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

Today I’m happy to introduce Louise Fortune as a special guest blogger. She has five fabulous ideas for crafting with printables – great ways to add new designs in just the style you want by using your home printer.

Printables are one of the most versatile scrapbooking products to have in your crafting arsenal. It doesn’t matter if you are a died in the wool paper only scrapbooker or if you dabble a little in the hybrid, printables can be a untapped resource especially as there are some great sites offering a huge selection (try here for a start) not forgetting the scrappers to numerous to mention, who offer great freebie versions of their designs. A whole page can be created from printable products without even moving from your scrapping space from papers and journalling cards to embellishments and accents.

The card above features one printable design – it’s a great printable and amazingly simple to use. The stand alone design could be adapted to use in a mini book – I’m thinking JYC here girls – as a printed background on a seasonal layout or as is intended on a card.

Although clean and graphic in looks it the overlapping type gives it a lively feel. The colours are simple enough that it could be matted (wow! I haven’t used that word in a long time.) and then added to a patterned background without it looking too busy.

Once printed onto your card blank all it needs is a pretty matching ribbon on the side, voila ! bespoke Christmas card. I used a 5 ×5 inch cream card blank for this design.

Two tips to help get the most from your printable design: Remember to adjust the paper settings on your printer for card to get a nice deep crisp ink resolution. If you want the design smaller or larger, adjust the scale settings (percentage) from your print preview screen.
This design is available free from Scrapbook Printables. Find it here and print at any size you fancy.

I love, love, love this design! My inspiration for this came from my favourite American coffee shop (you know who you are!) discontinuing the cherry chocolate christmas drink this year. I decided to create my own version and as I have friends who miss their seasonal cherry, choc, coffee beverage too I decided to do a few gift mugs, this tag with the instructions finishes off the package perfectly.

One seasonal mug, three sachets of cherry chocolate mix and a generous helping of mini marshmallows, wrapped generously in clear film and tied with sheer ribbon and the tag, one fast, thoughtful, designer, handmade gift.
I used a standard manilla luggage tag from a stationary store (WHSmith, Staples or Paperchase) printed the design off onto white card and then adhered it to the tag.

To create this gift bag I downloaded a template from the web, there are hundreds of options out there. This one fits perfectly onto an A4 sheet of paper and makes a 6×3×2 inch bag (approx). Choosing which paper to download and print is the only difficult option with this project there are SO many available and as you get to pick the design it can be tailor made for your gift and the occassion.
This one is obviously seasonal and I used this free snowflake design available here. The paper design is printed on one side and then the paper was put back through the printer and the template was printed on the opposite side.

As this scrapbook page is about a city break, I used Shimelle’s travel journal printable, but instead of creating a book with it I used it as a background and a journalling option for my LO. It is printed on kraft cardstock and then the design is left whole, trimmed to a 1/4 of an inch of the outside edges and then adhered to the cardstock.

I wanted the journalling to be read, and I hand wrote it, which is rare, so I want it accessible! A trading card protector sheet was trimmed down to 2×2 pockets and fixed to my page with brads over the travel log. on the back of the photos I adhered a street map of Dublin, but you could opt for four more photos to make it an 8 photo layout. finally I added a manilla tag printed with some details and a rub on clock face and a strip of American Crafts travel paper.

This scrapbook page uses a bunch of printable journalling cards. They serve two functions here, as a journalling option but also as a design element, creating a great undulating border across the photo. These were created using the speech bubble option in shapes on my word processing package, I changed the outline to dots adjusted the size and then printed them out onto graph lined card.
The only tricky bit was cutting them out by hand, not my strong suit! I added a wide strip of patterned paper behind the photo a small printed red tag to the top edge to tie in the red on the journalling tags and a title cut out on my Cricut die-cutting machine. I ran a few of the cut out speech bubbles back through the printer to add the lettering.

Do you have any projects with printables you’d like to share? Leave us a link in the comments and share the printable love!
Thanks for joining us Louise!

Louise is a 40 something work from home Mom, her professional background is in graphic design, her hobbies are all creative, as long as you don’t count chocolate eating. Since writing her first travel journal at 13yrs old,she has always scrap booked. Documenting and photographing the events that make up her life along with the associated ephemera. Louise recently entered the blog world where she randomly rambles on about life and her creative pursuits or lack there of and occasionally shares her various typographic designs.

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Is this you? If so, you’re the winner of the gift box of scrapbooking supplies from Hambly Screen Prints and Jenni Bowlin Studio!

Email me your mailing address so I can post this to you tomorrow before we leave!

And oh my goodness, the comments you left yesterday – I have loved reading them. Some of them places I have been and it made me happy to remember; others places I haven’t seen and would love to visit. Even some we’ll see on this journey!

Colour me excited.

xlovesx

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It’s our last weekend at home before we take off! Oh my! Seeing as I can’t take these lovely Christmas scrapping supplies in my backpack, I’m going to give them to one of you!

One randomly chosen commenter will win:
6 sheets of 12×12 paper from Hambly Screen Prints
4 12×12 screen-printed overlay transparencies from Hambly
Green vintage buttons, paint dabber and memo pad of journaling papers, plus Christmas mini bingo card set and die-cut journaling pad in polka dots, all from Jenni Bowlin Studio.

To Enter: Leave a comment on this blog post telling us one place in the world you would like to visit (daydreams totally allowed – don’t worry about the cost, time or anything else).

Enter until 10am Sunday, UK time. Please note you will need to check back for the winner tomorrow so you can give me your mailing address quickly – I’ll need to post this Monday morning! Thanks! International entries are certainly welcome, though I can’t guarantee the post will get it to you before Christmas. We’ve just passed the suggested last posting date for many countries on Friday – so it might make it, or you can scrap after the big day of course!

Good luck!

xlovesx

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Today I’m happy to welcome Christine Emberson to the blog to share five ideas for misting on scrapbook pages and other craft projects. Enjoy!

I’m really excited to be doing a guest post for Shimelle, in fact you could say I’ve gone a little misty eyed with the delight!

I discovered Tattered Angels Glimmer Mists fairly recently and I have to admit I was instantly hooked. Initially only purchasing one colour I soon realised that was just plain silly and that I would definitely need the whole rainbow (there are so many colours available!) Also seeing all the Glimmer Mist bottles lined up along my desk truly gives me a thrill – am I the only one to get so excited about co-ordinating products?

So, what is it? It is a water-based, archival safe, acid-free and non-toxic product! That’s the chemical/technical bit but the excitement is that it delivers a touch of glimmer in a fine mist for all your projects. You can use it on paper, acrylic, metal and fabric (it also adheres to cats and children if they happen to be passing by the craft table!)

And, what did I make? I made all five projects with Cosmo Cricket’s Mitten Weather papers. These papers manage to combine traditional with modern, using a palette of red and green with lilac and pale blues – I love them!

Winter Wishes Christmas Plaque

I’m a very lucky girlie in that my darling Dad is a keen woodworker. I can show him a picture of something and like lightening he rushes to his workshop and makes it! One example of his talent is these wooden plaques. They make a perfect base for projects. Here, I’ve opted for a Christmas theme – the background paper is ‘Winter Frost’ and I’ve used a chipboard reindeer as a mask and sprayed lightly with Glimmer Mist in Crème de Chocolat. Even though the reindeer is fairly faint I love the effect. There is also a bit of misting on the red die cut.

Festive Jar of Jelly Beans

Recycling! We are encouraged to be greener than green now and this is one little way we can all help. Altering a jam jar is fun and makes a lovely gift. I have used the spotty side of ‘Deck the Hollies’, ‘Woolens and ‘Festivities’ and one of the ‘Elements’ die cuts. A crafty bit of scallop punching makes a cute lid. Before adhering to the jar, liberally spray (yourself included if you wish!) with Chalkboard Mist in White – it gives everything such a sparkly frosty feel.
PS: I think this would be a great project to adapt for crafty youngsters who want to make Christmas presents too – fill jam jars with each friend’s favourite sweets and decorate to suit! -Shimelle

Winter Wonderland Scrapbook Page

I have had this chipboard die cut for some time and had grand ideas about covering it with paper but to be honest the thought of cutting out all those intricate little curves made my knees quake! I decided keeping it as a festive mask was much more stress free. I kept this layout very simple, some misting and inking, a bit of sewing, some strips of paper and tiny gems.

‘Just For You’ Snowflake Tag

Red Velvet Glimmer Mist was the favoured colour for my simple tag. I used snowflake punches as tiny masks and just spritzed away! Allow to dry thoroughly and add any other embellishments. I used one of the die cuts and attached a tiny embossed tag and flower.

Christmas Robin Layout

I punched holly leaves to arrange as a mask and I then using the Tattered Angels Chalkboard Mist in White. I love the floral side of the ‘Woolens’ paper and spent quite a while cutting out the holly and flowers! This photo depicts a true winter’s day to me.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my five ideas! Life does not feel complete without a bottle or two.. of Glimmer Mists!

Christine Emberson works in the City for a London law firm. Luckily this job only takes her away from scrapbooking a couple of days a week. She happily works from her craft desk in Kent where her style is critiqued by two teenage sons and far too many cats! Christine’s scrapping style is to mist, punch, distress, sew and wherever possible lavish everything with butterflies! She maintains she is at her happiest and most relaxed with a piece of 12 × 12 in her hand! You can read more about Christine and her creations at her blog, Hope Chances.

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Oh what to do with a funny old Christmas. It’s one thing to not be in your own house on Christmas day and come back a day or two later to find the tree still standing – that’s perfectly fine and ordinary. It’s another thing entirely to leave before Christmas and not come back until spring! Leave the tree up and passersby will certainly start to talk by February. Ask the house sitters to take it down and well, I just don’t think I could ask someone else to take on such a job, especially when putting all the Christmas decorations away means one giant organising challenge from the limited storage spaces provided by city living.

So no tree. Something different then: embracing the love of vintage and travel with a Christmas display in vintage suitcases! And then when it’s time for us to head to the airport, we can pretty much just close the cases with all the decorations inside and worry about that when we come home in fourteen weeks!

You can see the full details of the decorations here as part of the Scissor Quirk blog party. (Scissor Quirk is the blog of the lovely Michelle Clement, designer of Sassafras Mix & Mend, amongst other things!) There are so many inspiring posts on her blog with a huge variety of guest artists, plus giveaways and freebies to download and discounts for shopping! What’s not to love?

And maybe it’s time for me to become a little less obscure about this long trip I’ve coyly mentioned here and there. One of the things that is awesome about having a fully online job is that I can work from anywhere. One of the things that is not awesome about The Boy’s field of work is that firms dissolve pretty frequently in this market. We decided to make that not-awesome thing into a truly awesome thing by taking a travel break before he starts back to a daily grind. We are doing what’s called an RTW trip – Round the World – but in a way, that’s a misnomer. Round the world sounds like you go pretty much everywhere, and at some levels of the RTW airline ticket, you can. At our level, it means you pick a starting location and you keep traveling around the globe in the same direction until it brings you home. We start in Thailand and will travel much of that corner of SE Asia, head through Malaysia and Indonesia, jump to Australia and New Zealand, then finish in South America, traveling from Santiago to Buenos Aires and then home to Londontown. It’s a lot – twelve countries over three continents in fourteen weeks – but it’s hardly ‘the world’. Still: I think it’s plenty for one journey!

We are taking less luggage than what you see in our Christmas decorations! Just one small backpack each, which has had its own challenges for me – both in getting a suitable bag for my dinky shoulders and in not filling it up with things that are not as essential as I wish – I can’t wait for my hair to be an absolute disaster from no blowdryers, straighteners or assorted tonics – oh my! It would appear I am slightly more girly than the average backpacker, but I am determined to make a cute dress, converse all stars and a backpack become a rockin’ look.

I am not at all disappearing from blogland or the internet! We are actually going to blog the whole trip, right here. Don’t tell him, but this may mean you get to see a bit more of The Boy on the blog, and it’s not often he does that unless he’s dressed as the Mad Hatter! I’m going to try to persuade him to put in an appearance now and again. (If you didn’t know, The Boy’s middle name is ‘too-cool-for-Facebook’ as he doesn’t do things with social accounts!) But don’t freak out: the crafty posts will continue too! I’ve prepared some projects that I’ve kept back to share with you over the next three months and more excitingly, there are lots of guest posts from talented crafters who will be showing you their favourite tricks and techniques. So instead of going quiet, it should actually be pretty exciting here on the blog! I really hope you’ll enjoy hearing from our adventures on the road.

But before we leave, I’ve been determined to soak up as much traditional Christmas as possible, and that includes Hyde Park’s Winter Wonderland today! So I best go and grab a special Christmas coffee and don my red wool coat and sing a carol or two!

xlovesx

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_{©twopeasinabucket.com}

I did warn you that I had rather fallen in love with paper garlands this Christmas, right? Because here’s another garland with a step-by-step tutorial for you! This one is part of the Holiday Sharing event over at Two Peas, and you can find it here, including a PDF you can download to see all the steps for making the garland and the ornament with the bookpage.

If you create something (anything!) inspired by the project, you can upload it to Two Peas and enter a challenge. One entrant will win some shopping from the Two Peas store! Always fun to shop with free money, right? (I just spent some gift cards the other day and I felt like doing a dance to celebrate getting something for ‘nothing’!) You have until new year to enter the challenge too.

One little thing I’ve decided and wanted to pass onto you: from now on, I am only buying plain white paper flowers. With all the mists and inks I have on my shelf, I can make those white flowers any colour I would like! And for projects like this, it’s lovely to make just the right number of flowers. From one bargain pack of flowers, I had plenty and some left over. If I’d purchased coloured flowers, I would have had to buy a pack of red, a pack of green and a pack of cream. Misting flowers: it’s the way forward.

Of course, I reserve the right to change my mind for suitably beautiful paper flowers of any colour. But you know, just in general. With the plain flowers. Something like that.

And thanks to all who downloaded and spread the word about the Christmas single. It is much appreciated!

xlovesx

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Back in early 2010, Laura mentioned that a friend had started a new blog as a year long adventure in doing something new every week. That was Nick and his 52 New Things. I started reading his entries and told The Boy I was sure he would like the blog of Laura’s friend. ‘He’s doing one new and random thing every week for the whole year,’ I said.

‘Oh, you mean that guy from 52 New Things, right?’

Well, yes. And instantly my world had imploded: The Boy had just been reading along like you would read any blog and then presto, it was someone I had actually met in real life. Oh, the world is a funny old place.

Anyway, the reason I tell you all this is because now is when you can help make something amazing happen! One of the 52 New Things was to write and record a Christmas single in just 52 days, using the power of networking and friends to make it all happen. And the goal is to get to number 52 in the charts and raise £5,200 for the Alzheimer’s Society. They aren’t looking for giant donations: just sales of the song via iTunes at 79p in the UK or 99cents in the US.

Click here to buy this song in the UK iTunes Store
Click here to buy this song in the US iTunes Store

(If you’re in another country, search for artist 52 New Things on iTunes!)

All of the song’s proceeds are going to the charity – in fact, Nick has been taking sponsorship donations for all of the 52 New Things to support the Alzheimer’s Society all year long.

I realise this post has absolutely nothing to do with scrapbooking, unless I make a tenuous link between the nostalgic lyrics of the song being somewhat like the type of journaling we might write in our albums with photos from Christmas morning 1984, but it is a seriously cool project and I would love if you used that ‘share this’ button at the bottom of this post to spread the word about the song. Plenty of Christmas singles are advertised on posters and tv adverts – this song depends on people like us telling our friends. So share a link, download the song and be part of the fun!

Merry Christmas!

xlovesx

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_{The bottlecap card isn’t from the kit – look at the other three.}

I love to scrapbook.
I love the idea of making cards.

It’s just that when I make cards they don’t seem to come out quite right to me. It doesn’t come as naturally to me. Recently I figured that’s because when I scrapbook I start with the story I want to tell and probably some photos too – while a card is usually more design-centric.

So I have to tell you I am loving the card kits from BasicGrey. I only discovered them recently and these cards are actually from the kit they had out last year, which I bought in the post-Christmas sales to give it a try. But now consider me entirely sold on the idea of a kit that has a variety of cards but…
…the pieces are all the right size already, just punch them out and ink the edges if you want.
…the card designs are different so it doesn’t get boring like assembly-lining identical cards.
…there’s a card kit for each BasicGrey collection and all the cards are winners.

So if like me, you find it easier to scrap than make cards, or you’re looking for a great gift for someone crafty, these card kits really get a double thumbs up from me.

What’s your status with Christmas cards? Link us up if you’ve posted yours online.

xlovesx

PS: Today I made pumpkin scones inspired by Sharyn Carlson’s recipe and I must say they are divine. Not as sweet as a pumpkin cake or bread, and lovely warm with coffee.

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