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

_{image from Smash Stories blog.}

Oh, Smash Books. For the past fortnight, you seem to have taken over the discussions of the scrapbooking world. First discussions about when they would arrive in stores. Then they arrived and the discussions jumped to a) what everyone bought and b) when would more be in stock since it seemed to sell out pretty much everywhere pretty quickly. And then came a new wave of discussions with scrapbookers proclaiming Smash: I just do not understand! And the more I read, the more one very firm belief formed in my mind that I just had to put into words and share with you.

Know up front: I do not have a Smash Book. I have not ordered any Smash products. Partly because they are already sold out at Two Peas, but I’m mentioning it here because I want you to know I’m not saying this as some sort of hype to try to market Smash. It’s just that I feel like every message I’ve read along the lines of What’s the deal with Smash? is missing a really, really important point.

And effectively, my opinion is we should go buy Smash not really for ourselves, but to give to a friend. A friend who is not a scrapbooker.

If Smash is new to you, here’s the concept – and yes, it is essentially a pretty notebook in which to paste things and write notes. Like this:

Ad watching that, I fully understand both sides of the argument right now. I understand scrapbookers who look at it and think it’s the perfect complement to what they are already doing, and it would give them a place to keep notes without the need to be organised. There are cute accessories that could just as easily be used on a scrapbook page as in a Smash Book. But also, I understand scrapbookers looking at this product and thinking really? Really I need to pay for a special notebook to paste in my ticket stubs when I already have an entire stash of paper and glue? Exactly. You don’t really need it. You’ll be fine – you can make one yourself or you can be completely happy without a notebook and glue for ticket stubs. But if you’re a scrapbooker already, I don’t think you are really the key audience for this product. Scrapbookers are a happy sideline audience who happen to love pretty paper.

Look at the other products on the market in scrapbooking. If you weren’t a scrapbooker would you be excited by a new paper line? If you didn’t craft, would you care what designs are available in the new border punch collection? If you didn’t scrapbook, would you notice any difference between the best journaling pen and a borrowed ballpoint from the bank counter? Most of the products that hit the scrapbooking market are aimed at scrapbookers. Of course they are! For quite a while, that’s been a smart tactic, because scrapbookers are a market of people who buy those new things and that keeps the industry going. But you may have noticed… there are fewer scrapbookers. Buying fewer things. And all of those products that only make sense to people who already scrapbook? They aren’t going to expand the circle of papercrafters.

But Smash actually alienates some scrapbookers. The whole idea is simple: it’s a notebook that you glue stuff into to keep. In fact, it’s so much like the notebooks my friends and I bought during our final year of high school, and we may have been asked by more than one teacher to put away our notebooks and glue sticks because perhaps the middle of class was not the time to create a school scrapbook. But that was the point: we weren’t scrapbookers. Some company that marketed things like class rings and graduation invitations sold a notebook to paste in school mementos and we bought it. And we pasted away. That was a scrapbook, right? (Actually, I really wish I knew where that book was but I haven’t the slightest idea.) But some scrapbookers don’t understand why people are excited about Smash because they are quite capable of buying or creating their own notebook and pasting things into it. Of course! We cut and paste all the time – that’s what scrapbookers do! So whether you want to buy that particular book for yourself or make your own or keep your mementos another way, that part is completely beside the point.

Instead, think of someone you know who you actually think could be a scrapbooker, but isn’t. Maybe she’s a little crafty or maybe she takes pictures or maybe she has a new baby or is getting married or decorating her house. Or maybe none of those things but you just have a hunch that really this friend would enjoy scrapbooking if she just discovered it. Now… what if someone gave her a Smash Book? It’s a gateway. Maybe she pastes things in and then that’s that, nothing big. But maybe she pastes things in and suddenly loves it and pastes more and more. Then she goes on the search for more cute tape or pretty notebooks or nice pens and soon enough: she is totally a scrapbooker.

I wish I could have sound effects in this post, because if this were a movie, there would have just been jubilant sounds as she purchased her first bag of scrapping supplies at the craft store.

_{image from Smash Stories blog.}

So admittedly, I’m being overly dramatic. And I totally understand all those people who have posted on message boards saying things along the lines of I just don’t understand why a spiral notebook is so special and really, I don’t think Smash is rocket science. What I do think is there are very few ways that scrapbooking makes it way outside its comfortable little world and out there into the greater population, a world of consumers who don’t already own 12×12 paper trimmers, precision pens and die-cut machines. Yes, it’s simple. But have you tried explaining scrapbooking to someone who isn’t a scrapbooker? That isn’t simple. Maybe simple is just what we need.

Maybe I’m completely off my rocker. But I’m going to give a friend a Smash Book for her birthday. Someone specific. Unfortunately her birthday isn’t for a while, so I can’t report back in two weeks with empirical evidence or anything. But I just think if a cute notebook can show someone the world of scrapbooking, that’s a pretty cool idea. How about you? Love it? Hate it? Hadn’t heard of it or really don’t mind? Most of us like a pretty notebook in general, right? Regardless of the brand. I always thought most scrapbookers were stationery lovers… all that pretty paper!

And now, if there were sound effects, there would be suitable ending music that would make it very clear that I could be very wrong, but I just wanted to share that idea. Suddenly I understand how difficult it could be to write scores for Hollywood films.

xlovesx

On a completely different note, Beyond Blogging students – watch your email this evening. Thanks.

Comment [83]

You know those projects you save for a rainy day? Well, it’s raining.

And for some reason, I decided this was a window of opportunity play a game of Tetris involving scrapbook pages, page protectors and albums. I’m down to just twenty-three layouts left, which may sound a little ridiculous, but they shall each have a home this evening and for at least a day I shall feel like a scrapbooking Tetris champion. Hurrah!

I know we all have our own systems that work for us, and I would love to hear how you organise your pages. I have to admit, I think I have it easy for organising pages since it’s just the two of us – no trying to figure out what goes into a family album versus albums for individual members of the family. But I do have a system for what goes where. Most of my albums are 12×12 three ring binders with black fabric covers. (Specifically, I use these by American Crafts.) Each year gets a general album. It’s called ‘Our Lives’, which is completely hokey but simple enough that I just stuck with it. All the day to day stuff and events from the year goes in that album, in chronological order – though I don’t make the pages in chronological order at all. When an album gets too full, I just start another album for that year, call it volume two and keep the story going in date order. That’s part of why I love three ring binders: because it’s so easy to move the page protectors from one book to another.

Some times there are events that were just too photogenic and I end up with an inordinate number of pictures, so if I scrap quite a few of them, they will make the everyday Our Lives album for that year look totally silly. Case in point: SJ’s tea party last summer: I’ve probably made twenty different pages about that day, and three other layouts for the rest of that entire month. So if I included all those pages in chronological order, you’d pretty much think we did nothing else last summer except dress as Alice and the Mad Hatter. So events like that actually get their own album. I don’t plan it from the outset or anything – I never set out making all those pages thinking I wanted an entire album of Wonderland. I just enjoyed scrapping those pictures to the point that I ended up with a big stack of layouts that would fill an album on their own. It’s like promoting an event from the everyday to the something special. Those events also give me an excuse to use something prettier than a black fabric album. I love the different patterned albums from the same range, so I pick a different pattern for each of those special events. I have two from 2010, one from 2009 and one from 2008 – though admittedly 2008’s is our wedding album, so I always assumed that would have enough pages to make its own album (or two or three).

Then there are red albums – and those are for trips. If we go somewhere and I only do a few pages, then it stays in the black album at the right point in the calendar. If it’s a big trip and has enough pages to be promoted, then it gets its own red album. The earliest trip I did this for was 2006, when we went to Iceland. Since then we have travel albums for the Pacific Northwest in 2007, our honeymoon in 2008, a family trip to Cornwall and our holiday to Hawaii in 2009, and then the start of the big 2010-2011 journey, which will need several volumes. Within each album, everything is pretty much in chronological order, from the beginning of the trip to coming home again. Sometimes I add extra perspective pages at the end of an album, like if I’ve been thinking of a place a year later or something in the news has made me think of a certain memory and sometimes I’ll close the album with a sort of top-ten list about what we loved about a particular trip, which tends to summarise everything that is there in chronological order.

Then I have a few other albums thrown in the mix that were purposely made as a complete album, like Christmas Journals and some other albums I’ve made in classes. (Two of my Christmas albums are 12×12 – the rest are 9×9 and live in separate spot that is better for that size.)

The album system itself isn’t really new – this is pretty much what I’ve been doing since we moved to this flat and I dedicated a certain spot to albums. But I hadn’t made my system as easy as it could be, so over the last month I’ve been trying to get that right. So far, I have…
…moved the albums from on top of the bookcase to the bottom of the bookcase. I am short and couldn’t get to them without a chair! As a result, I would just let the layouts stack up instead of putting them away.

…added labels. I love that all our albums are very uniform, but I didn’t have them marked. And because I scrap out of order, I would pull four or five different books until I found the right one. Clearly that was daft. So I went for a very popular option – circle tags stuck on the spines. I had plenty of those and they aren’t going to disappear from the world like a collection that gets discontinued after a year. The labels make it so much easier to see exactly the right album, so I’m hoping that means I will put pages away rather than waiting until the job because a big chore.

…made it easy to get to page protectors of all sizes. I keep pages of all sizes together in 12×12 albums. And I had a storage spot for page protectors. Except it was a spot that was a pain in the neck to get to, so again, I would put it off. Seriously, how difficult was I trying to make this? So I’ve moved them all to somewhere easy and I added a few extra page protectors to all the albums I’m actively adding things to at the moment, so I should just be able to open the album and add the page.

…got rid of the box where I stacked all my layouts waiting for a home. I had this from the days of the magazine when everything came back months later, but most of my pages are just photographed here now rather than sending them away, so I have no excuse to let pages wait months before they have a home. The box has a new purpose in another room – hurrah.

…culled a handful of layouts that I didn’t like in any way and weren’t helping to tell the story. Most of those were things I did for assignments with really specific requirements and they just didn’t feel like me, and usually I had scrapped those photos again in a way I liked.

…dedicated an afternoon to getting all homeless pages into the right place, in page protectors and in an order that makes me happy. There were a few things that I also patched up along the way – mostly old chipboard letters that didn’t keep their adhesive qualities or layouts I had done on either glittered or flocked cardstock and other elements just didn’t want to stick to that paper. Everything else was pretty much fine, barring the odd bent corner here and there. If all the letters were there for the chipboard, I reattached with stronger adhesive; if the letters had gone missing I replace the whole word with a different set of stickers. And things on difficult papers I just stitched with the sewing machine so they aren’t going anywhere in the future.

Now I’m left with a couple things I still want to do. I would like to make a sort of summary layout for each album. Something that goes inside the album that gives an overview of what was happening. I did that when I first started scrapbooking but somehow stopped several years ago. I noticed it most in our 2004 album. That’s the oldest album I display, and it’s the year I met The Boy. The album includes the months at the beginning of the year before we met and then suddenly there’s just this new face on my pages, and there’s no real explanation. I think that would be so much more clear if I added a page at the beginning that explained 2004 was the year we met, he finished his MSC, I relearned how to drive… and maybe even mention things that are obvious to us but not to anyone else (our ages, where we lived) and some things that give perspective to the bigger life story (like our jobs). I think those pages would be quite easy to add and would help make things make sense if someone sat down with the album. So it’s a thought.

The other job on my to-do list is adding a few photo pages to each album. Two photo protectors in each album would include up to twenty-four more 4×6 photos without lots of bulk. And if for some reason those photos really inspire me in the future, I could always swap them out of those protectors and give them their own page, and just fill the gap with another photo, some patterned paper or more journaling.

But now comes the big question: will I actually conform to my new system and get pages straight into the albums once they are finished? Give me a week and I’ll report back!

So… how do you organise your pages? I would love to hear! And now I just have to wait for a guest at our house to actually ask to look at a scrapbook – because it would be safe to grab any album off the shelf!

Even if it is rainy where you are, I hope you are having a lovely Sunday!

xlovesx

PS: Don’t miss this weekend’s giveaway from Rob Ryan!

Comment [35]

This weekend, one extremely lucky commenter will win a signed copy of Rob Ryan’s book “This is for you”. A collection of Rob’s beautiful hand cut images which are inspiring, romantic and thought provoking. I am a huge fan of Rob’s work, and so very excited to bring you this giveaway. We actually received a copy of this book as a wedding present, so I can vouch for its beauty.

Rob was born in 1962 in Akrotiri, Cyprus. He studied Fine Art at Trent Polytechnic and at the Royal College of Art, London where he specialised in Printmaking.
Since 2002 he has been working principally within the paper cutting medium. Although he views himself first and always as a fine artist his intricate papercut work adapts itself readily to screenprinting which have then transferred to ceramics, fabrics, lasercutting and other surfaces.

He has collaborated with Paul Smith, Liberty of London, Fortnum and Mason and Vogue along with many other established companies. His work, often consisting of whimsical figures paired with sentimental, grave, honest and occasionally humorous pieces of writing he readily admits are autobiographical.

Recent exhibitions have included “The Stars Shine All Day Too” at London’s Air Gallery on Dover Street and “Your Job is to take this world apart and put it back together again…. but even better!” – an exhibition of papercuts and ceramics at The Shire Hall Gallery Stafford.

He lives and works in London. You can read more about Rob on his Blog and on his Website.

To enter, just leave a comment on this post sharing with us, what you wish you could cut from paper…

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

Good luck!

xlovesx

Comment [71]

In what has quickly become a week about charity and scrapbook sketches for some reason, here is the page I wanted to show you yesterday afternoon, but the powers of the internets decided we needed to wait until this morning because they didn’t want to go as fast as I hoped. Just in time for the weekend though – crafty time central!

To create this layout, I started with the same sketch set as a challenge for the contestants and anyone playing along with the UKScrappers Scrap Factor contest. It’s this sketch I shared yesterday. You can see the contestants pages from the sketch here. I know some members prefer to vote for the page that grabs them from the small image, but I really enjoy reading the commentary written by the contestants, explaining the creative choices they made in their details. So I thought I’d share my process for making this page, from the sketch to the finished scrapbook page.

Anyone is welcome to join in the Play Along with Scrap Factor challenge at any time. If you’re not already a member of UKScrappers, you can join for free. The challenges end on Sunday evenings, so you have a couple days left if you would like to participate in this round. There’s a prize each week for one paper layout, one digital page and one hybrid page. Some weeks we don’t have any hybrid entries! ‘Hybrid’ just means a mix of digital and paper scrapping, so if you print out a journaling card printable and include it on a paper page, that’s hybrid. Easy! And next week’s challenge is already posted – a layout inspired by film or television. Play Along entries for that challenge are due the following Sunday – 12th of June.

And there are two posts today because the weekend giveaway goes live this evening – and goodness, it’s a good one this week!

xlovesx

Comment [18]

Over at UKScrappers, the Scrap Factor contest is getting tougher each week! Every week, the contestants receive a new challenge on Monday and have to upload a layout by Friday, then the UKS members vote for their favourite and one scrapper leaves the contest each week. We’re in week seven, so you can imagine it’s getting pretty tough to choose a favourite! But there’s also the added bonus of ‘Play Along with Scrap Factor’ that anyone can join in at any time. You just make a layout to fit the challenge and upload it to the UKS gallery. Each week we have a prize for one paper, one digital and one hybrid layout! This sketch is the current challenge, which is open until this Sunday, the 5th of June. You can see the contestants’ interpretations of this sketch here – and if you’re logged in as a member, you can vote for your favourite too! So there’s a little bonus sketch for this week, I suppose!

Back in April, I taught a workshop at the True Scrap event – a weekend of convention-type classes all available online. But like conventions can be, to get all of the content was a significant price and I know many of you asked if there would be a way to take just the classes you wanted at a more affordable price. And your question has been answered! You can now purchase the classes individually, including my workshop on Creative Stash Diving. Other classes are available on a range of topics, from embellishment to organisation to photography, with instructors Jennifer McGuire, Ali Edwards, Kelli Crowe and many more. The classes are all presented as videos you watch online, so it’s like having your own scrapbooking-themed television channel, perhaps!

A little more info about my workshop: You might remember on Scrapbook Day, I started with some supplies and just kept working through them until they were pretty much finished – paper scraps, letter stickers and so on. That’s a big part of what my workshop shares – how to take a finite amount of supplies and get lots and lots of finished projects as a result, without making all your pages look the same. There are nine finished scrapbook pages (including a double page layout) and a card highlighted in the class. They all come from the same supplies and they all look very different and they don’t just focus on the most brand new of products. The ideas can be easily adapted to your own style and supplies. The pages all feature two to four photos. The class focuses mostly on the process of how to stretch your paper and supplies to lots of pages, so if you’re trying to get the most from your stash these days (be it older papers or a brand new kit) then I think you’ll find it useful.

And here are some comments from those who took my workshop as part of the True Scrap event:
“Awesome presentation at True Scrap. I watched the video half a dozen times. But, more importantly, I cut up an entire BasicGrey collection. It was a favorite but would you believe its discontinued now; tells you how long I’ve been saving it. So far I’ve made 2 dbl-page layouts and 3 single and I’m still going. Thanks for the inspiration.” -Terri T. (Terri went on to post at least 8 layouts from her stash-diving session!)

“Wow! Talk about a fresh new perspective/strategy! This was amazing! To put the whole process in words just clicked in my head! I loved tip #1! so very very true! Thank you so much!” -Mel9252

“Love this idea! I am going to do it. Maybe even tonight. It’s going to be so much fun!” -Hdubarry

“Loved the class shimelle =) got me scrapping right after watching it!” -Nora L.

Click here for more details, more classes or to sign up for Creative Stash Diving!

…and I’ll be back later today with some new scrapbooky goodness! It might just have something to do with that sketch. (ETA: The video is taking forever to upload, so I’ll have to post it in the morning!)

xlovesx

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Thank you for support yesterday. I cannot say that enough.

Thank you for backing the idea. Thank you for telling your friends. Thank you for signing up for a class. Thank you for emailing and asking how you can help. Thank you for leaving comments and sharing your experiences. Thank you for proving that girl power can be pretty darn powerful indeed.

In twenty-four hours, with your help, we raised £1200. That’s 1,968 US dollars. Or 1,363 Euros. Or 1,838 Australian dollars. And trust me, I did the adding up several times just to make sure because well, that was a much bigger number than I really expected. And after I did all that math, I just couldn’t stop smiling.

This morning we sorted all the currency conversion and account transfers and I got to call the Plan-UK office and report in with our total and make our donation. And I may have laughed a bit when asked the question ‘So are you that scrapbook girl?’ A little later when everything had officially arrived at The Girls’ Fund, I received this email I wanted to share with all of you.

A few payments came in after the 6am closing time and I went ahead and donated those, but I have now sent the payment so my big drive here is officially closed. However, if you would like to support The Girls’ Fund or any of their other projects, please have a look at the Plan-UK website where you can sponsor a child with a monthly pledge or give a one-off donation. You’ll also find details of how you can host a Girls’ Night In or sign your signature to help protect the rights of women and girls.

Thank you so much for helping me raise £1200 to give to this cause. And thank you to Plan, for using it to help girls go to school and stand up for themselves. May our little bit of girl power go a long, long way.

xlovesx

Comment [30]

This morning I have been processing class registrations and tallying up our numbers for our day of girl power. I will save my gushing message of thank you for later today, when I can post the exact total and show you our donation to Plan-UK, but for right now, let me just say this: it was amazing.

And for now, how about this week’s sketch? Recently there has been a discussion on Two Peas about schools of thought in printing photos. Some people only print the specific photos they are going to scrap, others print everything and plenty fall somewhere in the middle. I print a great deal of photos and will print two or three or even more similar shots if I like them all. Which seems a little silly to some, but there are two reasons it makes me happy. The first is that a library of printed photos doesn’t make me feel behind – it makes me feel inspired. I love that there is a catalogue of printed photos that show our everyday lives, and I prefer images that are printed (like the old days!) rather than just living as pixels on a hard drive. But that’s just me. The other reason is more relevant to this layout: it’s because I like being able to scrapbook the same event from a different perspective. I’ve scrapbooked this day and place before but it has been on my mind recently, and then I passed these photos in the drawer. Perfection: the chance to return to that day with additional (if similar) photos and document some thoughts from the this point on the timeline.

A side note: if you watched that BBC documentary a while back about the girl from the Isle of Wight who is big in Japan, you are allowed to giggle at the title of this layout with full appreciation that I love kawaii kitsch.

Some of the design inspiration for this page comes from that older layout, and the two will live happily together in the same album. I wanted to use the same navy and red colour scheme (but this time threw in grey and a tiny bit of aqua) and wanted to repeat the photo corners, but this time I cut them from cardstock as I don’t have the same supplies from that older layout. I used two 4×6 photos, but you can fill the photo space on this sketch with any number of pictures you would like. There’s really only one area of embellishment – just below the title. If you have that patterned paper by Studio Calico, by the way, the circles fit just perfectly inside the Martha Stewart sunburst punch. (Wait. Did I promise yesterday I would get back to the butterfly punch? Well… sunburst will have to do, I suppose.)

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!

Last week was one of the busiest weeks yet, going by how many of you posted and shared your pages! Here is a sampling of pages from that three photo sketch – click the corresponding link to see any page in more detail and get to know the scrapper behind the page!
Top row, L to R: one, two, three, four, five
Middle row, L to R: six, seven, eight, nine, ten
Bottom row, L to R: eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen and fifteen.

Thanks to everyone who participated in last week’s sketch. Happy scrapping!

xlovesx

Comment [16]

I know Five Ideas posts are usually on Fridays. I also know that I usually keep the tone on this blog pretty light and I do things like sing the praises of the Martha Stewart butterfly punch on a regular basis. And because you read my blog, I assume you enjoy such lovely, light-hearted things as scrapbooking, paper butterflies and the odd sparkly rhinestone or three.

But today, I actually want to shake that up.

Because I also figure that if you’re reading my blog you’re most likely a girl. (No offence boys, but you are the vast minority of my readers, you’ll understand.) And because you’re reading this, you can read. And you have internet access. And you probably even have at least a little spare cash that you use on super fun but not really important things like the Martha Stewart butterfly punch. And all that adds up to mean you are one of the luckiest girls in the whole world.

Today, I am really hoping you’ll help me with something a little different. Can we – all these lucky girls around the world who read things on the internet and craft with photos and paper and glue – can we get together enough girl power to help some of the girls in the world who don’t get all the things we take for granted? Not even butterfly punches. Things like a basic education and a way out of poverty.

Recently I got to speak with someone who works with the charity Plan-UK, who told me a lot about their Because I am a Girl campaign. I was so impressed with everything they explained. They are passionate about helping children in the world’s poorest countries get on their feet, get educated and break the cycle of oppression. Last year they worked with over 27 million children in poverty. They inspired me to be thankful for my luck in this world and to try to use what I know – scrapbooking – to help others. So today, I bring you five ideas for scrapping with girl power… but also, a little something else.

Scrapbook your inner super girl
What? You don’t have a photo of your three-year-old self in a super girl swimming costume? And you weren’t obsessed with Wonder Woman for the vast majority of your childhood? (Two words: invisible plane!) Then perhaps you’ll need to get more creative, but I’m sure there is an inner super hero just waiting to go from the depths of your personality onto a scrapbook page. Find your finest qualities and immortalise them in writing – be proud of your strengths, even if the flying over buildings part of super hero life is still leaving you perplexed.

I don’t even need to explain that just the fact that I watched super heroes on television and played in a paddling pool in the back garden means I had a pretty charmed life compared to girls whose families can’t afford clothes, books or transportation to the nearest school.

Scrapbook the girls who know your history
These two lovelies literally were the girls next door – their family moved into the neighbouring house in the summer before I started fourth grade, and they had two girls my age. Scrapping an old photo of the three of us was so much fun and brought back so many memories. And it reminded me that I’m lucky to still be in touch with some of the girls I have known for years (thank you, Facebook).

A little perspective: we were about twelve and thirteen in this picture. We had nary a care in the world. But in some of the world’s poorest countries, up to one in seven girls are forced into marriage before their fifteenth birthday.

Scrapbook your own baby photo
I don’t think I had even seen this picture until a couple years ago when it surfaced on a DVD of family photos. I wasn’t quite sure exactly how to scrapbook a photo of something I clearly can’t remember in any way, but after a while, it seemed like a lovely page to do a bit of wondering and contrasting all those years ago to where I’ve ended up today. Whether you still live in the same town or you’ve moved thousands of miles away, I’m pretty sure there’s a story in there from baby you to today’s you!

And in case you weren’t already thinking it: I was not exactly malnourished there at my first Christmas. Unlike the estimated 925 million people in the world currently suffering just that.

Scrapbook a girls’ getaway
Have you scrapbooked your gratitude for the girls in your life from day to day? Almost all of these ladies blog, so it may come as no surprise to see us all on yet another scrapbook page but my scrapbooky friends and the times we can get away from real life to get together and scrap? I never want to take those good times for granted. All our group photos remind me that I am a lucky girl indeed.

Let’s not even start on cultures where it would never be a girl’s choice to spend time with friends or loved ones… because she isn’t afforded choices at all.

Scrapbook the reasons why you’re happy to be a girl
And of course, there’s always that trick of a numbered list. You could take this really seriously and come up with a stack of reasons why you are happy to be a girl or happy to be a girl today and I think the resulting page would be very moving. Or you can just get show tunes stuck in your head and decide to go with sillier reasons why being a girl is awesome.

But here’s the serious side:
More than seventy-five million girls in the world don’t get the chance to go to school. It’s something that broke my heart, especially in Cambodia – to see children encouraged to sell things to tourists because the immediate income was more ‘important’ than the long-term good of an education. As a teacher, it also brought a new definition to the words ‘teacher shortage’ to my understanding. When my class sizes were climbing and I had to send students out to find spare chairs, I worried about where things were headed, but I never once thought of turning a student out of my classroom. We talk about teacher shortages here, but we have teachers who are trained and qualified and do their best. There are places in the world where there just aren’t people to fill that role. What happens if no one in your village is literate? How do you end that cycle? You can’t do it without some sort of outside help.

I really want to help.

For the next twenty-four hours, I’m going to donate 100% of my class sales to Plan-UK and their efforts to help these girls. You get a class (for you or a friend or a sister or a daughter or a mother) and all of the class fee will go to these girls who need a hand. I’m going to make my own donation too, but the more of us who can get together and help, the better.

So you can help in a few ways:
…sign up for a class. If you want to gift it to someone else, just let me know via the notes or an email. I’m happy to send the class to anyone you would like! And you can sign up for any shimelle.com class – they are all over there on the right and they all include permanent access and the classes that run every year (like Learn Something New and Journal your Christmas) include membership every year at no extra cost.
…help spread the word. If you tell a friend about any post I’ve ever written, let it be this one. Email someone you think can help, tweet a link, share it on Facebook, pin a layout to Pinterest, tell your message board friends – whatever works for you. If you want to reblog any of these images, go for it – any way we can spread the word and generate a bit more girl power is a great thing in my book.
…check out Because I am a Girl and see the ways you can help, like signing a letter to your MP, pledging your own direct donation or reading about the specifics of the different things they are doing to help girls break the cycle of poverty and illiteracy.
…make your own girl power layout and share it on your blog or in a page gallery. SJ has already started us off, and if you let me know about your own blog post, I’ll link to it.

I promise I will get back to posting things that are light-hearted and I will return to my vast overuse of the Martha Stewart butterfly punch. But today, I just want to help these girls.

And it would be awesome if you do too.

xlovesx

UPDATES
Thank you to ScrapDolly, Natalie, Debbie, Sally, Jenni Bowlin Studio and The Making Spot for blogging their own girl power today. And more blog posts from Kat, PaperCraft Inspirations, Vicky, May, Lisa, Abbey, Dina, Ali, Mel, Rhonna and Danielle. And many thanks to those who have tweeted, pinned, emailed and shared links with your Facebook friends. Every bit of help is so very much appreciated! Thank you.
Look here to see the end result of our day of girl power!

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