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Beautiful weather + a class who picked up right where we left off two years ago + two big scrapbooking deadlines = not enough time to blog!
But I’ll be back here tomorrow! Working on a little something now, but need to head to bed so I can get up early for school tomorrow!
Hope you’re having a lovely week!
xlovesx
Comment [2]
Today was a day with a little something old, a little something new. Back to a traditional classroom, just for a while.
Without a doubt, the most difficult thing about leaving full-time teaching was the terrible feeling that I would be abandoning my students. I had two classes that I had taught for several years, so of course I was a little attached to them. I lost a great deal of sleep over those two classes, but by the time my last day arrived it looked like they were all set and things were in place and everything would be fine.
Long story short: everything didn’t go quite so well as I had hoped.
Not long ago I got a call with the conundrum that my class was short a teacher for the few weeks before their national exams. So today I went back and returned to whiteboards and exercise books and a group of students who I swear are much taller than I remember.
When I was teaching, I could never sleep the night before a new term. Even if we only had a week off, I would be convinced that I would go back on Monday morning and not remember how to teach a lesson. If I had that fear then, you can only imagine what I felt like this morning. But sure enough, class started, they picked up their pens and we actually accomplished what I had planned.
Thirteen lessons to go until their big exam. Still hoping I can remember how to do this.
xlovesx
Comment [12]
Thanks so much for joining us at True Scrap 3! I hope The Perfect Collection helps you get more from your collection packs and your paper collection in general.
Cutting suggestions
There are plenty of ways to cut your paper of course, but I find these sorts of dimensions help me get the most of my collection pack.
All dimensions are in INCHES.
11.5×11.5 (gives you two spare strips)
10×10 + 12×2 + 10×2
6×12 + 6×6 + 6×6
6×6 + 6×6 + 3×12 + 3×12
9×12 + 3×12
4×4 + 4×8 + 8×9 + 8×3
5×12 + 5×7 + 7×7
4×6 + 8×6 + six 1×12 strips
6×12 + 6×12
two 4×6 + two 4×12
8.5×12 + 3.5×12 (gives you a big piece to go through an electronic die-cutter, etc)
10×10 + 4 extra strips (if a pattern has a frame around the edge, cut the 10×10 from the middle to remove the frame. those pieces can be used as border accents.)
4×12 + 8×12
If you are familiar with my work, you may know my philosophy is that I only teach and share with real examples from my work, so this is a real album I am currently working on. (Thank you for letting me share that!)
If you bookmark this page, you can come back to it and see each layout as I complete it! I’ll be scrapping throughout True Scrap 3 and posting the pages here, so you can see them get added to this post as I go!
But you’ll need to bookmark the page as this is not visible on my regular blog – this post is just for you.
So these are the finished pages you saw in the video.
Comment [40]
Three Sundays in a row with time to bake has made me very happy indeed! Today’s mission was something for two bananas that had decidedly turned to the cooking phase of colour. Bananas and I have a funny relationship. They seem to have some sort of magical healing abilities, along with Welch’s purple grape juice and a select other few grocery items, to bring me back to feeling myself when I seem to have a bit of a bug (and by magical, I mean more than the average happy fruit feeling, because I could quite happily live on fresh fruit and fruit juice, but please don’t tell my baking cupboard). But there is a very short window in which I actually like bananas. Too green and they have a horrible texture that seems to stay on your teeth for days; too yellow and the taste is just too strong for my liking. I actually prefer them when they are yellow with just a bit of green at the top, and once they have the slightest bit of brown, then they need to sit for a few days in limbo until they become prime baking material. The Boy will tell you I eat them before they are ripe and for this, I am slightly strange. I think he cringes as he watches me eat them green. But we all have our foibles, right?
Deb of Smitten Kitchen clearly has foibles of the other direction and would probably cringe more than The Boy at how I spot my perfect bunch of bananas at the store, since she is one of those people who I can’t fathom: she likes them with brown spots! My shoulders shrivel up at the thought. But anyway, the real reason I’ve brought her into this discussion is because I started with her recipe for this Banana Bread. And she called it Jacked-Up Banana Bread since she chopped and changed it from someone else who had borrowed it and chopped and changed it and so on down the line.
What did I do? I chopped and changed it.
Actually, I made the bread exactly to her recipe with the exception that I only used two bananas (partially because that’s what we had and partially because I actually like my banana bread to be a bit subtle, like I like my bananas). And my chopping and changing came in adding a crumble topping. A crumble topping which I didn’t measure, which makes it completely useless for keeping any real record of what I made, but essentially butter, flour, vanilla sugar, brown sugar and finely chopped salted nuts mixed until it was dry and crumbly. Spread over the batter in the pans and bake just like the Smitten Kitchen recipe. This was my happy medium because I really don’t like nuts in banana bread…but a tiny bit chopped very finely in the topping gives a bit of salt to balance out the sweetness of everything else. Or so I like to believe.
Best served as dessert with nice people who won’t debate that what I grew up calling banana bread is actually clearly a cake. That, and vanilla custard.
xlovesx
Comment [37]
Such a beautiful day that we took our work and reading outside to pretend these were our own personal fields of tulips.
And once I had to come inside, I could spend a few minutes away from that work and pretend it was still sunny. Love how these templates work—super quick to just paste in papers and click to make clipping masks. I used the Old Boris papers, which I am loving this week!
xlovesx
Comment [2]
I promise I am being kinder to stamps today. This little card highlights today’s featured stamp on the Banana Frog Blog.
Planning to relish this weekend as I’m starting a new little adventure on Monday. More about that later. Hope your weekend is a happy one!
xlovesx
Comment [4]
This is a first for me. I’ve officially killed a rubber stamp. It’s passed on. It is no more. Its stamping abilities cease to be. This, I do declare, is now an ex-stamp! (I’m sorry, I couldn’t help it.)
Or at the very least, it has cracked, dried and worn away after many, many years of well-meant abuse.
I think this was probably the first background stamp I ever purchased—those big background stamps always seemed so expensive so I never thought I could spent so much money on one design. It’s a scribbled handwriting that actually says nothing designed by A Stamp in the Hand and I started using it as soon as I found it. Thing is, it went with everything since it said nothing! So I used it for everything. Every imaginable theme for every imaginable scrapbook page! So I stamped it with every colour of plain old dye ink I could find. Then every colour of pigment ink I could find. Then I decided it needed to be embossed, so it was slathered with rather liberal amounts of Versamark ink. And possibly I forgot to clean off the Versamark ink a few too many times so eventually the Versamark sticky finish became a new feature of the stamp itself. Not to worry—surely stamping with bleach would remove the Versamark? Turns out no, but this stamp did look pretty fabulous stamped with bleach, so not a total loss.
Well, once the surface was sticky it seemed like I had no excuse to even try to keep it pristine. So I dunked it in acrylic paint. Stamped it into ultra-thick embossing powder. And beeswax. And silver clay.
And of course if I loved this stamp so much, I had to share my love for it with others, so I used it in apromixately a gazillion scrapbook class projects over the years. Usually when I use stamps in a class, I have a class set of at least a few to share, but not this one: just one single stamp to be passed around the room. So friends and total strangers used it too, with every kind of ink and paint and whatever else they could throw it out.
Somewhere along the line I grew to love a second background stamp bought from a tiny little company that only sold unmounted red rubber stamps. Of course I could have mounted it on its own block but clearly that was too much trouble and would take up too much space. Instead I used photo splits to stick it to the wooden side of the first stamp. Professional stamp mounting, that. And then I could carry my two favourite stamps in barely any space. So now both sides of the wood could become equally engrained with a muddy spectrum of inks and paints and well, no one would try to steal this item if I left my crop gear unattended.
So while many of my rubber stamps give me pangs of guilt for the sheer neglect they receive—used a few times then practically forgotten—this stamp has now been pressed past its life. I’ve actually stamped it so much that the raised surface is no longer raised and if I try to ink it, nothing sticks. Instead, this stamp just sits there reminding me that I used and abused it beyond belief. I mean, I practically had to nail it to the table just to take the picture.
Google has just told me they still make this stamp. Jury is out on whether I will succumb to another eight years of scribbled nothingness. For now, I’ll wear this stamp like a badge of honour, I think.
xlovesx
Comment [15]
A new garden of scrapbook pages bloomed today, filled with Easter pages and stamping projects.
I’m particularly loving:
Tia stamping with her son’s foot
Kelly making gathered paper ribbon with a border punch
Robyn making everything beautiful in yellow
and Chelsea making dreamy digital pages that look like something that belongs in the library.
See those and more here!
xlovesx
shimelle.com is © 2003-2016 and written by Shimelle Laine. She's a girl obsessed with storytelling through scrapbooking.
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