×11” page all I had to do was add a few quick embellishments, some journaling and the page was complete!

The second page I made was simply a lot of fun to do! I love the Pink Paislee paper with the cutouts, but couldn’t really get it to work as a base for a page so I used some circle dies and cut out a number of the circle elements and raised them with adhesive foam so you could really see the star cut outs better. I also fussy cut the “love” script word from a Simple Stories card and adhered it over my photograph. When it came time to create my title, I knew I wanted to alter the products and I started by using a black marker to colour over the green alpha stickers to match my page better. I also decided to heat emboss the “boy” with a colour that would make the title really pop on the page.

I decided to keep things pretty simple for this page, and wanted to let the photographs shine. I did however want to create a fun title on the page and layered that over some negative space in the photographs. I have a ton of journaling to add for this page about life on my brother’s farm, but I ran out of printer ink and will simply create a secondary journaling page for the other side of the spread when I put it in my album.

I have been on a ‘hearts & scallops’ kick these days, and even though I’m a boy mom I don’t let that stop me! This kit had such great heart elements including stickers and a polka dot heart on the 3×4 card that I used here too. I used the scallop stamp from the stamp set with a navy ink and stamped that on the side of my photo. I think it would be adorable to stamp that around the entire photo too. There are also adorable chipboard scallops that I use on my next page too.

I saved my personal favourite page for last. The red/yellow/blue colour combo is so bold and definitely a favourite of mine right now. I loved the October Afternoon paper with the clocks and thought it would lend it self nicely to a page about time itself. In this case, how fleeting moments are. I swore I only blinked, and ten years has flown by. I tried to create a visual triangle with this page by using red and yellow elements in three spots around the photograph. I again coloured the green alpha stickers black to match my page, and used the gorgeous yellow chipboard frame to highlight part of my title.

I hope you are inspired to dig into your kit and I hope you share your projects, I would love to see them! This is truly such a lovely and versatile kit, which made it so very easy to create these pages, and many more I’m sure.

Laura Craigie lives with her husband and three busy boys on the west coast of Canada. She started scrapbooking in 2004 while pregnant with her first son, the rest as they say is history. Laura is proud to design for Pebbles, October Afternoon, and work as a Garden Girl at Two Peas in a Bucket. She loves nothing more than a quiet evening scrapbooking or making cards, once her kiddos are in bed. You can catch up with Laura on her blog PaperLulu or on Instagram as Justlulu.

Comment [18]

Please welcome artistic scrapbooker Jina Jean, all the way from Seoul, to shimelle.com today. She has some simple steps for a technique I never would have dreamt of, and I can’t wait to give it a try. We hope it inspires you too!

I’m excited to share with you how to make an artsy embellishment using tissue paper and gel medium. Tissue paper is one of my favourite materials for efficient expression of various details. As you know, tissue paper mainly has soft texture and transparent property, so it’s fit for airy and dreamy effects on your pages. But today I’m going to show you a different way to use tissue paper. I bet you’ll find it fun and unique!

You will need a few basic supplies: tissue paper, gel medium, watercolours, brush, any die-cut shape you want. (I chose stars cut with the Silhouette Cameo.)

First, I slightly painted over the tissue paper using watercolours and a wet brush.

Add more bright colours for beautiful effects.

Spread a thick layer of gel medium over the star cuts.

Then attach the tissue paper, adding more gel medium to make beautiful creases and rich texture.

Here you can see another dimension of tissue paper. The more it creases as it dries, the more fun it will be.

And paint gesso on the surface of stars with dry brush. It makes the texture a little bit shabby and I really like the technique.

Finally splatter gold ink to complete the tissue paper embellishment.

These are some of my favourite stars I created using tissue paper. It would be a unique accent for your project. Awesome!

And here’s my completed layout.

I built some layers and added my star accents and various embellishments to finish this page. Also I attached leftover tissue paper I painted on the corners of this layout. It seems to be original texture of tissue paper, soft and airy, different from the more manipulated star embellishments. That’s exactly the look I like, with multiple looks from the same product on one page, for a variety of textures.

I hope you enjoy this technique using tissue paper and I can’t wait to see your unique embellishments of tissue paper. What shape will you try?

Jina Jean lives in Seoul, South Korea with her family. She is single and is persuing a PhD in Literature. She started scrapbooking in 2009 and currently designs for Gossamer Blue and Write. Click. Scrapbook. You can see more of Jina’s projects on her blog, Atelier B .

Comment [12]

It happens to all of us, doesn’t it. All of those little bits of scrap papers pile up while we happily craft away. We are then faced with the beautiful mess on our desk that logic tells us should head straight to the waste basket…

Oh, but some of those papers are just too pretty, aren’t they? And, what if you are trying to make the most of your stash? Bottom line, sometimes we just can’t part with those lovely little scraps.

Well, I am excited to share a favorite technique of mine with you today! Please take a look at an easy way to put all of those little pieces and scraps to good use on a completed page…

I do hope that video inspired you to make to most of your scraps that you are having trouble parting with.

Here’s to making the most of our stash and using our favorite papers to the very last piece!

Thanks for joining me!

Ashli Oliver (aka soapHOUSEmama) is a recovering graphic designer, a homeschooling mother, wife, daughter, coffee addict, knitter and gardener with an extreme passion for mixed media paper crafting and memory keeping. Ashli finds great joy in both the creative process and the final piece. Most of her craft time is found in the wee hours of the evening when all of her kiddos are in dream land. Although, Ashli never misses an opportunity to grab a snippet of time during the day to shuffle some paper around. Ashli has been an artist her entire life. She followed her dreams and attended art college. While Ashli mostly wanted to play with paint and glue, she chose a more sensible major of Digital Multi-Media and Photography. After working in that industry on and off, Ashli put her computer and brushes aside to start her family. Never in a million years did she think that scrapbooking and the paper craft industry would re-awaken her inner artist that she had put away so many years ago. Thanks to a good friend who showed her the ropes just a lcouple years ago, Ashli has jumped into a pile of pretty paper and is never looking back! When Ashli is not blogging, you can also find her on Pinterest , Instagram, and Twitter .

Comment [20]

For as much as love single pages with single photos and more room to write, more room for pattern, more room to embellish without it feeling too crowded, I also have a big stack of photos I want to scrapbook. In fact, ‘big stack’ is laughable, because there is no way anyone could just put my 4×6 photos in one big stack. I keep them across four drawers and tend to deal with a little bit of overspill all the time. (Right now it’s those wedding photos from last May that have a special box all their own rather than fit into the drawer just yet.) Suffice to say, when I hear ‘but I have too many photos to just put one on a page’, I hear you.

I think the difference is just that one photo on a page doesn’t bother me, and then I include other pages that make up for it with plenty of photos. To go opposite that last page I shared, I made a pocket page with four 4×6 photos, while still having room for a 4×6 title card, a 3×4 journaling card, and a 3×4 wood veneer card just for fun. I also challenged myself to just turn on the camera and film while I scrapped rather than my normal process of scrapping upside down and explaining as I go, so today I have a short video to share with you to show how this pocket page came together.

This page uses supplies remaining in my August Best of Both Worlds kit, plus a divided page protector. (For those keeping tabs, I have one more 12×12 page from that kit to share with you, then I’m moving on to the next set of supplies.)

This finished page sits to the left in my album where the ‘midday milkshakes’ layout sits on the right. All the photos here are taken from where I would sit there on our little middle of the day break, with a view of the river, the menu, and the street. Since the story of all this is explained on the facing page, the pocketed page protector is there just as a very easy way to include more photographs that bring back the memory of this place, but it’s the one I put on its own that brought the story to mind, so I singled that one out and grouped all the rest here.

For now, the back of that page protector won’t have anything showing. As I work on photos in that section of the album (my albums go in chronological order, even within a special event album like this) I will decide to either fill the reverse with photos and journaling cards as well, or to cut a 12×12 patterned paper to the right sized boxes to fill the spaces. Because the wood veneer card looks best without anything behind it, I think I will opt for the first option, and I’ll figure out at some point what photos are best there. But it doesn’t bother me at all to see the backs of the photos and the papers right now when I flip through the album – won’t be the first or last time that happens, so I just embrace it.

Thanks so much for stopping by today. For those who haven’t seen it yet, Two Peas announced their education and inspiration programme for 2014 earlier this week. Glitter Girl videos are still on Wednesday. They are changing just a little bit and I’ll share more about that once this week’s is live. You can see the whole schedule here, and it’s a schedule I’m very excited to have in front of me. We’ve been working on a lot of projects behind the scenes for Two Peas’ fifteenth year, and there is much inspiration coming your way. I hope you enjoy!

Comment [22]

Moving right along then with the August kit and some long overdue sketches, I came up to a design for a single photo and knew just the thing I had in mind, filed away under ‘somewhat random but still important’ as a story I wanted to include in my backpacking album, all about our midday routine while in Luang Prabang, Laos, which included milkshakes while sitting on the riverside. Yes, I’m scrapping about milkshakes. You’re right, I probably have lost the plot a bit.

This sketch is designed for a single 4×6 landscape photo with an accompanying story. It’s another design that is purposely meant for those patterned papers you love but don’t want to cover entirely – there is plenty of open space to let a pattern breathe.

Pretty much everything for this page comes from the August Best of Both Worlds kit. I know, I know: it is far from August. I can but move forward! The good news is most of that kit is still in stock and 25% off until Sunday the 5th of January too. I added a sheet of 12×12 kraft cardstock for the background and then the black ink pad of course.

I know it may seem strange to devote an entire page to one seemingly random 4×6 photo – it’s hardly a beautiful portrait or an amazing bit of scenery. It’s milkshakes of all things. But for me, it makes sense to take the space when there is a particular memory that is important, even if it’s not a traditional milestone. This image represents something that was very important for me to get written down in my backpacking album. There is quite a bit of open space on the page (in the form of the patterned paper) and that gives me two things that will work well for those sorts of important stories: one, if the story hadn’t fit in the space that it did, there is the potential to add more elsewhere, and two, using one pattern with relatively few colours and a repeating design can help direct your eye to the writing and emphasise its importance. It’s not a story tucked away in a corner of a page with lots going on – it has a space all its own.

That said, I had some more random memories and photos that went alongside this story in the form of a divided page protector for the facing page. I’ll share that next so you can see the balance between this more minimal and that one with more stuff in the same space.

For a second look at this sketch, let me introduce Jill Sprott with her interpretation in beautiful yellow.

This is my kind of sketch! It emphasizes the basics — a photo, some journaling, and a few accents — while also allowing room for interpretation. I sized down the sketch to work with an 8.5” x 11” layout, and reduced the margins around the photo and journaling block a bit. Since there is so much open space in the photo, I added the title to the photo itself rather than below it, and replaced the title block on the sketch with a sunburst pattern (from October Afternoon) that parallels the rays of sunlight in the photo. I built on the blocks in the sketch by adding layers and strips of patterned paper (from American Crafts, October Afternoon, Farmhouse Paper Company, and Studio Calico). Some of the patterns repeat the colors in the photo, while others serve to reinforce the theme of the layout. I also backed the photo with a rectangle of vellum, to add a shimmery quality to the sun-centered layout.

The most important aspect of this page, in my view, is the journaling. It begins with a ‘surface’ view, commenting on the photo itself, but it starts to move beyond that, commenting on the photo as a metaphor for the mindset that I wish to embrace as another school year begins. I usually try to avoid talking about the act of taking a photo in my journaling, since I would rather focus on telling stories or sharing my thoughts and feelings. I want to say more than, ‘So-and-so took the time to smile for the camera.’ In this case, however, the act of taking the photo and what followed from that is part of the story, contributing to the overall meaning of this page.

Jill Sprott lives on Oahu, Hawaii, with her husband, daughter, and their menagerie of pets. She is a high school English teacher, which makes for pretty busy days, but on the weekends, when not grading papers, Jill shifts from working with words to playing with words and pictures, surrounded by patterned paper. Like teaching, scrapbooking is a creative, challenging, colorful, and rewarding endeavor. Jill is currently on the design teams for October Afternoon and Jenni Bowlin Studio, and is a Garden Girl at Two Peas in a Bucket. You can follow Jill on her blog, Use Your Words.

Now it’s your turn. I’d love to see you you interpret this sketch with your own style and stories. As always, this sketch is just for fun and everyone is welcome.

Comment [7]

Jumping back a little, I have a big stack of pages and scrapbooking videos to share with you over the next few days! Today I’m starting with the video I included as a preview link in the last post – but now it’s here properly so you can also see the finished page and download the sketch to give it a try.

When I originally drew this sketch, I was on a real kick of printing multiple photos on a 4×6 photo print, and in landscape I prefer the 3×2 ratio to the 4×3, if that makes any difference to you, so that’s what I had in mind when I put the sketch together. Except I did that in the earliest days of 2013, and by the time we got to August supplies, I had moved on a bit and found myself with a big stack of 4×4 photos that really need to be scrapped. Then today’s guest used this sketch for 4×6 prints, so the happy part of this story is that this sketch seems to work really easily with a range of print sizes! Pair two prints with one background paper you really love and don’t want to cover up, and you’re halfway to a completed layout already.

This page was made with just supplies from my August Best of Both Worlds kit, most of which is currently in stock and 25% off, including my ‘Nailed It’ stamp set.

The 4×6 boxes as slightly messy layers behind the photo isn’t something I had planned when I drew the sketch either but I think it makes a huge difference to the page design. With a page that has plenty of white space, a little goes a long way in terms of small angles and just a few layers. And if you’ve watched the video and realised I said I would add the date and location before I finished and then I didn’t… I did realise the next morning so you can see it there at the top right corner. Things like that make me glad my head is screwed on tightly, or I would leave it on the train.

As far as the title – we made a bit of a promise to ourselves in the last year or so that we would get in the picture more often. Sometimes it works really well! Other times it is not quite awesome. This particular day I imagined some amazing pictures but in reality, it just wasn’t going to happen. The Boy made silly faces. I told him he could keep making silly faces, I would scrapbook them. I’m just keeping my word as a wife, clearly.

For a second look at this sketch, let me introduce Rachel Hull with her interpretation in another pretty blue floral!

I love following sketches & this was a great way to get back into scrapping after having my daughter. The kraft backing and photos were easy to select and then I slowly built up the embellished areas with stickers, washi tape, ribbon and punches and layered a project life card over a simple office tag for my journalling. I have been scrapping for over five years now, and whilst I don’t always get as much time as I used to, I like to keep on top of my Project Life album. However 12×12 pages will always stay close to my heart and I will always fit them in when i have time as I find them much more enjoyable.

Rachel currently lives in Leeds with her husband Rob and brand new baby daughter Martha, she has been scrapbooking for several years and divides any free time between scrapping and knitting. She runs her own blog, Rewarding Memories, including notes on plenty of crafty endeavours.

Now it’s your turn. I’d love to see you you interpret this sketch with your own style and stories. As always, this sketch is just for fun and everyone is welcome.

Comment [8]