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

My next stop was October Afternoon. I can’t think of a single paper collection they have released that I haven’t liked and purchased! And they have new papers, of course. Starting with the 9 to 5 collection.

9 to 5 features greens and oranges, which looks a lot cuter than it sounds. Embellishments include brads, stickers, labels, tin pin badges, die cuts and chipboard as well as washi tape and new coordinating colours of Sprinklers spray inks.

See that telephone photo thing? That something is very cool. It’s a new product called Chapters, and it’s essentially a set of mini book pages, all ready to make your own creation. If you liked the idea of the papers in Smash Books but wanted more freedom to make the book your own, this is exactly what you want. Each line has a great mix of images in the Chapters kit.

The papers are a mix of kitsch and small repetitive patterns. I think that’s why I find October Afternoon papers so easy to use: I cut my favourite elements from the bigger designs and then use the smaller, less specific patterns for backgrounds, boxes, border strips and pretty much anything else. If you’ve never used October Afternoon products, you’ll also love the quality of their paper stock. Their designs are cream-based and the paper is sturdy and smooth.

Collection two is called Cakewalk, with a happy colour scheme mixing soft shades with circus brights without relying on that elementary look of too many primary colours.

Same styles of embellishments and accompanying products – but to match the celebratory feel of the Cakewalk collection.

And more lovely papers!

Be still my heart: so many lovely shades of Mini Market letter stickers and Sprinklers spray inks. I love these two product lines and use them on the vast majority of my projects.

The third collection is called Woodland Park, which might be the most interesting of the three in that some elements break away from the recent designs – in a good way that adds breadth to the collection without making them look like they don’t belong.

Blue and green abound in this collection, but there are elements of pink and yellow thrown in the mix too. Not many manufacturers do nice deep blues, so this is a welcome colour scheme in my book.

And the papers: here’s what I mean by something different. That cloud paper isn’t something I would expect from October Afternoon, and yet I love it. There are chevrons and butterflies, which makes me happy of course. The trees remind me of one of the early October Afternoon prints but these are a bit larger and will be easier to cut out for both layouts and cards.

These collections are scheduled to ship to stores throughout the spring.

Click here to shop for October Afternoon products.

If you are attending the show, find October Afternoon at booth 1293.

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Next up: the second scrapbooking collection from Amy Tangerine, entitled Sketchbook. It’s bright and watercoloured and looks great with kraft cardstock and graph paper. Sketchbook ships to stores this March.

New Thickers letter stickers in foam, glitter, and wood-grain chipboard.

Another pack of mixed die-cuts to match this line. I am on pack four from her original collection, so definitely looking forward to these!

So much happy here! From left, a Camera. Printed. Album. YES! It’s a fabric-covered D-ring album in 12×12, and you can add anything you want to the window in the middle. Then the new set of clear stamps (includes the phrase ‘how lovely’ which I will obviously overuse). Paper rosette details. And two new Daybooks: one in white and one with a spiral binding to add to the existing five volumes in the Daybooks series.

Canvas stickers – love this texture. I was curious how the colours would print on canvas but I’m happy to report they look great and match the other items perfectly. There are also new tapes (black and white prints) and ribbons to coordinate with this line.

A look at the lovely papers – cameras, dots, hearts, splashes of colour.

This line makes me ready to be done with grey winter. Bring on summer photo opportunities and scrapping in happy colours.

And some general prettiness around the booth! Are you itching to cut and glue and layer now?

This made Amy the first of the Two Peas Garden Girls I found on the show floor. Amy has some fabulous fun scheduled for later in the show with some interactive art, so I have to head back to see that! (Don’t worry: I’ll take pictures.)

*Click here to shop for Amy Tangerine scrapbooking supplies.

If you’re attending the show, you’ll find Amy Tangerine in booth 1057, as part of the American Crafts family of brands.

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Ready for things to get really photographic? Because really you want to see pictures of all these lovely new crafty things. Got it.

And we’ll start with the always-lovely Jenni Bowlin Studio.

The JBS booth features four new collections to check out: two new paper lines (Magpie and Wren), a beautiful mix of new alterable items and the recent release of JBS punches from Fiskars.

If you haven’t seen the punches, here they are! Border, squeeze and lever punches, and these have just hit shops. You can find them here.

Seriously beautiful punch layering, right? So pretty.

Magpie is the first paper release – this will ship to stores in mid February. Magpie has a beautiful palette that mixes some softer tones with red and a tiny bit of black to keep it versatile and not pastel.

The new Magpie stickers include a mixed sheet (perfect for everyday scrapping documentation!) and very cool hexagonal stickers that are a great new twist on the expected circles and rectangles. I love how Jenni always gives things a simple change – it makes all her products so very easy to use but still exciting and fun.

The accessory sheet has border strips with both handwriting and coffee labels? I promise I didn’t pay her to do that. But I love it.

Love collection packs? You’re all set. Plus more hexagon stickers – red/black and cream/black to match pretty much everything!

Onto something else: Mixed Media Bases. So many things to decorate, keep around the house, and otherwise beautify life. A chalkboard easel? Small storage box with ‘handmade’ motifs? Definitely.

Will you hang necklaces, crafty ribbons or beautiful tags from something like this hotel key holding board? I wish I had something so cute in my old office when we had a million keys to keep straight!

Here’s how they might look once you art them up. Love that idea of adding a photo and some writing of whatever is a current event in your home – so change it up for holidays, birthdays, graduations, student of the week, awesome new haircut – whatever you want to celebrate!

This line also includes new clear stamp designs, printed pockets and tags (perfect for divided page protectors!) and plain chipboard in both button and tab shapes.

And this little vignette sets the tone for the second paper collection, Wren. Wren ships to stores in April.

It mixes beautifully with the pockets and tags, with a crisp blue and red colour scheme.

I love how the collection makes me think of Sunday brunch at a favourite diner, though it could certainly be used in patriotic designs if you’re so inclined.

And one last little addition: die-cut papers in kraft and white. Can’t wait to see how these look layered and misted and painted and inked. And the repetitive designs would be great for cardmaking for events when you need a whole set to match. Perfect for a vintage-themed wedding, right? (Come on: someone wants me to make pretty things for your vintage-themed wedding. Apparently it is frowned upon to like the idea of making more wedding things once you’re already married!)

And my face may look at a little this, surrounded by all these beautiful papers and projects! (This page is by Stephanie Howell – and the projects throughout the booth are by Jenni and the JBS design team.)

Click here to shop for scrapbooking supplies by Jenni Bowlin Studio.

If you’re attending the show, find JBS at booth 1773. (And I’ll be there Tuesday from show open till around 1pm, if you want to say hello and put me to work!)

Right – start making your wish list!

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In just a few minutes, the doors will open to the winter trade show from CHA – the Craft and Hobby Association. Across various crafts, manufacturers present their new collections for the year ahead, including plenty of new scrapbooking lines and papercrafting collections. And I’m very excited to be here blogging all this fun! Look for your favourites, brand by brand, throughout the next four days of posts.

And a little something extra special: I have more than $200 in gift certificates to give away throughout the show. Ten commenters between now and the 2nd of February will be randomly selected from all the comments left on the CHA posts to win a $10 gift certificate to Two Peas in a Bucket and even better? One person will win $100 to spend on anything you wish at Two Peas. A hundred bucks! This prize will be selected to a randomly chosen from all the comments left and those who pin a post to Pinterest or share a link via Twitter or Facebook. Share your favourites with friends and you’re entered to win – possibly the easiest hundred bucks ever.

Right – I’m off to run through that door and start snapping photos. I’ll be updating frequently over the next few days and I hope you see something that strikes your fancy!

xlovesx

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This week one lucky commenter will win a TWO pairs of earrings from Safi & Sasu

Safi & Sasu is a new store on Etsy selling Tibetan silver earrings, featuring charms such as Owls, the tree of life, love hearts and cute little elephants.

To enter, just leave a comment on this post, with a description of your favourite pair of earrings from the Safi and Sasu shop.

Entries close at midnight Thursday UK time and the winner will be posted Friday evening, so be sure to check back to see if it’s your lucky day!

Good luck!

The winner for last weeks giveaway is Nicky!

Congratulations to Nicky who wins the hand crafted egg from Pinkworks

Nicky please email me (shimelle at gmail dot com) with your address.

Have a great week!

xlovesx

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_{Class content ©twopeasinabucket.com.}

In this week’s adventure, Glitter Girl takes on the question of how much ‘stuff’ is enough ‘stuff’, an issue currently being discussed here on the General Scrapbooking message board at Two Peas. Her adventure takes her the completion of three layouts this week: one layout that just didn’t feel finished in the album and two pages from a basic starting point to the end result. Plus a review of products that make layering and grouping embellishments very simple – many of which are on sale right now at Two Peas, but more about that in a minute.

About those products… if you have a look at this page you can see a big shopping list at the bottom – it includes the specifics from the three layouts plus a bunch of products I turn to again and again for layering. Some of them are ridiculous bargains at the moment – like some colours of the Studio Calico label stickers are just 87¢, and the stamp set with that lovely woodgrain background is $2.99 – but keep in mind that the big trade show starts this weekend. That means two good things: big sales and new things on their way, but also a bad thing: if you miss something you want now, it probably won’t be restocked. I have learned that lesson the hard way more than once, so there you go!

This layout might look slightly familiar, depending on how much you pay attention! You can see it in its original form here and even then I made a note that it didn’t feel finished, but I added it to my album it has been there ever since, not nearly as dressed up as the other pages in the book. There’s actually nothing wrong with it, of course. It shows the photos and documents the story and it fits the colour scheme I was working with in that section of the album. It’s not a case of right and wrong. It’s a case of being happy with what’s in the album, and sometimes that means I go back and make changes. I am sure there are scrappers out there who would prefer the before with its cleaner design as well as scrappers who would like neither – but I prefer the made-over version and am happy for it to be in my albums. So for me, that was a good use of time and energy.

There’s a chance this page may look a little familiar too – but this one isn’t a makeover. It is, however, a bit like this page, which is also a wedding photobooth page on white cardstock with pink and black and glitter! Some similarities, but certainly not the same layout, which is fine by me.

Proof that I put my stash to use straight away: the Sassafras stickers and the KI Memories tape I mentioned in the recent digest are both here on this page. I have to admit I feel a bit victorious when I manage to do that! (Though not as victorious as I will feel one day when I magically use every single letter on a sticker sheet in genuine words.)

Doily paper is just amazing, right? I love it as a full sheet (like this) or cut into separate doilies to layer and embellish (like this). But I think it’s the title placement that is a bit of a surprise here. It’s not what I normally would expect from this starting point, which makes it seem like all that room on the right is just waiting for a title. But part of what makes layering details work is to keep things very close together, so with the photo facing that corner of the page, it created a little window of space just right for the title, meaning layers of embellishment can go to the right. And because the background is a pretty overwhelming pattern, lots of empty space doesn’t look empty at all.

This idea of adding an extra colour quite near the end is something I do more often than I care to admit. It sometimes feels like a lack of planning when I’m working on a page – I was just going along thinking ‘pink and kraft and cream’ and it just wasn’t enough. There needed to be some sort of visual contrast without adding something that was going to take over the page. So I started with the embroidery hoop embellishment, then added the punched hearts and presto: the addition of an entirely unplanned colour, and it brightened the page and kept it from falling into a dreary bit labelled ‘lack of tonal variety’. Don’t be afraid to add something entirely different when you feel a page is almost – but not quite – finished.

This week Glitter Girl challenges you to make a page with ‘stuff’ too. You can add more to a layout in your album that didn’t make you happy or you can start from scratch. Create something to share with the Two Peas community and in your project description, tell us about how you found inspiration there. Be sure to click the challenge box when you upload a picture to the gallery. You can also leave a link here in the comments to share what you have made!

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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Someone glittery is helping me out with not one but two scrapbook starting points this week. She’s prepared a big mission this week, and these starting points are a little sneak of her adventures. But you won’t have to wait very long at all to see how these pages turned out.

This starting point includes a full sheet of patterned paper for the background, plus a stack of papers just slightly bigger than 4×6, with each layer a bit bigger than the last. One is punched with a notebook edger and a 2×7 strip of paper runs the other direction to all those in the stack.

And the second starting point has a white cardstock background, plus patterned papers by KI Memories, Doodlebug and Echo Park. The tall column is 3×12, the longest horizontal strip is about 1×11, plus a smaller strip at 1×5 and a 4×5ish box. If you’re going to scrap a 4×6 photo on this page, you might want to increase the size of the box to become a photo mat.

A little thought about these two side by side, before I can show you the finished pages: the first looks busier, but it’s entirely down to the patterned paper background as there really isn’t any more to the layers on that page than the second. But the clean white background of the second page makes it appear more minimal! Something to keep in mind if one style or the other suits your fancy perhaps.

Here are four favourites from the last starting point, which generated everything from minimal to lots of layers! Clockwise from top left, these pages are from Soaphousemama, Dapfnie, Ann and Sabbyscrap.

So… what do these two starting points say to you? Glitter Girl will show you her finished versions very soon!

xlovesx

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Last week I switched gears from thank you cards just temporarily to start thinking a little about all things red and make up a few Valentines. You can see more of these layered envelopes on the JBS inspiration blog.

Which begs a Monday morning question: are you planning on any special Valentine projects? Do tell!

xlovesx

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