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

Oh goodness, that is probably the longest break I’ve ever taken from blogging… and I didn’t even have a chance to warn you! While Love your Pictures, Love your Pages has been keeping me busy, I’ve also come home to visit my family and hometown for a few weeks. It’s been a somewhat crazy journey that has involved everything from appearing in a musical to a trip to the hospital (in a supportive role – I’ve managed to stay injury-free so far!) and in general it’s been quite surreal. (Probably more so since the boy who keeps me sane is still in London, working away!)

Today was the first day when things started to show a semblance of calm and I have about eleventy billion scrapbooking deadlines to catch up on (thank you to all who have been patient with me!) and for a while this morning I was worried that I might not remember how to scrapbook. So far, I think I have managed to remember how to glue one piece of paper to another piece of paper in an aesthetically pleasing manner. We’ll see if that continues!

So between hanging out with the world’s most amazing grandparents and having a bit of a volume duel while I sing and my mum plays flute and piccolo in Chess, it is proving to be quite the experience.

You know… the sort of thing I should scrapbook. Or something.

Crossing my fingers that you’re still out there and it’s okay for me to come back to the blogging world now!

xlovesx

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_{Admittedly unrelated to the rest of this post, but yay for pretty things, right?}

Some of my blogging friends are giving away class passes — they are all comment-to-win giveaways, but they all have different deadlines and things to leave in the comments, so do read each post carefully! And of course check out (and bookmark!) their fabulously crafty blogs for more inspiration!

I came to know Jen Martakis as a digital scrapper and digital designer, but she’s been crafting with paper for ages too! Lately she’s been posting some fabulous cards as well as her scrapping projects. Enter Jen’s giveaway here.

Danielle Flanders has an amazing blog for anyone who loves papercrafting. Her cards and pages have such a classic, beautiful style with just the right amount of edge to make them hip and now! Enter Danielle’s giveaway here.

Doris Sander is the sweetest lady I’ve ever met at a trade show. She designs for Jenni Bowlin and American Crafts, and she is hilarious to boot. She has been known to email about scrappy things while she’s with her family at the local pool, and I find this an amazing image in my head! Enter Doris’s giveaway here.

If you’ve been reading for long, you should know Laura Buckingham. We worked together on the SI team and it was lovely to meet a scrapper with a similar sense of humour who was a Londoner! Just this weekend she happily obliged with taking faux-tourist photos in Westminster — and you may recognise her as the Cheshire Cat! Enter Laura’s giveaway here.

Angie Lucas is one of the ladies behind Ella Publishing, and I’ve only just started to get to know Angie but she is so with-it and together and her demeanour just really inspires me. Her blog has a lovely mix of different types of storytelling that I love. Enter Angie’s giveaway here.

If I could be reincarnated with another scrapbooker’s style, I think I might pick Jennifer Johner. I just love how she designs and photographs and lives! Her blog is a must-read in my book. Enter Jennifer’s giveaway here.

SJ Dowsett should be a familiar face by now too — she threw the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party for her birthday! She has an adorable drawing style and gives away a free illustration for print or digi projects on her blog every single Friday. Such a talented lady and she also helps keep me sane by making a lot of behind-the-scenes things tick here at shimelle.com. Enter SJ’s giveaway here.

Kandis Smith is a fellow Garden Girl at Two Peas in a Bucket and her projects are just so perfect every time. I would love to spend a day in her designing brain — she has a great eye for colour, balance and embellishment. Her work is always fab! Enter Kandis’s giveaway here.

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This weekend, choose just one photo of all the images you have. Make it a picture you love but a picture you haven’t scrapped. Or you haven’t scrapped enough.

This weekend? Make something of it.

Blog the photo and share what it means to you.

Or scrapbook the photo and give yourself the freedom to love what you create.

Or have it printed and frame it or display it in your home.

Or find a way to carry it with you wherever you go, as a picture in your wallet or the wallpaper on your mobile phone.

You’re invited:
Choose a photo. Do something with it. Share.

Share in the comment below. You can either just write a comment explaining what you did or you can leave a link to your blog or online page gallery so everyone can check out what you made.

I have a lovely prize to share with one or two of you who take up the invitation by the end of the weekend.

As for me, I’m going to scrapbook that photo at the top of this post. From shooting straight into bright sun, it came out of the camera just like that — completely overexposed and not in any way perfectly composed. And yet, I find it somewhat magical. I’ll be back to share the results soon. Can’t wait to see (or hear) what you plan to do!

xlovesx

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In case you didn’t see it late last night on the Frog Blog, we’re starting a new series of videos all about stamping titles on your scrapbook pages. We asked what you wanted to see, and it turns out I’m not the only one with a heap of letter stamps at the ready! So we’re going to walk you through a variety of techniques that focus on the title for your pages. This first instalment starts right at the beginning, with letters stamped in plain black ink on plain white cardstock, then cut out and used just like letter stickers or Thickers.

Coming up in the series, we’ll be sharing stamped titles with embossing, punching, resist techniques, masking and more. I hope you enjoy, and I’d love to see the pages you’re making with letter stamps. Share a link in the comments if you’d like us to check out your pages!

xlovesx

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Starting the new week excited about this news and looking forward to the chance to design with the lovely goodies from Jenni Bowlin Studio. I mean how could I say no to the lady who makes the most amazing butterflies in scrapbooking?

This week, look for a sneak peek at Love your Pictures, Love your Pages, a big Document:2010 update, a stamping video, a giveaway and a quick project you can make over next weekend.

By the way, Two Peas has 25% off a bunch of American Crafts pens for Monday’s Deal of the Day — this brown pen is one I cannot scrap without, so you might want to check it out if you are in need of a brown option for journaling, doodling or details!

xlovesx

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Ready for a summer scrapbooking adventure? I hope you’ll join me for a new online scrapbooking class here at shimelle.com!

Love your Pictures, Love your Pages is a four-week, high-energy journey through July. Each week we’ll be taking pictures and scrapbooking and putting it all together to make something you love.

Starting on Monday, the 5th of July 2010, full-colour PDF prompts come straight to your inbox. There are six prompts each week: the first three focus on photography and the last three focus on scrapbooking — but of course the two go hand in hand!

This is not a technical photography class. There are plenty of amazing classes already out there with people far more qualified to take you through the technical parts of your camera. Instead, we’ll be focusing on options for creative photographs — the kind of pictures that really inspire you to get scrapping. You don’t need a super-fancy camera to take part. The class prompts will show sample images from point-and-shoot cameras, dSLR cameras, toy cameras and mobile phone cameras. No matter what you’re using, you’ll find something just right!

As we start to scrapbook those photos, you can craft with paper or pixels! If you’re new to my classes, it’s worth knowing that there’s never a set of ‘do it exactly like this’ instructions. The class materials encourage you to use the supplies you have on hand and adapt any of the ideas to suit your own style. Of course, if you want to recreate things exactly as you see them, you’re welcome to do that too! Classmates share their work, creating even more inspiration to kickstart your creativity — it’s one of my very favourite things about hosting classes here.

The scrapbooking prompts give you the option of creating stand-alone layouts to go into your existing albums or you can create an album dedicated just to photos you take this summer. Most of the sample pages are 12×12 and can be adapted easily if you would like to work in a mini-book size for this project.

Here’s a look at exactly what’s included in Love your Pictures, Love your Pages:
…24 full-colour PDF prompts delivered straight to your inbox, Monday through Saturday.
…3 resource workbooks: A Month of Sketches with a full complement of detailed page sketches for your scrapping, Camera Basics with an overview of technical basics on a variety of cameras and Photoshop Magic with step-by-step instructions for some of my favourite photo-editing techniques. (Photoshop definitely isn’t required for this class — but this workbook can be useful if you do have it or you install a free trial download.)
…Exclusive designs in printable format for paper scrappers and image formats for digital scrappers
…Members-only access to chat and share your work with other participants, including a special section dedicated to helping you with specific shots you would like to kick up a notch
…Permanent archive of all class materials so you can participate whenever fits your schedule and know everything is always available for you in just a few clicks
…-Special members only discounts to some of my favourite places, including Digital Photography School and Totally Rad Actions.- (Unfortunately these discounts have now expired.)

In total, the class comes in at just under 200 pages of material, even before we start talking on the message boards! You can sign up any time in your choice of currencies: £16 GB Pounds or $24 US dollars. Just click the image to join us:

Class starts on the 5th of July and the message board will open a few days before that — you’ll receive an email with all the details on how to sign in once the board opens!

Do keep in mind that the email address you use when you pay is the only way I can get in touch with you, so do make sure it’s a valid email that you can read. If you would like your prompts sent a different email than the one you use to pay, leave a note on your payment (or send me an email if you forget – shimelle at gmail dot com).

Any questions, just ask! And watch for a few sneak peeks of both the photo and scrappy sides of the project as the starting day draws near!

I’d love to see you in class!

xlovesx

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The summer idea book from Scrapbook Inspirations is available now with its pretty-in-pink cover. This edition features pages about summer, the outdoors, girls, boys, pets, plus workshop articles on outdoor photography, detailed borders, interactive pages and machine sewing. There’s also our regular Sketch Collection, the scraplift feature Take it up a Step and Colour Story with lots of projects in my favourite colour combination for this summer. And more than £28 in free downloads for our readers too!

This edition is stocked at some WHSmiths stores and is available for online ordering as well. I know there were significant issues with the online order fulfilment with the last book (trust me – I was frustrated too!), so I actually held off in posting this until I could place an order and give you an honest account of the ordering process. I ordered my copy from here last Tuesday evening and I received it in the post today (Wednesday), meaning the current UK delivery time is one week. I even ordered under The Boy’s name so it wouldn’t stand out, just in case, so I do think this is an accurate measure of how long it will take you to receive your copy. Orders are being shipped by a different contractor than before: nothing to do with me, but I am thankful for it nonetheless. That same order page will let you send a copy to a friend as a gift or order a copy to an international address. The prices there include shipping: £10.99 for the UK, £11.99 for Europe and £12.99 for anywhere else in the world. Or if you happen upon a WHSmiths who is stocking it, you’ll find it on the shelf for £9.99. (For Londoners, I found it at Waterloo Station of all places! The shop that is right in the centre of the station had it on the bottom shelf behind the regular craft magazines.)

If you’re in the US, it will appear in Barnes and Noble and some Borders stores sometime in the next two weeks I believe. Unfortunately the import/export process seems to mean there isn’t an exact release date, but rather just when it arrives!

On a sad note, this is the last printed edition of Scrapbook Inspirations. It is my favourite of the books we have been working on, so I’m happy it was printed, but of course sad that the series won’t continue. I know there are things that were not ideal about this book, like the higher price when advertising was minimised or the harder-to-find distribution, but those were things that were always outside of my control. On the editorial side, it has been lovely to get to know even more scrappers and publish our favourite pages from all the submissions. And I really must thank Jane, Helen and Jenny who took a stack of layouts and pages of my crazy notes and made it into such pretty books. They are amazingly talented women and it has been a pleasure to work with them over these last six months.

If you had sent in pages for book 3, we are currently waiting on a few things to know what our options are for publishing your layouts in other titles, like our sister magazine Papercraft Inspirations. Your layouts are safe and will be returned, of course. But right now we’re waiting to see how many we can publish in another format, and when I know the result of that consultation, I’ll be in touch with all of you to let you know. Thanks for your patience.

And just to show you exactly how long I could wait before scrapping at least one photo from last weekend’s tea party, I made this page this morning, with pretty papers from The Girls’ Paperie and a lovely older collection – Adele from Rouge de Garance. Now I just can’t wait for the giant stack of photos I’ve ordered to arrive!

xlovesx

Click here to order your copy of the new Scrapbook Inspirations Ideas Book!
UK delivery time of one week.

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With all its pink and turquoise, I had to love Delovely, the newest release from Cosmo Cricket. But everywhere I go I hear people say but it’s so bright! so I must share one little thing…

Delovely has made me fall back in love with Girl Friday. The two collections have similar colours: two shades of pink, turquoise, baby blue and a bit of green, but while Delovely is bright and almost shocking at times, Girl Friday is muted and a little aged around the edges. Together they are my current scrapping heaven and I love them so.

Just thought I would share.

Do you have a favourite combination of two different collections? Do tell in the comments!

By the way, if you attended Scrapamia and didn’t receive your PDF after this class, please email me (shimelle at gmail dot com) and I’ll get that to you. I know we were short a couple email addresses after the weekend.

xlovesx

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