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

I love the first day of a new class. It’s also somewhat insane, because everything tends to happen at once, and all the technical stuff comes into play so there’s editing email addresses and resetting passwords and helping people get my messages out of their junk mail folder. But by now I have a bit of a system for everything so it doesn’t outweigh the amazing stuff that happens on day one. Just like the first day of school when everyone has energy and puts their best foot forward. I love seeing the results of day one appear on our class board and for this class that means it has hit the blogosphere too. Today my Google Reader has popped up plenty of entries that relate to our first prompt, so that has made me smile so very much.

I also love that planning and researching and writing a class also gives me that back to school energy – just like lesson planning did when I was teaching. So many teachers dislike lesson planning and prefer to teach something that is already outlined, but devising new ways to present material was one of my very favourite parts of the job. Every once in a while I still get a chance to write academic curriculum and I still love it! So in writing the new class, I also have new things I want to share here, new pictures I want to take, new videos I want to make and so forth. Everything in a creative circle.

It’s also made me curious about you and why you happen to be reading this. That note over there to the top right (you know, that stuff you can’t see if you’re reading this through a blog reader – so jump over for a minute) makes it pretty clear I’m not ashamed to call myself a scrapbooker. It creates conversations that are always interesting, for sure! I’ve learned there are so many ways to explain what it means. So I’m curious… how would you define yourself, oh blog reader? Even if you’re reading there quietly and don’t really go in for leaving a comment, I’d love for you to click and let me know this tiny bit about you. (Again, you won’t see this in most readers, so click over just this once. Thanks!)

Have a fabulous week!

xlovesx

Comment [14]

This weekend’s winner is Laura Y, who wins a place for herself and a friend on the new online class, Beyond Blogging For Scrapbookers. Class started today but you can join at any time and have permanent access to the materials. We would love for you to join us on this adventure!

Please email me (shimelle at gmail dot com) to claim your prize, and don’t forget your friend’s email 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

Comment [2]

This weekend’s giveaway is a class place for you and a friend of your choice on the brand new online class Beyond Blogging for Scrapbookers, which starts on Monday! In fact, I’ll throw in two passes for the first class Blogging for Scrapbookers so you’ll have all the reference material.

And don’t worry: if you’ve already signed up for Beyond Blogging and your comment is selected to win, I’ll send you a full refund – so you don’t need to wait and see if you won!

To enter, leave a comment on this post with the name of a blog you really love! It doesn’t have to be about scrapbooking – any blog you love to read!

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! Make sure you leave a valid email address as class starts Monday morning so I’ll get you added to the class before the post goes live here to announce the winner.

Good luck!

xlovesx

Comment [182]

Today I’m thrilled to welcome Michelle Clement to shimelle.com to share five beautiful ideas with a brand-new paper line. I hope you’re ready to get crafty, because all I wanted to do when I saw these projects was start cutting, pasting and stitching!

Lately, floral and vintage-inspired scrapbook goodies have been my muse! I decided to focus on one of Sassafras Lass’ newest paper collections, Sweetly Smitten, and five cute and wonderful ways you can use it on your projects! I contributed designs to this lovely floral-full paper line in conjunction with Sassafras, so I can tell you firsthand that there’s lots of love, handstitched details, and even a few doilies in there to give your projects lots of character as you work with the super-cute paper, stickers, and dimensional ‘foldies’. Here we go!

Use Stickers as a Background
I love love love me some pretty paper, but the ephemera-inspired stickers in this collection were just calling out to me to make a little collage with them as a background, instead! (There’s a cute little ‘memory star’ certificate, a vintage button card, and a few cute lined journalling spots that lent really well to a quick and easy collage!) No need to worry about cutting and gluing for this collage, though – just stick them down onto your cardstock, overlapping! Super easy-peasy, and it gives a layered look in a flash – to make a few of the stickers a little more dimensional on my page, I stuck them onto a thin white computer paper and trimmed around the edges, first, and then stuck them on.

Make it Masculine
Lots of times, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the ‘girlyness’ of a collection and miss seeing how versatile it really is! And believe me, this one is suuuper girly, so it’s easy to see just that. But can you still use it if you don’t have girls to scrapbook about? If you only have three boys or mister husband, or if you just don’t like flowers? Of course!

The stickers and papers have some beautiful masculine details to them – you just have to look past the flowers to see! The simple blue polka dot makes for a great masculine background paper, and the lined paper (even though it’s sewn) is a perfect neutral paper. There are lots of neutral and masculine stickers, too (the button card, the lined journalling tag, the stars, etc.) – and after collecting the boy-friendly bits from the collection, I added a teeny bit of orange and brown in, too, to set off the blue & yellow, and there you go! Boy-friendly!

Stitch the Details
If you’ve peeked at the details on the stickers and paper of Sweetly Smitten, you’ll see lots of hand-stitching already there. When you’re in a pinch and want to make a quick page – awesome! The handmade touches are done and you can just put them right on the page!

But if you’re feeling a little more crafty and have a moment to add a little ‘something extra’, try stitching your own details in – it works really well with the feel of things! For the layered flowers on my banner triangle, I cut them out of patterned paper, pierced some holes with my needle in the petals and leaves, and used embroidery floss to add a special little bit of dimension to them.

Layer it Up
There’s nothing I love more than layers on my pages (you could say I go a little crazy with it, sometimes…lol). Sweetly Smitten has tons of teeny little stickers that layer well together, and the new foldies that coordinate make layering even easier! They’re die cut, so you simply poke out the foldie you want, fold it where indicated, and then stick it onto your page using foam squares or another dimensional adhesive! So easy!

I also used multiple stickers to add dimension to this card – I stuck them onto plain white computer paper and just trimmed around the edges before adhering them with foam squares.

Paint or Dye It
This is something I do to nearly everything I work on, but for this card I decided to use one of the scallop sticker ‘extras’ (the part that was left on the sticker sheet after I used the scallop sticker) as a mask for some walnut ink. I stuck it onto my patterned paper and used a brush to paint walnut ink on the right side of the sticker ‘mask’. Once it was dry, I peeled off the mask and had a super-cute scallop dyed area with some of the patterned paper details still showing through! I also splattered a little bit of paint around for the finishing touch.

I hope you’re inspired to play with this lovely paper collection & scrapbook a bit, now! I had a blast both designing the papers & stickers and scrapbooking with them, myself – it’s so much fun! :) Thanks for having me share it with your readers, Shimelle!

---

Michelle Clement is a 26-year old artist, and lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada. She works in children’s tv animation, and also freelance designs – she’s currently working on scrapbook paper collections for Sassafras Lass, as well as her shop-of-cute-things, Bubbly Shnooks. She loves living close to the ocean, getting her hands crafty in everything from scrapbooking to crocheting to sewing, and also enjoys summer jaunts out in the sun, like camping and napping on a cozy blanket. She has a weak spot for singer-songwriters, acoustic songs, hammocks, cinnamon dolce lattes, handprinted graphic tees, elastic belts, cardigans, thrift shops, floral linens, yellow, and anything octopus! You can find her daily ramblings and crafty adventures over on her blog, Scissor Quirk.

Comment [7]

I started blogging a bit after I started scrapbooking, and for quite a while the two things lived quite separate lives. Blogs very rarely had pictures back then, and perhaps that was why the leap to the visual took a while for me to grasp. Of course, my scrapbooking style has certainly evolved and likewise, the blogging changed too. Eventually I left that exceedingly random and picture-free blog behind and started things with a bit more thought here at shimelle.com… and now a thousand posts later I still find I have ideas I want to convert from head to notebook to blog to scrapbook (sometimes missing out any of those steps) and I think I’m far more in love with blogging now ever. Part of that is from Blogging for Scrapbookers, a project that originally started in late 2009, but revisited over the past month. Scrapbookers getting together to blog about what they love. I love it when things come together like that – it’s simply electric. And so, it’s time to push all that to the next level of inspiration. With a new class: Beyond Blogging for Scrapbookers. It starts Monday.

Over three weeks, we’ll cover:

Getting to know your readers: who is reading and who do you want to be reading? We’ll make stats and analytics easy to use and understand, we’ll work with concrete ways to start conversations on your blog that get your readers talking in the comments and we’ll define exactly what’s best for how you want to blog, whatever that angle may be. Using videos, series posts and other ideas, we’ll make sure blogging is fun for you and your readers.

Simple ways to serious storytelling: how to eliminate boring blogposts forever. You are worth more than that! Taking your blog posts to the next level makes a direct impact on your scrapbooking, as it becomes second-nature to tell stories in meaningful ways. We’ll even cover a list of things never to write so you’ll have a warning system in place to prevent blog post boredom! Photos also come into play in your storytelling, both on your blog and your scrapbook pages. We’ll look at ways to take engaging photos (no matter what your camera) and how to best display them on your blog so they grab everyone’s attention and develop your style.

The blogosphere: blogging is very much a community and the more you contribute to that, the more the community gives back to you in comments, links, praise and support. In recent years, this has developed its own little world that includes social networking and sites like Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest, just to start. Some bloggers can get great benefit from these tools – but they are no means a requirement of having a great blog. We’ll work together to find the right balance for you and make sure you’re sharing just what you want to share with the audience you want. If you want more readers for your blog, this will include how to find them while always staying within the happy lines of internet etiquette!

Of course, blogging takes time and sometimes blog posts come easier than others. We’ll look at forward planning, brainstorming and how and when to take a break from your blog – without losing your readership! If you’re interested in making a bit of spare cash from your blog, we’ll cover that too – just at an introductory level so you can be aware of your options and choose what’s best for you. (If you really want to focus on earning from your blog, you can also join us in May for a special online business workshop.)

And we’ll always keep the focus on scrapbooking, so you’ll get scrapbook pages as inspiration in the daily prompts, we’ll cover many topics that will apply both to the way you blog and the way you scrapbook and we will continue to make the two work together, just like we started in Blogging for Scrapbookers.

A note about that actually: do you have to take Blogging for Scrapbookers in order to join us for Beyond Blogging? I’m not going to enforce this as a strict prerequisite. If you want to jump in now, go for it! However, we aren’t going to go back to the basics that are covered in the first Blogging for Scrapbookers class. If you’re new to blogging or you find the technical side of changing your template or formatting a post difficult, then I would highly suggest you sign up for Blogging for Scrapbookers as well, so you can download the Blogging Blueprints workbook as a manual and have a look at the prompts so you know where we’re coming from. You can sign up for Blogging for Scrapbookers at any time and have full, permanent access to the class materials and the message board. A quick review of the first class will also help you embrace the ‘assignment’ format for the classes. At the end of each prompt, there are suggestions of how to put that day’s topic into action. But we are all busy people with varied amounts of time to apply to different things! So each prompt has three options for how to apply what you’ve just read and watched. The first is a quick option for just five to ten minutes! The second option has a bit more detail for someone who wants to spend thirty minutes to an hour on a fun project, and the third option requires more time but is meant for a longer-term project, like planning future posts and developing your style over time. There is absolutely no pressure to keep up with any sort of daily assignment on a deadline and the schedule is entirely up to you – just know there are options for improving your blog just five or ten minutes at a time when you can’t devote hours!

In Beyond Blogging for Scrapbookers, I’m excited to share two new elements with you: a series of videos that cover additional material and profiles of fifteen different scrapbooking bloggers, who share their perspective on blogging and how it works hand in hand with their scrapbooking. There are also more options for customising your blog design covered in this workshop, in case you fancy giving things a bit of a visual shake up! But mostly, I hope you’ll join me to create some amazing blog posts over the next three weeks.

Class includes:
…15 full-colour PDF prompts delivered to your inbox, Monday to Friday
…Series of videos with further instruction
…A special series of profiles of a variety of scrapbooking bloggers, discussing why they blog, their creative process and other insights.
…Blog graphics in a choice of themes that you can customise to create your own blog design
…Private message board for class members
…Permanent access to all class materials

Class starts Monday, the 18th of April, but you can join at any time and have full access to all the materials. If you would like your class materials sent to a different email address than that of your paypal account, please be sure to leave that information in the notes to seller box or email me to let me know. Class registrations can take up to 24 hours to process. Thanks!

If you have any questions, please let me know and I’m happy to help you decide if this is the course for you!

Hope to see you in class on Monday morning!

xlovesx

Comment [112]

_{layout ©twopeasinabucket.com. Click here for supplies.}

After much lovely warm weather, today it has been so chilly that it seems apt that this wintry layout falls as this week’s sketch! Maybe I needed the reminder that it really isn’t freezing cold – it was just a combination of being spoilt by spring weather and dreadfully tricked by a boiler that was fine in its yearly inspection on Monday but today decided it had lit its last fire. Strangely I did not panic as quickly as usual at the aspect of no hot water – oh, how I have mellowed! {Not to worry – it apparently shall be back to working order tomorrow, when someone will come to fix it and wonder why there are umpteen boxes of craft supplies in our hallway, for it never fails that something breaks just as you do something to make you wish for no guests at all. Or perhaps that is just me.} So yes: a winter layout for this week’s sketch with space for one or more photos, a fancy border and an embellished title.

If you don’t scrap single photos or don’t print pictures larger than 4×6, please don’t panic: you can fill all the grey space there at the left with photos in any way, so it would work with two 4×6 pictures, one larger print, a collage or smaller prints – whatever you prefer. And the sketch is simple in outline for a reason: instead of piling on lots of patterned papers with this page, all the detail is in the border at the middle and the title. It’s a great place to use plenty of small pieces from scraps of your favourite papers, plus little embellishments that add dimension like buttons, gems or epoxy circles.

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 in the comments. (And an extra thank you to those of you who have been pinning the weekly sketches to your Pinterest boards! It pretty much made my day when that popped up on my screen!)

I think last week was our busiest week yet in terms of how many pages were created, blogged and linked to in the comments! It was tough to choose this week, but these are ten of my favourites. Click through below to see any of these in more detail!
Top row, L to R: one, two, three, four, five.
Bottom row, L to R: six, seven, eight, nine and ten.

So… what bits and pieces are you going to create into a lovely border for this week? Can’t wait to see!

xlovesx

Comment [28]

It was no coincidence that we went away in December, headed to warmer climes and came back right at the start of spring. Goodness do I love this time of year! And this week is the one I feel is most beautiful in my little corner of the world, for the pink trees are in full bloom. Nothing can get me down during cherry blossom season.

I spent this past weekend in Germany at the lovely Crop on the Rhine, where we attached many a Jenni Bowlin butterfly to many a layout! And we started on a long-term project that I look forward to sharing with you later. An idea that has me excited! And my sincerest thanks to Barbara and Heike who put on such a lovely event, plus Andrea and Andrea’s husband for their kindly volunteered help and chauffeur service!

And I also taught a workshop as part of True Scrap, an online scrapbooking convention. My session was all about getting the most from your stash, and it was great to chat with everyone, even though my session ended up being in the middle of the night my time. Totally worth staying up! If you are interested in True Scrap but couldn’t make it at the weekend, you can sign up any time and have access to the recordings of all the classes and workshops, so you can take your time and make it work for you. All the details are here.

I think I am finally getting back to reality in our post-travel world. Hilariously, after nearly four months of only having a carry-on bag, I walked straight past the baggage claim in Germany, only to be nearly out the door when I remembered I had two big suitcases filled with scrapping materials! Traveling lightly is definitely easier, but not really possible for a crafting weekend. I knew when we were on the road that I would come home and want to streamline some things, after getting used to existing with just the basics. I’ve been spring cleaning and my crafting space was first in line, and although I’m not quite finished, I’m already loving the clarity of the space with much of the clutter stripped away. Except when I say ‘much of the clutter’, really… there is still a lot of stuff. Funny how that works.

I have a new online scrapbooking class that starts next Monday – I’ll share concrete details about that tomorrow! And there’s a new sketch. And spring? It’s also making me want to make stuff.

Spring, you are amazing.

xlovesx

PS: I just realised, this is my 1000th blog post since I moved my blog to shimelle.com. How sweet.

Comment [19]

_{layout ©twopeasinabucket.com. Click here for supplies.}
It’s Wednesday, so how about a little sketch for a scrapbook page or two? This one is a bit simpler compared to last week, so probably a bit quicker to put together! And this layout of Leanne and family just makes me smile! It also makes me notice just how much I truly love letter stickers. If letter stickers had their own fan club, I think I would join. Which reminds me of the days of the Lisa Frank sticker club of my youth. I often wonder how many Lisa Frank sticker fans are now scrapbookers. Important issues that go through my brain, obviously.

So here is this week’s sketch. Although it’s shown with a single photo, it can easily be adapted to two or more photos in the same space there in the middle of the page. You don’t need to use the scrolled label shape either – you could substitute any shape that fits the style of your page. The idea is to repeat that shape once above and once below the photo. I have to remind myself that sometimes you can repeat a shape without repeating the same exact embellishment!

Here are eight of my favourite pages posted from last week’s sketch. Click to see any of these pages in more detail!
Top row, L to R: one, two, three, four.
Bottom row, L to R: five, six, seven and eight.

As always, if you create something from the sketch, please share a link in the comments! And no matter what you’re making, happy crafting!

xlovesx

Comment [28]