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

If I could only scrapbook with the supplies from one collection this year, it would be the Amy Tangerine collection. (Admittedly, I might cry first. Because I really, really like mixing collections. But since this is an imaginary restriction, I’m going to try to keep the tears and tantrums to a minimum.) I love the colours – rich turquoise, ripe raspberry pink, avocado green – and the motifs are inspiring without being sickly sweet. Cameras, maps, handwritten affirmations. All things that rate highly in my book.

So it is with great anticipation that I look forward to Amy’s new release for American Crafts: Sketchbook.

Think an updated, summery colour palette and a bit more freedom in the designs. With the tag line Splash some color on life (which you know I want to respell, but I’ll cope for today), this line promises an artsy twist, but still easy to craft with, no matter what your style, just like the American Crafts tradition. Sounds good to me. My intention is to use the two collections together, so I’m especially interested to see how they coordinate.

But really I don’t know all that much more than you do at this point! Today you can hop through ten different blogs to get a peek at the new Sketchbook collection, and my contribution is this canvas camera sticker. Yep, I think I can find a spot for that in my albums!

To continue on the journey, head over to Jennifer McGuire for the next look. Once you’ve made the full circle, be sure to visit the American Crafts blog, for the chance to win the full Sketchbook collection. A pretty fabulous reward for a bit of crafty blog reading!

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By the way… I will be covering Winter CHA right here on the blog – that’s the big craft trade show where all the new collections (like this) debut. The show opens on the twenty-ninth of January, and I’ll be blogging one brand at a time, so you can come right onto the show floor with me, except you can stay on the sofa and avoid paying nine dollars for a cheese sandwich in a convention centre. Sound like a deal? Awesome.

xlovesx

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This weekend, one commenter will win two hand carved rubber stamps from Skull and Cross Buns. The fabulous bunting and the cute heart topped Cupcake stamp, each unique and beautiful.

Emily Fox is the designer and creator of “Skull and Cross Buns” Stamps. Residing in idyllic Devon she is inspired by her love of Skulls and cakes. “I come from a really creative family too, my mum is a fantastic textile artist and cake maker and my aunt makes jewellery and greeting cards. My two children love to stamp too, I’m always being pestered to carve them something new, which is great but my sofa is starting to look like a stamp brochure – Ooops!”

You can see more of Emily on her blog and in her Etsy and Folksy

To enter, just leave a comment on this post describing what you love about the uniqueness of handmade.

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!

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The winner for last Friday’s giveaway of a place on Lain’s Layout a Day class is Jane! Jane please email me (shimelle at gmail dot com) with your details.

Have a fabulous weekend!

xlovesx

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Welcome to the very first day of Saying Thanks, my personal mission to make, write and send a great deal of thank you cards to start the year! This first tutorial is for a very simple card, and I’ll be honest: I like many of my cards very simple! I think it takes a certain kind of recipient to really appreciate a card that takes a very long time to create, and most people appreciate something that is simple yet handmade. And there is absolutely no reason why simple can’t be beautiful, as most of good design reminds us in branding, stationery and all other sorts of things. So I’m starting simple.

I’m also starting with an idea of not being wasteful. Not collecting stamps without using them. I ordered some Christmas stamps that didn’t arrive until a few days after Christmas, so they won’t be useful for Christmas cards until next year. But they can still be useful for scrapbooking Christmas photos, of course, and I believe they are appropriate for thank you cards sent regarding Christmas things, like saying thank you for a Christmas gift or to the hostess of a Christmas party. So I’m going with it, even though it’s January. Christmas stamps, you will not sit in my drawer uninked for a year! You will start stamping now!

For these cards I used this Hero Arts stamp (currently on sale), this Technique Tuesday sentiments stamp set, this Hero Arts background stamp (not sure where that one might still be in stock), Jenni Bowlin for Ranger inks, American Crafts pigment ink (in brown sugar on kraft cardstock for a very subtle pattern) and a bit of Distress Ink too. The star stickers are by Studio Calico.

Plus, with a simple card you can always dress it up. Add stickers. Add pop-dots for dimension. ADD GLITTER.

You know you want to. (I just used a glue pen and dotted it about the stars, then sprinkled the glitter over the top. Seriously an under-sixty-seconds technique for all that sparkle.)

Do you have a big stamp like this that could work for a simple thank you card? If you make something similar, please share – we would love to see what you make! And thank you for stopping by!

(Why yes, that does mean there are more thank you card videos on the way! I hope you enjoy.)

Thank you for reading and watching. Always.

xlovesx

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_{Class content ©twopeasinabucket.}

In her second adventure, Glitter Girl tackles the mists of magnitude, an issue currently being discussed here on the General Scrapbooking message board at Two Peas.

This adventure takes her through the differences in various mist and spray product lines, including which white sprays show up on black cardstock, and on to create two scrapbook pages with an assortment of misting techniques.

_{Click here for supplies.}
On this page, the obvious ideas of spraying the background and splattering bigger drops of ink, but also my favourite thing about cream coloured mist, which is painting a white-based sticker cream to match another collection. In this case, that means BasicGrey stickers (which are printed on white) can match with October Afternoon stickers (printed on cream) and act as if they always existed in harmony. This minor concept makes me happier than I can explain.

_{Click here for supplies. Oh, and that smile sticker is incorrectly identified in the video. It’s by KI Memories, not Doodlebug. You can find it here and Glitter Girl apologises for the error.}
And a second page this week, to demonstrate how white mist can be particularly useful with patterned papers, and because I’m not ready to put that snowflake punch away with the Christmas decorations!

Any more ideas for mists you would like to share? Please do! Glitter Girl would love to hear from you in the comments. And she challenges you to share a layout or a project with your favourite brand of mist in the gallery this week.

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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On the tenth of the month, a bunch of us share ten things. Any ten things. All different kinds of ten things. And you’re welcome to join us.

For January, I’m sharing my ten favourite scrapbook pages from 2011. At the bottom of this post, link up your own ten things on absolutely any topic you fancy, and click around to see other lists of ten!

And my ten pages… in order of when they were made, I do believe.
1. He is only somewhat mad, designed for Jenni Bowlin Studio and Ella Publishing. When we arrived home, the first few pages I made felt completely strange, like paper and glue was a foreign concept. This was the page that marked my turning point. Making this made me think happy things about crafting again. (See full page here.)

2. Overnight Train, with a giant photo that still makes me nervous, having later found out The Boy snapped it by hanging out the side of the train. Designed for the garden at Two Peas, and one of my most popular pages there this year, but I like it more than the most popular. Go figure.

3. San Telmo, one of just two scrapbook pages I’ve completed about the South American part of our trip. Designed for Kelly Purkey’s Sketchbook class, and based on one of her sketches.

4. Travel Well, a page designed for the garden at Two Peas, which ended up naming an episode of the Paperclipping Roundtable, when we got to talk about scrapbooking travel. Orange and turquoise: who knew?

5. Seaside Hike, a scrapbook page with a bunch of mists and my favourite product from 2011: Foldies! Designed for Two Peas as a community challenge.

6. Siem Reap, based on the sketch challenge I set the participants in the ScrapFactor competition, and one of the very first videos I posted here. Love the layers and circles and just the sheer number of ways you can use this sort of design with different supplies. Plus Cambodia. Sigh.

7. On Stage, a layout and a half, with a rather special photo and lots of writing. Pages with that combination make me very happy indeed. (More details here.)

8. Rock & Roll Romance, a funny little layout in that I really like it but no one else seems to think much of it. Maybe it’s because it’s a double page. Maybe it’s because no one but us thinks it’s funny that we crashed a concert to get a wedding picture. That’s okay. It has a special place in my heart even if no one else loves this layout.

9. Inspiration Found, from a day of crafting with an absolute mess of stuff on my desk and just layering until I couldn’t layer any more. I love it, and in the end it was one of the pages I sent to American Crafts for consideration and they must have liked it too. Good times. (Full page here).

10. Goodbye Australia, a page to close one volume of our travel albums, and featured in a prompt of Pretty Paper Party, an online class. (Though the class has finished its live run, it is available to be taken at your own pace at any time.)

Runner-up layouts include this project (my most-viewed project ever at Two Peas), any of the pages made for the scrapbooking with girl power post and the giant rose layout tutorial I made for the JBS newsletter.

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Welcome to And Now For Something Completely Different, a monthly scrapbooking challenge I’m leading at UKScrappers throughout 2012. I would love for you to join me!

Each month of 2012, I invite you to join me for a start-to-finish craft along, in which we’ll all make a scrapbook page. Each month we’ll make something completely different, so you’ll have a variety of pages on a variety of themes with a variety of techniques. Heck, let’s just start a variety show while we’re at it!

Today is your ten day warning: each month I’ll post a look at the supplies I’m using on the tenth, and the craft along tutorial is posted on the twentieth, so you have ten days to get your pictures and supplies ready to go.

For January’s project, you will need three small square photographs. Mine are 2.5 inches, but you can vary this if you prefer. Above you can see my supplies. You can use exactly the same or your can substitute similar items in colours and patterns that suit your own style. See this post on UKScrappers for an itemised list and further notes on substituting other products to create your own page kit for January’s project. UK-based scrappers, the UKS sponsors can help source your supplies. US-based readers can find a list of supplies here (do take care that list includes the papers both individually and in the collection kit, just depending on what you prefer for your albums, and it does not include the larger of the two alphabets so you would need something similar from your stash).

The project will be posted on the twentieth of January, so for the next ten days you can get ready and chat about your speculations on this thread at UKScrappers. So what do you reckon we’ll be trying this month?

xlovesx

PS: 10 Things on the Tenth will be live just a bit later so you can link up your post!

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I’ve nearly found a place for papers and stickers and stamps to be happy in their new place without constantly stepping on a box that still needs to be unpacked. So many steps in the right direction! Now just don’t ask me to find anything in the first place I look. Aside from pens and Thickers, most things take me at least two guesses, even though half my drawers and boxes are accurately labelled with their contents. But hey, I don’t even know where the cutlery drawer is in the kitchen either, so apparently it just takes me a while to get my bearings.

But this I remember: scrapbook starting points! It’s back, and it’s on Mondays now, so you can use this starting point any time throughout the week and next Monday I’ll post a new starting point and a round-up of favourites from the previous starter. This week Starting Points is brought to you by BasicGrey and their Picadilly collection. Circle and star punches also came in handy.

To follow this starting point, you will need a full sheet of pattern for the background, plus rectangles at 4.5×10.5, 3×7, 2×6.5, 1.5×2.5 and 1×3 inches, plus three circles and six stars. You can, of course, swap the stars for any other motif you like.

I didn’t add very much to my finished page actually! A funny little wallet-size print that was one of my senior pictures from my last year of high school, some BasicGrey letter stickers and some Hambly washi tape, plus a Jenni Bowlin journaling card.

But you can finish this starting point in any style you like! What do you fancy? Give it a go with your photos and share your end result!

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This January, I’m excited to be the special guest at BasicGrey, with a few projects to share with you. This first layout is my favourite kind of project with BG papers: some simple detail yet plenty of space to show all the lush patterns in their collections. These papers and stickers are from their Picadilly collection, with an Instax picture the lovely Laura snapped for us way back when on our second anniversary.

If you fancy a sketch challenge, head to this BasicGrey blog post and give it a whirl with some of your favourite papers!

…and keep your eyes open for the return of the weekly sketch right here this week!
Enjoy the rest of your weekend!

xlovesx

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