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

I’m convinced that whether you have a tiny stash of crafting supplies or a whole room filled with so much paper you’re not sure how you’ll ever use it all, there is a certain satisfaction that comes from stretching our scrapbooking supplies and getting plenty of projects without a refuel. Right? Whether you’re a fan of getting a monthly kit or like me, you like to choose your own supplies to make sure you love everything in the mix, stretching your supplies to multiple layouts can help you get the most for your crafting budget and also help avoid the ongoing struggle of how to practically store all those half-used sheets of patterned paper. Plus it’s a great way to be productive when scrapping with friends, if you find the conversation distracts you from remembering the great plans you had for your scrapbook pages — though that could just me with that problem!

I have four formulas that I love for taking one set of supplies and making a variety of different layouts without needing to unpack any extras. I started with three sheets of cardstock, six sheets of patterned paper, one set of Thickers letter stickers, one sheet of themed stickers and a small selection of journaling cards, adhesive gems and a tiny bit of ribbon. For tools, I added a border punch, a mask (like a stencil, but in negative) and spray ink to the usual line up of paper trimmer, scissors, adhesive and black journaling pen. All the papers are older designs that had been sitting in my stash – I loved the designs but it was time the went from the shelf to the scrapbook, I do believe!

With all that ready to go, I sat down to create four scrapbook pages using easy formulas – all designs you could reinvent with your own style.

The first formula is Several Strips. It’s just as simple as that really: start with a sheet of cardstock as the background and cut strips of several patterned papers. Trim them into different lengths and overlap them in a group in the middle of the page. One one half of the page, add your photos and journaling; on the other add the title. I love vertical titles for something just a little different, and easy-to-read fonts help them work. And for the record? Shake Shack in NYC serves the best veggie burger possibly ever. Sigh.

For one photo, 4×6 or larger, I move away from the strips to go for a Bunch of Blocks. I love scrapbooking with quadrants but sometimes that’s a little too formal or I want to use a bit less of each patterned paper. So for this look, the size of each block is less important, since they will be a bit more haphazard than the equally spaced quadrants. Overlap all the blocks and place the photo on top of the pile. The edge of the patterned papers gives you room to journal and it’s easy to add just a bit of embellishment in three spots around to the photo to hit a balance of look-at-the-photo-but-appreciate-the-crafty. And I love white ink on a dark photo too!

If you have three photos – especially printed at a small size – you can stack them up to create a Totem Pole. Just think of how a totem pole is designed: several figures, roughly the same size, stacked on top of one another, with some sort of extra flourish at the top, and usually something somewhere on the sides. So stack up the photos by placing them in a column, and your flourishes can be a title on the side and a journaling card and accents at the top! I like to anchor the totem pole design by placing it in the corner of the page, and use the mask and ink on this page to go just over the edge of the patterned paper so everything sat just right on the cardstock background.

As for the last page? Now concentrate. Layouts with a concentrated design style always help to stretch your supplies, because they simply don’t need as many things to be added before you call it done. This is the only layout I didn’t start on a plain cardstock background: instead, I chose my favourite pattern from the six sheets and kept it as a whole sheet, then chose one quarter of the page as the scrapping canvas and just left the rest of the page alone. Admittedly, concentrated designs are a bit of a love/hate issue perhaps – but if you’ve never given it a shot, you might be surprised with the variety they can add to your albums. I wouldn’t want every page to be so sparse but i love the look just now and then.

One last little suggestion: I find it easiest to stretch one set of supplies to multiple pages when the photos have something in common, so the theme looks like a choice rather than turning the pages of my albums and suddenly thinking ‘Oh, and I made all these pages when that paper collection came out’. These photos are all from a trip to New York on the way home for Thanksgiving 2009. These four layouts used the majority of the supplies I started with, but I have some scraps left over so I can carry those into other layouts from that same trip perhaps – and stretch the scraps even further.

Okay, so now I’m curious: what’s your opinion on stretching one set of supplies? Do you love the look you get over multiple pages from one kit of supplies (either purchased as a kit or assembled from your own stash collection) or do you prefer that every page in your albums have a different combination? Like it’s okay for the red polka dot paper to appear on more than one layout, but the next time you used it, it would be with other papers entirely? Is it something you actively think about when you scrap? Ooooh… discussion time! Let me know what you think.

xlovesx

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Sorry for the few days of absence there… we’ve been spending more time on trains and out of towns in our last few days. We’ve just arrived in Saigon and have internet access now! I’ll be back later today with a scrapbooking post, if you can believe it. A scrapbooking post with four layouts! Shocking, I know.

Looking forward to catching up with everyone after a few days of doing things like this.

A note to those of you on Facebook — Facebook is blocked in Vietnam, so although I can read messages by email, I can’t reply. If you need to contact me in the next few days, please feel free to email me at shimelle at gmail dot com and I’ll be able to write back! Thanks so much.

xlovesx

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The Ancient City in Thailand… it’s an interesting sort of place. Imagine you were a wealthy businessman who wanted to do something nice for your country. I know, you think, I’ll build an amusement park! But not the sort of amusement park with daredevil rollercoasters and log flumes. The kind that plots a map of the entire country on some empty land and fills it with a mix of transplanted, recreated or just plain made up landmarks that correspond to each region of the country’s geography. That makes sense, right? Well, that is the Ancient City in a nutshell.

Pay to get in, then ride a bicycle or drive a golf cart around the winding paths to see various structures either moved here or constructed here so you can get a feel for every part of the country and all the unique cultures contained therein. You’ll see things like this:

Because every theme park needs some random cattle, right?

And some pretty flowers.

As well as samples of product packaging over the years.

No rollercoasters, but on the plus side, you also don’t have to queue for anything and the ladies’ room was the cleanest of all I saw in Thailand, I do believe!

The real reason The Boy was a fan: he could drive a golf cart all afternoon. He would quite happily forget the ‘lf’ at the end of ‘golf’ and tell you this was a go cart instead. Oh my. So maybe there was nearly one rollercoaster, if you were a passenger on this cart!

And if you can understand what they mean by all that, then your translation skills are awesome. (Not that I could read a word of it in Thai – just that this particular translation is more creative than others!)

There are temples, ruins, bridges, homes, waterfalls, mountainsides, rivers and ancient burial grounds all recreated here.

Which makes it seem like a geography teacher’s dream: can you imagine the field trip potential? I am sure there are often many children here with worksheets in hand.

Though that might be a bit confusing when you come to a spot on the map where it indicates that some pieces were just made up from their imagination, like a bridge (over no water) painted like a rainbow and clouds. The little-known Rainbow Brite province, I do believe.

Rather than school children when we were there we saw a corporate retreat, with all sorts of groups doing trust falls and scavenger hunts… something comforted me that those mixed up days are part of business life all over the world! I went on many as a teacher and they were always a little hit and miss. But then they were usually in the school yard or maybe a conference room at a local hotel. Not a theme park of national landmarks!

Okay, so maybe I think this whole idea is slightly comical, but it is worth seeing. It’s a very pleasant place and far quieter than Alton Towers or Six Flags, of course. And it did let us see a bit about life in years gone by or parts of the country we’re not going to see with our own eyes.

And just to ensure family and friends that I am actually here and this isn’t a random joke I’m blogging from my bedroom in London, some photographic evidence of my location:

Now… share a slightly funny thing to see if I came to your neck of the woods! After all, I hail from the state with the world’s second largest ball of twine, so your locale must have something unique too! (And given the choice, definitely go see the Ancient City rather than the ball of twine! But if you happen to be driving by…)

xlovesx

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Happy New Year! May 2011 bring you and yours much happiness and nothing you can’t overcome with grace.

We’re a few countries on from this today, but a sparkly night in Bangkok sounds pretty New Year’s Eve to me!

xlovesx

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Congratulations Heather! You’re the winner of the giveaway and will receive a $25 gift certificate to Two Peas in a Bucket to spend on whatever you would like!

Heather, please email me at shimelle at gmail dot com and let me know the email address for your Two Peas account. Thanks!

If you didn’t win, I hope you have better luck next time! Look for weekly giveaways here on the blog and a chance to win a Two Peas gift certificate every month! (You can subscribe or become a friend on Facebook or Twitter if you want to make sure you don’t miss a chance to win. Just use the buttons over to the left.)

xlovesx

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So I’ll warn you now… if you don’t want to see pictures of our feet, go ahead and click away. But I promise, our feet are clean and everything… it’s just that they were also dinner for a few hundred small fish who specialise in giving pedicures. True story.

Fish pedicures aren’t really all that hard to come by now – there are several places in London where you can get one if you fancy, but they are all over the place in Bangkok and we decided to give it a whirl at a night market. Essentially, you wash your feet then stick them in a tank filled with lots of tiny fish you nibble at the dead skin. It doesn’t hurt, but it tickles more than I could have imagined, and it took about ten of our fifteen minutes for me to calm down and not constantly shake the fish from my toes. So that sign that says one of the benefits is ‘the rest’ and how it will ‘cause relaxation’? That bit is far, far from what we experienced!

We did however giggle a great deal and get many laughs from passersby who had no intention of sticking their feet in the tank. Definitely a conversation starter.

By the way, if you ever get a fish pedicure, go for a tank that has smaller fish. We passed various places offering fish of different sizes and our tank had mostly small but a couple large fish. The large fish bite harder and they are too big to get to the little spots anyway, so I was very glad we didn’t opt for the all-big-fish tank. Seriously, there is a certain I can’t believe I am writing this message going through my mind as I type about fish instead of scrapbooking!

Admittedly, my feet were very soft after a fish pedicure and if I had the nerve to keep my feet in that tank for thirty minutes instead of fifteen, I think my toes could have won awards for their amazing condition. But I’m just not sure I could manage… we’ll see what the verdict is on that after several more weeks of miles of walking every day!

xlovesx

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Butterflies and rosettes – still my go-to embellishments! Just a few recent scrapbook pages from the garden that I haven’t shared here yet – click to see each page and all the products, some of which are great deals in the year-end sale.

What have you been scrapbooking recently? Share a link in the comments so we can all see!

Today is the last day for the giveaway so don’t miss out!

xlovesx

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The potteries of Ko Kret were lovely enough to deserve their own post, I thought – or perhaps I just took too many pictures and couldn’t choose my favourites! On this small island there are several potteries, all working throughout the year to create terra cotta pots for tourists, local guests and large retailers. You can walk right up to each of the work rooms and we were encouraged to walk around and see everyone at work.

Each pottery has its own space for keeping the raw pottery in its greenware form. Some kept it in blocks and others in pits, then as you walked down pathways we passed the unfired pots waiting their turn in the kiln.

Many of the kilns are huge and seem to run pretty much nonstop. They are such a part of the scenery that we saw small mock-up kilns for children, with teddy bears and other toys nestled inside – like a dollhouse really!

The workspace of the individual artisans was intriguing. They spend day after day in these spots, working on their own style of decoration. The potter in the top photo had several fish tanks that we could see as he worked. The potter from the second shot had stepped away when we passed, but I thought this space was amazing – definitely a case of finding just the right arrangement of everything to his liking. How many pots must have been made right there?

In this pottery the fluorescent lighting played havoc with the video, but you can get a little idea of how quickly they work. He made a completed pot in less than sixty seconds, and there were three potters working here making thousands of pots for export.

These were made by the potter with the fish tanks – his work all had a very ornate carving style, and he made all of this with two tools – a scalpel and a plastic cigarette lighter. He used the rolling metal part of the lighter to draw the lines in rings around the pots rather than any sort of fire from it.

There are storage cabins filled with small, basic pots ready to be put out on the sales tables or be crated up for larger orders.

Some of the small pots are sold as souvenirs with tiny starter plants, so many of the ledges are covered in seedlings in preparation. Everything an on-going process.

These pots were from larger orders being boxed up to ship to retailers all over the world. I am somewhat curious if we’ll find terra cotta heart pots at the garden centre next summer.

Don’t forget to enter the giveaway while you are here!

xlovesx

_{Find tons of scrapbooking bargains in the Two Peas Year-End Sale. US customers can also get free shipping for orders $50 or more with code 2YRANN in December or NYRESE in January.}

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