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

Good news, I think. After a two-week-and-one-day hiatus, sketch of the week is back. That’s good, right? I mean the coming back part. Not the hiatus part. But onward.

Also, this week’s sketch is a little different to the normal drill in that I didn’t draw it. Amidst a day that mixed work, craft and coffee with Relly Annett-Baker (find her here on Twitter until she finishes her scrapbooky web presence), she drew me a sketch and challenged me to scrap from that. She also gave me strict instructions, like “use pretty things”. I am hoping I pass muster.

This week’s sketch includes one 4×6 portrait photo and a smaller square image, which I printed at 3 inches. I used vanilla cardstock, woodgrain paper from Hambly, Thickers letters by American Crafts and stickers and die-cuts from Colorbok, along with Jenni Bowlin paint and Glimmer Mist. But of course you can use any colours and supplies you fancy!

The Miss Erin in the picture is Erin Loechner, by the way. She blogs at Design for Mankind.

As always, the weekly sketch is no-stress and just for fun! If you use it, I’d love to see, so please leave a link if you post your page online.

All those many moons ago, the last sketch included three photos in a sort of grid. These are six of my favourite interpretations. Click the corresponding link to see each page in more detail and get to know the scrapper who created it.
Top row, L to R: one, two, three.
Bottom row, L to R: four, five and six.
Thank you to everyone who joined in!

Now… are you up for some sketchy scrapping this week? I hope you’ll give Relly’s sketch a try!

ETA: Relly has made a page from her own sketch too. Find it here.

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_{Random aside: I processed this picture with the new Radlab addition to Photoshop and I’m loving it so far. I used it in CS3 but you can use it in Photoshop Elements too. I’m going to blog more about it on Saturday.}

Yesterday The Boy and I had a scrapbooking discussion. It happens less often than you might think, as usually scrapbooking interactions with The Boy go something like Does this layout look finished? and he replies “Yeah, I guess,” and on we go about our merry day. But yesterday we were actually talking about scrapbooking. And writing. And blogging. And why it hasn’t become popular to add video to digital scrapbook pages so they look like the newspapers from Harry Potter. But mostly the writing stuff.

He read my travel posts after were back at home, not over my shoulder while I was typing them. Mostly because I can’t write at all if someone is watching over my shoulder. It makes me too conscious of how much I edit as I type. In this paragraph alone, I’ve made six seven changes. If someone were watching, I’d have made at least eighteen, I reckon. So he read them in one sitting, I think, and then got curious as to what I had been writing in my journal along the trip was the same stuff I was blogging or if I had written just the details – itinerary style – with my pen then created the more thoughtful stuff later. For the first week or two, I had written just a report of where we went and what we saw. It felt like work. On a busy day and when nothing was in English, it was hard to figure out where we had been. In my head ‘we went to a floating market and sat in a row boat’ could suffice but I had to refer to guidebooks or the internet to find the name of the market and the type of boat and what we had for lunch. Sometimes I regretted looking up what we had for lunch. Trust me when I say some things in the world taste way better when you don’t know what they are.

Soon I tired of the tedium of those kinds of reports in my journal and I decided to let those details go. I wasn’t a researcher. I wanted to experience each day, not stress about the minutiae of the map coordinates. I am not leading an expedition to new lands. I’m a scrapbooker on holiday. So one day my journal turned from the factual reports to my real thoughts on a place and I’ve never regretted that. I wrote about little things I saw and bigger things they made me think about. I wrote about how old ladies smile in Viet Nam and how I cried at a makeshift petrol station even though I was riding a bicycle. I don’t know the name of the village with that petrol station, but that’s okay. I also don’t know what you really call a petrol station when it’s actually a shelf on the side of someone’s house with a glass jar of petrol and a money box.

Anyway, while The Boy and I were having this scrapbooking conversation, he said sometimes when he reads what I write, it’s like we were on two different trips. Not that he didn’t physically go to the same exact places, but that we were thinking different things. And then he got to the real point: Is that something that comes from scrapbooking?

Yes, I think it does. It’s the same thing I mention at the end of this:

{Many of you have seen this via this guest post I wrote for Ali’s blog, but I wanted to share it here too.}

So we had this conversation about how he thought it was cool (yay!) that I was seeing some other layer of daily life and that it was motivating me and on one hand that sounded fabulous. But also that he had no interest in actually scrapbooking. The crafty stuff – whether paper or digital – just isn’t something that’s ever going to be fun for him, and that’s fair enough. But taking pictures he gets. And writing he gets, though he doesn’t write as often.

I told him that was still a scrapbook.

That part of the conversation may be continued another day.

xlovesx

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This weekend’s winner is Anisa Edwards who wins the retro alien crayons from Colour me fun.
If you love them and want to see more Colour me fun products, then why not check out their store.

Well done Anisa! Please email me (shimelle at gmail dot com) with your address.

There’s a new giveaway every Friday night, so check back next week for another chance to win just by leaving a comment.

Have a great week!

xlovesx

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_{All class content ©twopeasinabucket.com. Click here for supplies and here to chat on the message board.}

Right about now is when I should start to panic in the 4×6 Photo Love class. Beyond the half-way point means it only gets tougher to add that extra photo to the layout each month, but actually I’m quite excited about all the extra tricks we can throw in now to create plenty of space for all those 4×6 shots. You can check out the newest edition now, with seven 4×6 photos on a single page layout.

This month’s page appears to just have two photos at first glance, but there are indeed seven, plus a 4×6 journaling card too. They are hidden behind the photo on the left, which opens up like this…

…with photos on both sides, creating plenty of room. I still use page protectors with pages like this, but just create a window in the protector so the folded section can be opened. You can watch the entire process, from layout to page protector, in this month’s video:

Neither layout this month is on kraft cardstock – shocking, I know! One is travel themed but the other uses a stack of photos from our wedding reception that I have been meaning to scrap for ages but I kept putting it off because it was a big stack of images that wouldn’t ordinarily go on one layout. But I love how they can all live on one page now!

This month, the lovely Julie Kirk is my special guest and she adapted the page design to feature landscape photographs. I love the colours and patterns she used on this page.

But this is so very clever! She explains her process for the rope ladder technique here, so you can try it too. Thank you for joining me, Julie!

Every month, there are two ways to win a prize for participating in 4×6 Photo Love! The first is at Two Peas: create your page and upload it to the gallery. Be sure to tick the box for this challenge in step four of the upload process. One participant will win a gift certificate to Two Peas to go shopping for whatever you like. But there’s a second chance to win right here: on this post, leave a comment with a link to your page (in the gallery at Two Peas or on your blog, whatever you prefer) and one of those links will win Two Peas shopping money too! The deadline for both is the 29th of August.

Congratulations to Connie for winning the draw for last month’s six photo class! (Connie, you will receive your gift certificate by email.) Will you be next? Just choose seven 4×6 photos to scrap and follow along with this month’s class prompt.

xlovesx

PS: Feel free to grab the button there on the left for your blog or to share this class with a friend – since it’s free, the more the merrier! And you’re welcome to use any supplies and any photos, so there’s no boundaries to your scrapping with this year-long project.

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Finally, the very last of my summer CHA posts! All the brand new things from Jenni Bowlin Studio. First up, the treat box! It comes with the dividers and the inside surfaces are covered with a non-themed pattern and then you can add whatever you like, to use it as a display or storage piece. Store owners can even use this near the till for last-minute sales of small items.

Jenni also has new products in her Jenni Bowlin for Ranger collection. I’ll let her introduce those to you herself:

(Thanks, Jenni!)

On to the paper collections! The first full holiday collections from JBS. A vintage Halloween line mixes with the existing products, like the mini bingo cards.

I love that the papers may be vintage in design but they work perfectly with modern photos and the colours are crisp and bold.

Speaking of vintage, how amazing are these vintage boxes in Jenni’s display? They are about a hundred years old and were for tobacco, but I love how they say ‘scrap’!

These mini spools came out at the winter show, but I had never thought of using them for a minibook spine.

For the Christmas collection, vintage themes with bold colours, just like the Halloween collection. This is definitely going to be in my Christmas journal, and I love that shade of green for the lettering.

Also new to the collection are foam stamps to go with the paint dabbers. Borders, backgrounds and butterflies? I’m in.

What is this? I have no idea! And of course I asked. It’s super secret… but I am intrigued!

Click here to shop for Jenni Bowlin products!

xlovesx

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I always love the Hambly booth – a big aqua-coloured box of happiness in the form of transparency, washi tapes and funky projects.

My sadness of the discontinued camera paper from Studio Calico that I loved so much was somewhat remedied by this new print from Hambly. These cameras will definitely be coming to my albums soon!

Just wanted to show this layout (by Amy Tan) to highlight the background paper – silhouette designs were all over the show floor and Hambly have had these in their collections for a while. But I love how this is such a great pick for photo booth strips – whether taken in an actual booth or created with your computer or phone.

Christmas loveliness in elegant reindeer and a detailed damask, the latter of which would work throughout the year too.

Hambly’s new collections ship about seven weeks from now (eight from the show). Click here to shop for Hambly Screen Prints products!

xlovesx

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Lily Bee, just what would I have done in the last six months without your letter stickers? I ran into some members of the Lily Bee design team the very first morning of the show and my first question was Are there more colours in those amazing letter stickers? That’s how much I love them. Fabulously, the answer was yes.

And a green themed Christmas line! It’s really lovely and such a nice change. It’s called Jingle.

The LB design team shows how lovely these papers can look in your album. So very pretty.

Head over Heels is a romantic, cool-toned collection. Will work for Valentine’s Day of course but that’s not a necessity as this collection isn’t really about heart motifs. Polka dots and doilies and florals make it far more versatile.

This was my very favourite layout of all the pages on display on the entire show floor at CHA. I just love this. It’s by Cindy Liebel.

Click here to shop for Lily Bee Design products!.

xlovesx

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Echo Park has never waited for CHA to release new lines. Since they opened their doors, they have brought out a new collection every six to eight weeks to keep plenty of new designs on the shelf. They work with several different designers, so the collections have varied looks too.

Their booth didn’t have the biggest displays, so my photos are a little disappointing compared to the actual collections. There are three Christmas collections, really: your choice of either a grown-up or kids line, plus a Christmas-coloured extension of their Dots and Stripes collection, that also includes metallic silver and gold.

Plus the Happy Days collection, inspired by 50s happiness, but the papers have lots of versatile patterns that aren’t overly themed.

Although I don’t have lots of pictures to share here, I do have to chime in and say I love how it’s so easy to work with Echo Park collections. The colour schemes are always well coordinated but not completely predictable and there is a good mix of bold and subtle patterns. I find these are papers you can keep using to the very last scrap. Good stuff for scrapbooking and cardmaking.

Click here to shop for Echo Park products!

xlovesx

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