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

It may be Thursday, but it’s still Time Warp week. And we’re up to 2001: A Scrapbooking Odyssey. And while it wasn’t a year of my life filmed by Kubrick, it was a pretty shocking year for me in scrapbooking terms.

In 2000, I put together an entry for CK’s Hall of Fame but never sent it in. Don’t worry: it was filled with many paper dolls. Back then you had to select your eight best unpublished layouts to be considered. And I actually just enjoyed going through my albums to find my eight favourites, so I decided I would do that every year and keep a copy of my little ‘entry’ so I could see how I changed as a scrapbooker. Except in 2001, I got up the nerve to actually send the entry in. I was really, really hoping to get an honourable mention. I thought that would be a fabulous achievement and then I could enter the next year with a bit more respect and maybe someday I might make it, but that was really a pipe dream. I really, honestly just wanted to be forced each year to select my eight layouts, print them out on index cards and keep them as a little highlight scrapbook. Except CK went and thwarted my plan.

I am very, very glad they didn’t record the phone calls with the winners then like they do now. It would be so cringeworthy. But screechy phone calls aside, I was shocked and thrilled to win. And I knew some other girls that won that year (well, I knew them online, through a scrapbooking forum) and that was lovely. And I knew some people who entered who I thought should have won and didn’t, and that wasn’t very lovely. But then there was the second phone call that made 2001 the most confusing year of my life. A phone call from Paperkuts magazine asking me to be on their Power Team. So all of the sudden I went from having the odd paper-doll page published to actually making pages just for articles, and no matter what year that happens, it is strange. You take this thing that you’ve done just for fun and now it’s serious and it’s going to be judged and it’s so hard not to take any criticism personally.

And there was a lot of criticism back then—one scrapbook forum that was pretty popular had an entire section dedicated to issue reviews, and as soon as the new issues hit mailboxes, posters would go through page by page and offer commentary on the entire issue, layout by layout. Sometimes they would say nice things, sometimes they would say funny things and other times they would be downright cruel. I wasn’t very thick-skinned then and I wasn’t about to fight my corner, so I inevitably read what they had to say and any criticism would really affect my scrapping, from just not using a certain colour of paper to being unhappy with a week’s worth of layouts. Trends were moving very quickly as the industry started a huge growth spurt, and there was a lot of pressure to keep up with products, improve photography and make each page a masterpiece.

The funny thing is that when I look back on the layouts from that year, they are actually the most timeless in all my albums. When I look at them now, I think they are quite plain, but because this was just before so many products expanded across the US and came to UK shores, there isn’t much trend involved. CK published seven of my layouts in the Hall of Fame book: all double page spreads; all entirely cardstock. Well, one had a bit of patterned paper but it was the most subtle patterned paper ever so really, even that looked like all cardstock. (Interestingly enough, I did send in layouts with patterned paper, pop dots, metal embellishments and even cinnamon sticks, but the seven that made it into the book were the seven that were as minimal as I ever made.)

See what I mean? Really simple. Lots of wide-open space (sometimes in odd places like this layout) and the vast majority of the page space is either photos or empty expanses of cardstock. And although it doesn’t have the punch of today’s minimalist-graphic-styled scrappers, there’s nothing here that I can make fun of. The paper dolls were gone. Stickers and cheesy titles were pretty much gone. I was just about cardstock and photographs. My supply lists by each layout were so very short. But there’s just nothing there to offend. It might not grab your attention, but this is the point in my albums where I don’t look at the pages and laugh. The first concrete step of my evolution.

The trouble was that this was the point of my evolution of style that I became a scrapbook academic. I no longer played with pretty paper. I didn’t take the time to make fun little doo-dads and play with silly designs like paper dolls. I didn’t buy products I thought were too ‘fluffy bunny’, and I made my pages with a pencil, a ruler and a spirit level pretty much all the time. I had taken a few courses in page design for newspaper and magazines while I was in college, and I started abiding by those principles, more or less. At one point, I actually got out my old textbook and reread it with a highlighter and tried to invent my own formulas for scrapbook page design. It seemed like if this was going to be work (and it certainly wasn’t my full-time job but getting assignments and deadlines sounded like work to me), then I needed to treat it like work. Every once in a while I would try something out of my box for an assignment and inevitably it would get kicked back for me to do something in all cardstock or maybe with one sheet of patterned paper, but never, ever two. So back to work with the cardstock I went for a solid year of magazine issues. I also started teaching little classes at a monthly crop—and the supplies were usually just cardstock with the odd bit of thread or chalk. I remember teaching a little three-stitch triangle tree as part of a Christmas page and having several scrappers in the room look at me as if I had three heads when I gave them a needle. All of them still scrap, and I guarantee they have needles in their tool kit right this second.

One of two layouts from today looking back on pages from 2001: a bit of sewing things into a pocket of vellum and embracing wide open space.

In 2001…
I basically shopped at my own scrapbook store. Long story, but suffice to say I had plenty of Bazzill cardstock to hand.
I scrapped at a desk under the stairs, not unlike Harry Potter. The desk was too small to have both pages of a two page layout side by side, so I would do one side then walk into the hall to hold them side by side and see how they looked. I swear it didn’t seem strange at the time. I still scrapbooked in the middle of the night—sleeping wasn’t a particular talent of mine.
I kept my scrapping supplies in a Crop-in-Style Navigator rolling tote (which also went with me on the train and crossed the Atlantic a few times) and in the desk drawers. But I no longer kept a paper stash at all.
I used my Hall of Fame prize money to buy a Canon Rebel 35mm SLR camera. It was my pride and joy. But often I didn’t have the photos I needed for assignments, so I was constantly borrowing pictures from other scrappers just so I could get the ‘work’ done.
I still only did double page spreads, but I had to scrap a mixture of 12×12 and 8.5×11 for assignments.
I wrote a great deal on most of my layouts, usually typed on the computer and printed out. All of the journalling was very much like factual reporting—all told in complete sentences in chronological order without the slightest attention to lyricism. If I put the pages together, I have a near-complete commentary of where I went and what I did for an entire year, but not the slightest notion about how any of it made me feel.
I designed almost all of my pages by holding my photos in front of a rack of cardstock and choosing three colours that coordinated—one light hue, one medium tone and a dark shade. And at crops, I helped choose sets of three colours for other scrapbookers. Sometimes people even posted me their photos in the mail and I would pick three colours and post it out to them. I had a real job, but when I wasn’t doing that, I was thinking in cardstock colours.
I made about 150 layouts that year—for some reason, I kept track. Two-thirds of them were published. A big handful of the rest were for classes. And all of this made me absolutely ecstatic for about ten months, before I came crashing down in the last two.

Every single layout in my hall of fame entry used colour blocking in some way…although without any patterned paper. I had a little try today to see if I could still make colour blocking with with patterned paper and pretty edges. Does it work? It’s not amazing but I quite like it. Will product and style date this more than cardstock and a spirit level? Probably. But not quite like paper dolls. I have some more theories to share about that soon.

So the conundrum: the pages I made that year are probably the ones that will date the least. And I had to pinch myself every day because people were paying me to scrapbook, which was nothing short of amazing. But by the end of year of scrapping like that, I was totally burnt out. What’s a girl to do?
Never fear…there was something entirely new in 2002 that brought all the good back. Shall we talk about that tomorrow?

But looking back at these layouts, there is one last thing I have to say about 2001 before we move on. I really think it took three to four years of scrapping for me to develop any sort of consistency. When new scrappers pick it up these days, I think they are brilliant from their very first layout because it often seems to me that they are developing their own style quite quickly. And sometimes, they are. Lucky girls! But to those of you who are relatively new and don’t feel like you’ve caught your style just yet, I felt lucky to find it in four years. And all I’ve done since then is change that style to something totally different. So if we did this retrospect again in ten years, it might look like it took me eight or ten years to develop any style. It’s all relative. And it’s all part of the fun.

Don’t worry about the scary being over just yet: I think I can still find a fright or two in the albums to come.

xlovesx

ETA: closing comments on this one as it seems to be target of the day for spamville.

Comment [7]

Moving on then. On to the year 2000. A new millennium that brought us bugs and life was supposed to look like an X-Files spin-off and my scrapbook pages? They looked like this.

(Wait: you need the soundtrack of the week again, don’t you? Why not try this version which makes you wonder what people did with their time before there was YouTube.)

So yes, in the year 2000, I was scrapping in the land of paper dolls. I’m not sure which is scarier: the layout above with its paper dolls of Dorothy, Tinman and Scarecrow…or the fact that the layout above was published. Really. I’m not particularly proud of that. I’m just telling you so it puts things into perspective. It means I was not the only person scrapping like this.

Care for more flashbacks from the dawn of the twenty-first century? How about a tribute to my school colours?

And how about the title that everyone had to use? It was law that you go somewhere snowy, take pictures and use this title. Seriously. The scrapbooking police would arrive at your door and arrest you if you had a snowy photo in your home and no layout with this title.

At least, that was what I had heard.

Do I need to add that both of these were published? This was pretty snazzy stuff. Look how brave I was to have a sheet of vellum in my stash and just tear it! What would I have done if it had gone wrong? Where would I find another sheet of vellum? (It was easier to find a second rosetta stone then, I assure you.) And that purple page, my goodness. I cross-stitched! Cross-stitched! We are talking the height of modern and cutting edge. Also, it was pretty daring to use embarrassing photos of yourself (or any photo of yourself, it seemed), so if you didn’t catch this, you’re in for a shock:

Yes. Sixteen-year-old me with frizzy hair in cheerleading pajamas. (You know that cheerleaders have official pajamas as well as matching uniforms and matching practice clothes, right? I digress.) Printed on the pages of Paperkuts magazine.

Okay, time to be a bit more serious: my pages from the year 2000 still make me cringe, but there are a few things that I learned and there might even be a smidgen of style starting to show up. A tiny speck. Like smaller than dust, but still…let’s see.

In 2000…
I shopped mostly online from the states, though I did discover I could buy adhesive at Artbase at Lakeside shopping centre.
I scrapped on the dining room table that was never used for dining. I scrapped late at night when I should have been writing my thesis. And part of my thesis research was watching repeats of a programme that aired at 1am every night, so scrapping kept me awake until and during that strange excuse for academia. (No, really. I have seen every episode ever made.)
I kept my scrapbooking supplies in a drawer. One single drawer. Though I left quite a bit out on the table.
I still mostly used the same old 35mm point and shoot.
All my pages were 8.5×11 and double page spreads.
My favourite tools were the Jill Rinner paper doll templates and the Coluzzle system.
I bought my first scrapbooking font collection (on a CD, as nothing was just downloadable then!) and started journaling by printing from the computer. But I almost always chose handwritten style fonts, which makes me think I was mostly scrapbooking in someone else’s handwriting. Hmpf. I did handwrite quite a few of my titles, with lettering styles learned from Becky Higgins in the creative lettering column in Creating Keepsakes. And I had my biggest purchase to date—a set of Prismacolor coloured pencils. I still use them and they are still lovely, but it was about a $40 investment, which was huge for a set of coloured pencils.
I bought my first papers from Bazzill Basics—so I now had cardstock in about two dozen colours! I also found a UK stockist of acid-free cardstock, but it only came in poster-sized sheets, so I bought a bunch and spent an entire weekend cutting it down to size. That paper lasted me the majority of the year.
I bought my first sheets of vellum. I bought about three Paperkin paper dolls and found them too expensive to actually use so I would trace around them and make duplicates. Somewhere those three dolls are still in their packages.
I still matted everything. Usually several times.
But I did start to try things that were a bit dangerous for way back when: stitching, tearing, scrapping about yourself. Did you catch that there was wire holding the heart around the neck of the tinman? Crazy. Okay, it wasn’t stuff that was so dangerous I needed a lifeguard or anything, but it was more than scissors + gluestick = page. It was the ball starting to roll. If nothing else, it was the start of accumulating more stash, since clearly now papercrafters needed sewing supplies as well as their gluesticks.

And the year 2000 was when I started submitting my pages to magazines and the first time I had pages published. The first time a magazine phoned me to ask for a page, I pretty much passed out on the spot. (Well, actually I react the same way now but I have learned to finish the phone conversation!) That call was for the World of Memories book, where the pages were displayed by the scrapper’s state or country. It still makes me laugh when I see the description of the book as featuring ‘113 scrapbookers from the United States, Australia, Canada and England’. Two of the ‘scrapbookers from England’ were Jane Dean and I. I will quietly wave to the third scrapper without naming her because I don’t know if she would like me to say! Jane can slap me next weekend if she was keeping World of Memories a secret. I can take it. Anyway, one of my pages in that book?

A paperkin dressed up to look like a beefeater with pictures of the Tower of London.

I blame that layout for every little bit of what happened from then on, because I got emails for years asking where I bought my beefeater paperkin. Lots of emails asking how much I would charge to make one. And one email from a guy who offered me $50 to make one so he could wrap it up and put it under the tree because he was surprising his scrapbooking wife with a trip to Europe. (I did make that one, but I only charged him postage. I was a sucker for a sweet story!)

2001 was a very big year, so I will save that for tomorrow with a post of its own. But of course I have a need to leave you with something that is more of this lifetime! So…I tried and tried to come up with something inspiring from the pages above, and I just couldn’t bring myself to make a paperdoll. But my sewing machine can cross stitch these days, which made this layout a heck of a lot quicker than the garishly purple one above…and I didn’t have to measure a single x to stitch it!

J: don’t get mad: you are cute.

Yesterday Karen asked a big question in the comments:
my ? to you is…can anyone evolve into a better scrapper? i have been scrapping for quite some time and still, it is ok…i just love the look and style of so many other scrappers. Mine is just plain and simple. Any advice on how to evolve?

So here’s my answer: Yes, everyone can evolve. No, that does not mean you will get to a magic point and look at your layouts and know with confidence that no one has ever scrapped this wonderfully in the history of the world. It’s a tough one to answer and I am not the authority (though I am not sure that there is an authority) but over the course of this week o’ time warp, I think some answers may form. For me, the evolution started to get concrete in 2001. So come back for more embarrassment explanation and let’s see if we can put something together that makes sense.

xlovesx

PS: More modern-day stuff here today, if you fancy a star or two. And proof that I still scrap embarrassing photos of myself.

Comment [20]

Please, please, please understand how very difficult it is to lead with that image. Please don’t run away! I promise these are not an experiment in my newfound scrapping style. In fact, these are some of the very first pages I ever made.

Yesterday I was lucky enough to teach a layout class for the Scrapmates in Enfield and in thinking about what we would do for the project, I stumbled upon a class page I taught on that very same May bank holiday Monday in 2001. The supplies for that double page spread included four sheets of cardstock. Nothing else. So I had a little challenge to see if I could use a few basics from that original double page spread while making it up to date…like adding a few zillion pieces of patterned paper to the kit. But anyway, I’m getting ahead of myself.

All this inspired me to go through my old scrapbooks. The ones I keep on a bookshelf in the spare room. The ones that are filled with pages that make me cringe…some a little, others a lot. And see if I could track where I have been as a scrapper. So over the next four days, I will possibly scare you a great deal with some images of old pages. But hopefully there will also be some things that make more sense…a visual evolution of a scrapbooker. And a little project at the end of it all that you might like to do too. I call it time warp week. And as there will also be a great deal of explanation, you might like to listen to the time warp in the background, for added humour and enlightenment.

I discovered scrapbooking in the autumn of 1998 at that fine American shopping establishment known as Big Lots. If you’ve never seen a Big Lots well…it’s called Big Lots because they buy giant lots of random close-out items and sell them very cheaply in stores that are big but basic. Every Big Lots I’ve ever been to has been housed in what used to be a Wal-mart before Wal-mart decided they needed a bigger, better building. There was a Big Lots store in the little town where I went to college and it was a huge hit with college students, as the pay cheques from our minimum wage, part-time jobs went a bit further when you weren’t paying for pretty store displays or correctly spelled packaging. And there in a giant box of random items, I found a scrapbook kit in a box for the princely sum of $3.99.

The kit contained a cardboard 3-ring binder, ten page protectors, ten sheets of white cardstock, a dried up glue stick, some faded construction paper and a plastic shape template. And I did actually use all of the contents of this kit to make my very first scrapbook, a gift from the cast for the director of a play I was in that term. So if you haven’t figured it out, that means I can not hide my very first pages from the world. They are in someone else’s house. Sometimes this gives me nightmares. Because I remember just how terribly frightening those first ten pages were. And of course I was already taking it seriously—I had to double my investment by paying at least another $4 for a set of Crayola markers to make the beautiful titles and clever captions in that book. Imagine the beauty.

Shortly after giving that album away, I discovered that there were people who used the word ‘scrapbooking’ with a real ‘ing’ at the end, almost as if it were an athletic event. I discovered that Wal-mart had a scrapbooking aisle where they were hiding all the good pens, far away from the Crayola markers in the stationery section. Then I found the scrapbook aisle (singular in those days!) at Hobby Lobby. It was there that I bought an out of date, marked down issue of Creating Keepsakes magazine and had the biggest scare of my entire life: I WAS SCRAPBOOKING ALL WRONG.

See, those pages at the top of this post…they are actually significantly less scary than my very first pages. They were made in late ‘98 and show that I had discovered some things (like the pack of coloured cardstock that had navy, hunter green, brick red and a yellow that didn’t match anything) and not others (all the pastel and brown papers are just typing papers…not at all from the scrapbook section). So I suppose this is where it all started.

In 1998…
I shopped at Wal-mart and Hobby Lobby.
I scrapped on my lap, while sitting on my futon in my just-off-campus apartment. I usually scrapped late at night while watching a strange combination of MTV and HGTV.
I kept my scrapbooking supplies in a small plastic file box. All of them.
My camera was a point-and-shoot 35mm I had had for at least six years.
I scrapbooked on both sides of the cardstock.
My favourite tools were a plastic template with a circle, square, oval, heart and star, deckle edge scissors (though I didn’t know they were called ‘deckle’. I called them ‘ripped’.) and my very first punch: a small star.
I journalled with the four-colour starter set of Zig Fine & Chisel tip pens.
My pages didn’t stand alone or have titles—I would just do a run of pages with a roll of film and move on to different colours with the next roll of film. ‘Different colours’ meaning a little more navy on the first roll; a little more hunter on the second roll.
All of my pages were 8.5×11. Most of them were navy, hunter green or brick red.
At the very end of the year, I bought my first patterned papers in a book from Hot off the Press.

And in trying my very best to take some inspiration from those pages to come up with something today, I ended up with this:

It surprised me just how much I had to search in my stash to find navy blue cardstock when it used to be my staple. This was the only sheet I found. And I had absolutely none of that hunter green, so I had to opt for a springier shade (oh, what a shame, I hear you say!) of green. Before you think that’s the only thing I could ‘lift’ from those ten-year-old pages, I did include a tiny bit of patterned paper cut with my current favourite punch (the 2” scallop circle) as a nod to my melodramatic overuse of the star punch in 1998. But yeah, that is pretty much all I could do. I wasn’t going to crop anyone into a heart shape just for laughs.

In 1999, I like to think things got a little better. But only a little.

In 1999…
I shopped at the giant chain craft stores and Two Peas in a Bucket.
I scrapped on my dining table, which was only once used for a meal, though it was sometimes used for studying for exams.
I learned not to scrap on both sides of the cardstock, so I could move my layouts around.
I started making pages with titles—pretty much all double page spreads.
My favourite tools were punches and the Fiskars circle cutter.
I journalled with a black Zig Millennium pen, but I hadn’t realised they came in different sizes.
All of my pages were 8.5×11. The colours got a bit more varied, but only to include derivatives like burgundy and baby blue.
I had a few more patterned papers, most by Keeping Memories Alive.
I learned I could cut titles by printing out fonts on the computer and tracing them onto paper.
And let’s not forget, I started making crazily random opera singers with viking hats out of paper. That had to be a real skill. Maybe even one that would get me a job someday? Surely not.

In trying to find something from that opera page to scraplift, I had no choice but to try to paper piece something. Though I once spent hours and hours working on paper pieced figures, I really can’t imagine doing that today. It just wouldn’t hold my attention that long. But I managed to cobble together a tree…and I did my best to work with that burgundy cardstock, but in the end I had to relegate it to the very edges and brighten things up with the yellow.

So you can see where this is going…tomorrow we venture to the valley of the (paper) dolls. I know you can’t wait.

xlovesx

Comment [18]

The twenty-fifth is here! So here’s a photo to blog this month and the album prompt to download!

Now…time to get clicking the shutter.

Wishing you a fabulous Sunday! When you post your photos or pages online, comment below with a link so I can include you in our next round up of show and tell!

Scrap your Day links & schedule:
About this project
Sign up for reminders
Getting Ready
Photo Fact Sheet #01
April Album Prompt
Photo Fact Sheet #02
May Album Prompt
Our Flickr group
UKScrappers discussion thread

xlovesx

Comment [25]

The twenty-third it is. And that brings us to this month’s photo fact sheet. Just click to download.

This month’s photo emphasis is on awareness behind the lens. It’s a step that I often find neglected when discussing photography, and I think I have finally figured out why. It all comes down to film.

My most formal photography training is not that formal at all—it was a module as part of a high school journalism class. Most of you will remember the days when we all shot on film (and if you don’t remember those days, kindly keep it to yourself, for you are making the rest of us feel much older than we really are) and the feeling with film was that we couldn’t make mistakes. When we pressed the shutter, we were taking a calculated risk, and because we had to pay for film and processing and developing and reprints all as separate costs, we were less likely to try something that was deemed quite risky and even less likely to try something just for the sake of trying. So in that class, we learned how to use a camera in the same way we learned how to develop film and print pictures in the darkroom: through regimented technique. We had posters to help us remember the things we needed to check before we started shooting: did we have the right film for the place we were photographing and was the camera set to the ISO of the film you have loaded? Had we checked the light meter from several angles and had we metered with a neutral shade? Had we composed the shot with a sales factor in mind—meaning if we were shooting a school sports event, you would much rather see our fans in the background that lots of supporters of the other team. The curriculum was regimented with two lessons each on things like aperture and exposure, and when they finally set us loose with cameras and film, we had a checklist in our camera bag to help make sure we didn’t take an entire roll of nothing. Because we could shoot three rolls at the homecoming game on a Friday night, develop the film in Monday’s class and show up on Tuesday to find that the roll with nothing on it? That was our evidence of the homecoming game. Great.

And so many things have changed since so many of us went to digital cameras for day to day use. We take risks now. We shoot things just to see what happens. We can stop worrying and flip a few dials and see if we like the results…because we can see straight away and change as we go. And that’s not even getting started with the fact that we can change the ISO on every picture if we really want to, when some of us remember the horrible feeling of a day that started so sunny you loaded a 36-roll of 200ISO only to find that the biggest, thickest cloud in the history of the world had then descended over you and there was nothing you could do but turn the flash on and hope for the best, because you had to take thirty-six whole pictures before you could use a different kind of film.

But a lot of books out there are (quite rightly) still based on shooting film. And there is a point where it does become important to know lots of regimented, technical stuff if you want to move on with your photography. But the girls I meet at crops and through this blog often tell me the technical stuff isn’t helping them right now…they just want to take one step up in their snapshots. And Scrap your Day is about snapshots. We’re not posing every element of life for a finely-tuned portrait. So instead of starting with technical stuff, we’re started with awareness. Because with a digital camera, it costs you nothing to walk around your house taking a picture of a cup of coffee on every different surface you can find. But when you put them on the computer screen and look at them side by side, you can find where the best light is in your house. And then suddenly you’ll know where to take the picture of the crafty thing you made or the amazing dessert you’re about to eat or the painting brought home from primary school.

And on Sunday, you just might want to use that to your advantage with some elements of your day.

Of course, we still have ten more photo fact sheets to come, so I reserve the right to say something that sounds remotely technical at some point between now and next March! But not today.

Scrap your Day links & schedule:
About this project
Sign up for reminders
Getting Ready
Photo Fact Sheet #01
April Album Prompt
Photo Fact Sheet #02
May Album Prompt: coming Sunday (25th May)
Our Flickr group
UKScrappers discussion thread

xlovesx

Comment [7]

It’s the 22nd…which means it is getting close to the 25th…which means soon we will be snapping everything in sight again! As promised, I wanted to make sure we took a minute to look through the different covers that have been posted in case you’re still stuck with what to put on the front of your book.

My cover is still looking pretty plain, and I am okay with that because I think it will come together over the year and be just another little reminder to me to keep the project going. I used two square punches (I have this one which has two squares in one punch, and I’ve had for approximately six and a half thousand years and all is still well) to punch twelve large squares of patterned paper and twelve smaller squares from photos. Except I can’t punch the twelve smaller squares yet, because I want one for each month. So right now there is just one little photo square from April. But next week there will be one from May. And onward we go. The buttons aren’t actually attached yet. Once the photos are all in place, I’m going to add the buttons but I wanted them to overlap the photos so they will have to wait. Which also means I reserve the right to change my mind about the buttons at any time over the next year! But for now, I am thinking pink and green buttons. There’s a bit of pearl white paint on there two, but that’s pretty much it. I’ve left the big window empty for right now. I will eventually put something there…possibly something similar to the hand photo but since this is going to last all year, clearly I don’t want to commit this early in the game.

There are some fabulous covers out there to share with you. Have a look…

Starting in the top left corner:
one, two, three, four, five.
six, seven, eight, nine, ten.
eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen.
sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty.
twenty-one, twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five.

And I’m afraid I had to stop there for today! But definitely keep them coming.

Scrap your Day links & schedule:
About this project
Sign up for reminders
Getting Ready
Photo Fact Sheet #01
April Album Prompt
Photo Fact Sheet #02: coming tomorrow (Friday 23rd May)
May Album Prompt: coming Sunday (25th May)
Our Flickr group
UKScrappers discussion thread

So…what will your 25th bring this month?

xlovesx

Comment [32]

Still doing the morning warm-up page routine, but am taking a little break from the calendar to play with some class kits from other crafty girls. It’s always a bit of a bummer not to get to take the other classes that are on at the same time, but sometimes we can trade class kits at the end…and I have a small collection calling to me to do something with them. Working on some big projects right now (well, aside from the wedding!) so it’s still nice to wake up and follow someone else’s ideas and see what happens. Little discoveries to be made.

When Karen Russell and I traded kits at Scrap Fever, I instantly felt like an absolute child. My kits were all pink scribbles and candy floss and her kits were just lush, divine, grown-up papers. But with those darned cute scalloped edges that are just too much temptation. This week I’ve made two pages that are so grown up I just don’t know what to do with myself. Both of these are from the Interactive Scrapbooking class kit—the strawberry layout (because yes, happiness is strawberry season) is pretty much exactly like the class sample, so I’m just showing bits and pieces. It has a book of photos that folds out with a calendar behind, so I’m keeping track of everything I cook with strawberries this season, listing it on the calendar, taking a photo and paperclipping the recipe into the book. (The recipe cards are from Martha Stewart.) The beach layout is a little more of me playing rather than following directions, but all the samples she includes are so lovely it is difficult to pick somewhere to start! If you can’t take the class in person, Karen sells the kit and instructions on her blog. And if I can grow up on paper, you can grow up on paper.

The other thing that really keeps me living for the first page of the morning is current photos. New photos are almost always more fun. The strawberry photos are from yesterday’s dessert. The seaside was last Saturday. Today has been the first grey day in a week, and those photos made it a little less grey in my mind. Hurrah for modern technology.

xlovesx

Comment [8]

I really meant it when I said there was no way you could feel behind until the 24th of the next month with this project. Take pictures on the 25th of the month, then you have an entire page of the calendar to tick off before the next photo day, so I just needed to find a bit of time between those magic 25s to scrap my own pages, take some pictures and have a gander at the web to see all the others this month.

I pretty much stuck to my sketch for April’s entry, and ended up including thirteen photos plus two 4×6 journaling cards attached to the back of two photos that flip up, attached with Making Memories fabric tape. I did swap one photo for the word ‘April’ as things just fit nicely that way. I am loving these letter stickers and just may use them throughout the project, as they come in a massive pack and there seems to be plenty to spell out all the months, though I will probably be stuck for zeros with all the 2008 and 2009 labels, but that can always change each month.

Another thing I am already planning to change each month is the little bit of extra embellishment. I’m not using much on top of the photos + preassembled background pages, but there is just a little. Right now, my plan is to pick something each month that is an embellishment I am using a great deal in other scrapping projects. Right now I using Circus Stories stamps and Prima flowers on page after page, so putting them to use here is not only easy but it documents that bit of personal trend. Of course, I will need to have a new favourite embellishment each month for this to happen…so we’ll see how that goes! (By the way, all Banana Frog stamps are 15% off this week along with a bunch of other stuff, so if you were dithering or fancy a bargain, now’s the time.)

And now, time to click around the interwebs to see what everyone else did on the 25th of April!
Cameron
Willow
Flower
Lainey
Jackie
Aimee
Kristy
Sarah
Jen
Mary
Lily

Plus you can see more here at our Flickr group, and UKS members can see even more pages here in the UKScrappers class gallery.

Coming soon: a post all about the album covers, so if you’ve made yours and posted it somewhere, do tell me so I can include you!

xlovesx

Comment [13]