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

You may have noticed I am rather a fan of bunting. I know it’s become more and more on trend, but this hasn’t made me love it any less. There are over a dozen posts on this blog about bunting. And today, there’s one more. It seemed just the right thing to do this Friday as part of the virtual street party hosted by The Making Spot (a relatively new general crafting blog that is pretty darn cool). So don your royal wedding attire and join me for five ideas with bunting!

Scrapbook with bunting stickers
Have you checked out these bunting stickers that come in all different colours and patterns? One, they are totally cute and two, there are so many stickers on the sheet it’s kinda crazy. They all fit together so almost every part of the sheet is a sticker rather than waste. Very cool. So for this page, I chose different pieces of those stickers to hang bunting across the top left corner of my scrapbook page. (For the record: that is a title you shouldn’t try to spell with letter stickers. One word and now the sheet is completely devoid of the letter A. Oh well.)

Stamp a bunting background
Of course there are plenty of bunting stamps to choose from, and I’ve been using this set recently. It includes cakes, cake stands and three different kinds of bunting! Definitely a winner.

To make this card, I stamped one of the bunting designs repeatedly on the background, with black ink. Then I stamped the cake and cake stand on white cardstock, inked the edges in pink and matted it in grey. The greeting is machine-stitched to a punched circle backed with pink washi tape, then splashed with ink in pink and white. I love how the bunting adds another layer of dimension in the background that works well with the simplicity of the central design. Plus, this card took less than fifteen minutes to complete!

Dress up a gift with fabric bunting
Fabric bunting is so easy to make and perfect for even tiny scraps of fabric. I’ve made it in black, white and blue for our wedding. I’ve made it in red and black for my birthday and red and green at Christmas. I dream of finding fabric that looks like a very old map and making bunting that will make my world happier than I ever knew it could be. And I also spend so much time thinking about bunting that I almost always forget to think about wrapping paper. As a result, I wrap gifts in plain brown paper and then try to make it look pretty… and mini fabric bunting wrapped round and round would make me squeal in delight. Giving it to someone crafty makes me hope their bunting ends up hanging somewhere in their home, at least for a little while!

Make the cutest of cakes
Parties are far more fun with a random theme, and last autumn I went fully oddball with a lumberjack-themed birthday party. Lots of manly, American foods for dinner that wouldn’t have been out of place on a lumberyard. But even as a lumberjack, I needed something girlie – and that was the ruffle cake. But wait – it’s a black forest ruffle cake. Trust me, I was the only one laughing at my own joke then too. Tinting the Swiss meringue to a shade of grey was an interesting adventure, but my favourite thing was this little bit of bunting across the top. It was made with the same fabrics as party decorations, just in a teeny-tiny size, then tied to two chopsticks or lolly sticks.

Secret info: I chopped up a pair of old pajamas and a skirt that was a million sizes too big to make all the party bunting.

Bonus idea alert! Of course I kept the bunting from the cake and popped it on a scrapbook page. Of course!

Go for the sparkle
I love bunting enough that several years ago I designed Paper Chains, a set of stamps that lets you make your bunting just the right length and even has a teeny little alphabet to sit inside. It works great with patterned paper, but if there’s one thing I like more than patterned paper, it just might be glitter. By the way, if you like that idea but want to stamp much bigger bunting, try these stamps perhaps!

I’ve written about this minibook before, but here’s a little video that shows you exactly how these stamps work with the layers of sparkle.

Now… if you can keep yourself away from the kitchen or the sewing machine just a bit longer, Lara is up next. Go see what she’s up to a A Month of Sundays. And if you happen to collecting letters in search of the big prize, consider this post brought to you by the letter E.

Speaking of prizes, it’s Friday so that means there’s a weekend giveway that starts here tonight. Pop back to leave a comment and enter.

And with that, I’m off for a weekend of craftiness in a cottage with friends. So excited to catch up with everyone – most of them I haven’t seen since we took off in December! Have a beautiful weekend!

xlovesx

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I have a feeling you’re going to tell me two things about today’s sketch.
One, it’s a day late.
Two, it only has one photo.

And some of you just don’t do one photo.

But here’s the thing… I like one photo.
I like that I can show more pattern and colour from a lovely piece of paper. I like that the photos don’t fight for attention. I like that there’s more room for journaling. I like that no matter what the size of the photo, provided it’s 12×12 or smaller, there’s a way to make it work.

Then again, I have not a nerve in my body that urges me to catch up with what I scrapbook. Because if I did, this would be pretty scary:

Ever wonder what 691 photos would look like? Now you know. That is the order I placed late Tuesday afternoon and bright and early today it arrived at my door, including the first few hundred prints from our trip. You know, the first few hundred of the nine thousand. But I am not in a panic. I look at that giant stack of photos with much glee! All the different images, all the different opportunities. All the pretty papers with which they will coordinate! And thus I could sing from the rooftops.

I guarantee some of them will become single photo layouts. Not all. But some. Because I just find single-photo pages to be fun. End of story.

So when the JBS team were asked to share something that helped define our style, I chose this. Because it has colour. Because it has pattern. Because it has lots of detail in just one little part of the page. Because I have scrapped a great deal of Alice in Wonderland. Because it has one single 4×6 photo. (Oh. And a butterfly. Of course.)

But I will make you a deal:

If you like single photo layouts, follow this as it is. If single photo pages make you break out in hives, look at this sketch and imagine that there are additional photos. Maybe another directly above the picture that is there. And a third to the left of that. Or print the photos smaller and include even more, like a strip of photos all the way across the middle of the page.

In a world full of people who like single photos and people who don’t, I am convinced we can just all get along. Especially if we can find some pretty paper as common ground.

So here’s this week’s sketch, and I’d love for you to play along – with one photo or as many as you dare.

Since I got the links all mixed up last time, I’ve just picked four from last week’s sketch – let’s see if I can get them right! From left to right, Claire, Jenna, Veeruliiru and Cheryl. That should take you to more details and bigger pictures!

This week we’ll try a Mr Linky and see if that works better! So if you play along, please leave a link below… though you can still use the comments if you prefer. Let me know which you think is best for future, perhaps.

Happy scrapping!

xlovesx

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A little project with the Beyond Blogging class today. Click any thumbnail below as their days appear online. If you’re viewing this through a reader, please click here to see the full post.

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This is one of my favourite pages in quite a while. It’s all about this. And it doesn’t even have a single butterfly.

It’s here in the Garden this week. Just wanted to share.

xlovesx

PS: excited about a little project happening here tomorrow!

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This weekend’s winner is Joy who wins herself the stamp prize from Little Musings.
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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Fancy a series of scrapbooking challenges? With three prize winners each week? But no worry that you have to participate every single week or anything else stressful? Then Play Along with Scrap Factor is just for you! While our Scrap Factor contestants have five days to create their layout in response to each week’s challenge, everyone else is invited to spend the whole week, use the contestants’ gallery for inspiration perhaps and just generally have fun with each challenge.

Each week, the three mentors from the teams (that’s Mary Anne and Dolly plus me!) will each choose a prize winner for our category – paper, hybrid or digital. All you have to do to enter is create your page in response to the week’s challenge and upload it to UKScrappers by Sunday night. When you upload a page, you’ll see a special gallery called Play along with Scrap Factor and that’s the gallery you want!

This week’s challenge is based on a colour scheme including sky blue, two shades of blossom pink and two spring greens. You can see all the fab pages created by the contestants here and if you have time to scrapbook this weekend, you could still enter this week’s play along contest.

Or you can jump ahead to next week’s challenge – taking inspiration from advertising. Choose a print ad (from a magazine, poster, leaflet, etc) and use it as the visual inspiration for your next scrapbook page. Our contestants have been busy with that challenge this week and their pages will go on display on Monday when voting opens for the week.

Remember, there’s a prize each week for playing along – one for a paper page, one for a hybrid page and one for a digital page! So all kinds of scrapbooking are welcome, and as you can only win once throughout the challenge series, there are plenty of prizes to go around! We’d love for you to join in with Scrap Factor this spring.

xlovesx

PS: Don’t forget to enter this week’s giveaway before Sunday night – that just takes a comment to enter!

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This weekend’s giveaway comes from SJ at Little Musings.

Little Musings is a digital and clear stamp store where all the musings from SJ’s mind end up as cute digital stamps for you to use on your craft projects!
She is offering you a three part prize – one of the new angel stamps she has designed, a set of Birthday themed stamps (which sold out on QVC recently) and also your choice of digital product from her store.

To enter, leave a comment on this post about something you often “muse” over.

Entries close at midnight Sunday (UK time) and the winner will be posted Monday night, so be sure to check back and see if this was your lucky weekend!

xlovesx

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I may have tricked a few of you with this week’s sketch. At Two Peas, a new garden of pages from the design team goes live each Monday and I often base the week’s sketch on my pages there. So maybe you were thinking it would look a little like this. But as it’s Easter this Sunday, it seemed the right moment to grab something a little different! This page features Hipstamatic photos from last Easter, and I figured the five-small-square-photos option would make for something a little unexpected in this week’s sketch.

The layers of the sketch are relatively simple and make it a good candidate for a patterned background with a cluster of colour. You can even make this layout from scraps and leftovers. It also gives you plenty of space to really work the title, if you want to try something lovely with lettering! The sketch includes five small, square photos, but you can change this to suit something else, of course! It could even work with a single panoramic shot replacing the row of five pictures.

I love the pages posted from last week’s sketch! Here are a dozen of those scrapbook pages. Click any of these to see them in more detail and say hello to these scrappers!
Top row, L to R: one, two, three, four.
Middle row, L to R: five, six, seven, eight.
Bottom row, L to R: nine, ten, eleven and twelve.
Sorry about the problem with these links – somehow I had them in the reverse order! But they go to the right place now. So sorry for the mistake.

As always, the weekly sketch is a no-stress challenge that’s just for fun! If you find this sketch useful and create something with it, I’d love for you to leave a link in the comments! And while we’re very Easter themed today, I hope you have a lovely holiday weekend!

xlovesx

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