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

Not to let Go Now Go take all the fun today, I’m excited to share this brilliant technique from Heather Leopard, complete with a step-by-step tutorial. I hope it inspires you to get stitching!

When I think of summer, the things that come to mind are bright cheerful colors and sandy beaches so naturally, I made that the focus of my layout. I didn’t just want to include a nod to summer, I wanted to scream SUMMER! I knew I had to go with a big, bold title so I went to my trusting die cutting tool and pulled out 6 bold colors that coordinated with Shimelle’s Starshine collection and went to work.

To get started, I created the entire design for my layout in the CAMEO software, including my photo and layering around my photo. I created the letters using Franklin Gothic font in varying sizes between 460 – 525. I simply enlarged the letters, overlapped them and scaled them up and down until I liked the look.

For this next step you have many options for practically perfect holes for stitching but I’m going to talk about two of my favorites. The first one is to draw the design onto your paper using your CAMEO and sketch pens, then poking the holes yourself. The second option is a little more complicated but well worth it if you ask me. Take a look at how I added dots onto my letters in the image below.

Usually when I want to stitch a cut file, I skip steps 1 – 3 but you have to do steps 1 – 3 this time because you can’t add text to text. So 1st step is to create a png or jpeg of each of your letters. Separate your letters and use your favorite snipping to to do a screen capture.

Import the png or jpeg back into your Silhouette designer. This turns it into a “shape” instead of editable text.
Trace each letter and release the compound path / ungroup them.

4. This is where you’d normally start if you were using a cut file. Using a text box and Times New Roman or some similar font, type in dot after dot after dot until you’ve filled up an entire row or two of dots. I prefer using a period for my dots but others use an “o”. The actual number doesn’t matter because you can add more dots to an image in step 6.

5. Change the font size to 24 or 36.

6. Click the “Select” Arrow in Silhouette and then double click the text box.

7. The text box turns to a green outline and you will see circle with a plus sign inside. Click the circle and hold it down while dragging it to the cut file. In my case, that’s the “S”.

8. Your image will look similar to this. If there aren’t enough dots to cover the entire image, just click in the text box and add more. It’s as easy as that.

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9. Repeat until everything you want to stitch has dots for holes.

10. Cut your files as you normally would. A few of my holes were just barely hanging on so I’ll be using the double cut option next time and recommend you do that as well.

11. Put a good movie on and stitch away!

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What’s on my desk? Something so exciting for me!

Go Now Go is my newest collection with American Crafts, and it makes its debut today on the AC blog. I’ve just been able to start to work with the actual products and a bit later today, I’ll share a first look video with you on YouTube.

I made one page as soon as I turned off the camera from filming with that, and I’m loving the rich colours and blue skies. Colour, colour, and more colour please and thank you.

I can’t wait to share more with you, so I hope you’ll stop by again soon!

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There may be no fireworks in my part of the world right now, but we can all embrace a bit of starstruck love. There is no such thing as too many stars in your stash, right? This week, I challenge you this week to go overboard with stars. Start with one, add a few more, and then let the stars just take over! Everything in your design is completely up to you, so you can take your inspiration in any direction you like! To get you started on this week’s challenge, take a look at these examples from contributing designer Leigh Ann Odynski and guest artist Sherry Coogan.

I had so much fun seeing how many stars I could get on the page for this week’s “Go Overboard with Stars” challenge.

For the first layer of stars, I used Whipped Spackle texture paste, and a Silhouette cut file to create a star stencil.

Then I layered several other textures in star shapes as shown. When you look through your own stash, think about vellum, patterned paper, stamps, stickers, and embellishments like the acrylic stars. In the photo above I used an X-acto knife to trim around the acrylic star, and don’t you love how it is adhesive backed like a sticker? I do!

Next, I wanted to create more dimension, so I used the Counting Stars cut file from the Cut Shoppe, and backed it with True Stories and Starshine papers. Make sure to leave some of the stars open to add another layer of interest.

Using the Minc Machine to add gold foil to the Starshine cards created more texture on the page and repeats the star shape. Going for lots of repetition here!

Next some stamping near the three embellishment clusters around the page in navy and aqua for another layer of stars!

Here you can see a close up of the title and photo layers. The Fitzgerald Thickers are a favorite font of mine. Stitching down the vellum stars with a zig zag stitch, and adding the punched cork stars, gave lots of interest to the page with a variety of textures.

Choosing to add the stars in different textures around the page was a lot of fun! How many different layers of this repeating shape can you get on your layout? I can’t wait to see what you all have to share, and your take on this challenge!

Have fun!
- Leigh Ann

Stars are one of my favorite design elements, in scrapbooking, and a July 4th layout is the perfect opportunity to use them. Shimelle’s Starshine collection was the starting point for this layout, along with a cut file from The Cut Shoppe. to make the background.

I backed the die cut background with a fun mix of patterned papers and popped up the collage of photos to let the photos shine. A few acrylic stars were scattered across the layout. I used puffy letter stickers for the title. I love this layout for many reasons; especially seeing the changes in my children throughout the years.
- Sherry

You have a week to complete the challenge and share a link – but of course you’re welcome to set your own time schedule. Whatever keeps you happy and creative!

Today’s Guest Artist: Sherry Coogan loves creating, pretty paper, and paint. You can find more from Sherry on Instagram, YouTube, and her blog.

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Hello July! And hello to contributing designer May Flaum, who has a perfect project for this weekend: use just scraps, finish it quickly, and making something simple into something special? Sounds like a winner to me – and you can go red, white, and blue if you wish, or recolour if you don’t have an excuse for fireworks coming right up! Take it away, May.

Use up the scraps and get your scrapbook paper to make pretty treats and favours: that’s my agenda today!

I noticed that some of the colors in the Starshine collection would work great for some Fourth of July treats that I’m wanting to dress up for a party. Taking scrapbook papers and dressing up simple and inexpensive treats and favors is one of my absolute favorite things to do! Today I have a video tutorial showing you exactly how I made mine.

In my video example I have used candy and chocolate, however you can use this idea in a number of ways:

• Gift boxes
• Around a gift bag
• Fill a box with treats with a theme, then wrap papers around that box
• Gather a few items then use paper to bind them together
• Create a layered bow or topper for a scrapbook page or card

Whether candies or a box of homemade cookies, for a gift or for fun – there are so many ways that you can dress up packages and gifts to create unique things with your homemade touch on them! What I love about this is handing someone a chocolate bar is nice, but the extra time spent dressing it up a bit lets them know I really put some energy and thought into it. A bonus? This is a great way to use up various sized scraps and bits of papers, stickers, and embellishments that I want to get used!

What weekend crafting is on your agenda? We’d love to hear from you.

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This week’s scrapbooking challenge comes from one of my favourite guests posts in our archives: a washi technique from Tegan Skwiat. While Tegan shares steps for creating the look above, this is a challenge that allows for following directions or going off on a complete artistic tangent.

This week, I challenge you this week to take inspiration from those colourful borders. Follow the same look or just let the idea take on its own format on your own desk. To get you started on this week’s challenge, take a look at these examples from contributing designer Gina Lideros and guest artist Anna Bradshaw.

I’m excited to share my challenge project with you today! I chose to take my inspiration from the supplies rather than keeping it contained to a border. This is a great way to give new life to your tapes and punches. To create my project first, I picked out an assortment of decorative tapes that coordinated well with the papers and embellishments that I wanted to use.

Then I tore two pieces of decorative tape and adhered them to a scrap of white cardstock in a horizontal pattern. Next I punched out circles using a one inch circle punch. This is the fun part where you can get creative – I repeated this step and punched out different washi designs using an assortment of patterns. I also punched out an assortment of patterned papers using different sized circle punches.

Once all of my shapes were punched, I adhered them to a pattern paper background. I used stamps, ink, paint, and hand embroidery around the title to complete my page.

Tip – don’t limit yourself to just red, white, and blue when working with Fourth of July layouts. Fireworks are colorful so your projects can be too! Instead of working with just one collection, I chose to bring in coordinating papers and elements from three of Shimelle’s collections.

I hope this challenge allows you to get creative with decorative tape and get creative with your punches too, whether you create a border, an embellishment, or an explosion of color across your page.
- Gina

After a recent washi-swap, I came home with a clear but now colorful acetate sheet of shared tape strips, and, while staring at a handful of manufacturer’s branding strips that happened to be lying near my photo, inspiration struck; I could use a few manual punches to create some custom embellishments with meaningful-to-me layers on this page documenting a recent road trip with my family.

Alternating branding strips from the Simple Stories’ I Am collection with WeR Memory Keepers aptly named Road Trip, and even a few from Shimelle’s first delightful line of papers, I also punched some sentimentally appropriate hearts in a variety of sizes from a wide gold polka dot pattern of tape and the new We Are Family washi tape strips, also from Simple Stories. A popular EK Success border punch with a thinner black and white polka dot washi pattern grounds that busy block at the bottom of my page. It’s awesome when we can use those tried and true tools and still get excited, no?

In Tegan’s example she used plain paper to back her tape before punching, and I’ll be honest, the clear acetate sheet as a punching mount did not give me a clean look – but I’m okay with that. Just like using ephemera and products with brand names that relate to my story, having a bit of the imperfect represented on this layout reminds me more of my “why” for celebrating this fun day alongside my mom and brother with a place in my scrapbook. It was our first road trip together, just the three of us, in ages, and I enjoyed it so much. The bouts of unrestrained laughter, seeing my brother trying not to enjoy making greeting cards and shopping for scrapbooking supplies, the unwanted advice-giving…yep, these are the perfectly imperfect moments that I want to remember in my family’s (many, many) albums.
- Anna

You have a week to complete the challenge and share a link – but of course you’re welcome to set your own time schedule. Whatever keeps you happy and creative!

Today’s Guest Artist: Anna Bradshaw loves where she lives, teaching, and being with her biggest source of inspiration: family. You can find more from Anna on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and her blog.

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Please say hello to contributing designer Gina Lideros! She’s ready to get true summer memories into her scrapbook, and has challenged herself to work just with patterned papers rather than pre made embellishments. Always a great challenge!

Every summer as soon as school is out, we head to the beach. One of my favorite things about living in California is that there are plenty of beaches to visit. A favorite beach of ours is Santa Cruz beach. They have a boardwalk with plenty of rides, attractions, tons of great food (hello garlic fries) and free concerts.

The inspiration for my layout came from the colorful rides on the beach boardwalk. I also made sure to add lots of beach themed colors as well, such as aqua, turquoise, coral, sand and navy. I wanted my photo to be the main focus on my layout, so I started by printing it out in black and white. Then, I created my background out of patterned papers. One of my favorite techniques to do is creating patterned pieced backgrounds.

Because the background of my page was already busy, I challenged myself to work only with patterned papers (no embellishments). Even though this seemed like a tough challenge at first. I love the result. To achieve this I got creative and fussy cut several shapes out of patterned papers from Shimelle’s various collections.

The vibrant colors of the patterned papers really make the background pop and bring out the contrast in my black and white photo. I also added a bit of machine stitching and little pops of ink and paint across my page.

I hope that my layout has inspired you to play with patterned papers and limit your embellishments. We’d love to hear your ideas for scrapping beach photos! Have a craft-filled and happy weekend.

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It’s been a while since we’ve had a specifically colourful challenge, and it’s also been a while since I’ve seen much other than a grey, grey sky. I’m ready for summer colour! I’ll take it only scrapbook pages if I can’t find outside my window. How about you?

This colour wheel may come in quite handy this week, and you can find a larger version to print if you would like one for your desk. A colour wheel is definitely not required for scrapbooking and scrapbooking collections tend to have carefully considered colour schemes anyway, so you can choose a mix of colours from a paper or embellishment and they will certainly look beautiful together. But it can be fun to start from scratch and take control of the colour and even know a little about why we’re drawn to certain tones together, and that’s where the colour wheel comes in useful.

We’ll talk more about colour in some other posts this week too, but for now, let’s start with just the challenge! This week, I challenge you this week to scrapbook with split complementary colours. Split complementary means choosing one colour to start, then going straight across the wheel to the opposing colour and instead of that central colour, choosing the one either side. If you started with red, you’d go across the wheel and have yellow-green and blue-green. If you started with yellow, you’d pair it with blue-violet and red-violet. You can start with any colour you like, go across and choose the two either side and they will always work well together, but they are colour combinations we don’t always head toward for scrapbook pages. Everything else about your page design is completely up to you, so you can take your inspiration in any direction you like! To get you started on this week’s challenge, take a look at these examples from contributing designer Meghann Andrew and guest artist Daphne Wuenn Rihm.

I always find it easy to work with a chosen color scheme when those colors are apparent in the photo- the photo and the product I’ve selected just work together seamlessly that way. As soon as I saw this photo of my mother and daughter sitting on the beach, under a brightly colored beach towel, I immediately saw the split complementary color scheme (meaning the two colors adjacent to the complement of a given color) in the blue, reddish-orange and yellow-orange stripes in the towel.

Armed with my trusty color wheel, I got to work choosing product based upon those colors.

Instead of working with a complementary color scheme, which allows for two colors, this color scheme offers three colors and an interesting variation from the typical blue and orange combination. All of the product on this page reinforces my color scheme, down to the golden-toned woodgrain alpha that I used in my title, and everything works to support the colors found in my photo, creating a harmonious page, documenting a great day on the beach.
- Meghann

I am a big fan of bold colours combined with great patterns – this always makes my heart beat a bit faster! No change for this layout. I chose three colours from the split complementary colour scheme as a starting point: pinkish-red, turquoise-blue and greenish-yellow.

The inspiration to pick these bold colours came from the photos, which are from a recent walk along the cliff top in the South of the UK, just about 10 minutes from where I currently live.

I started building up my layout with a geometrical-patterned background, layered the turquoise and the red on top, with the green strips behind the three polaroid-style photos. When I first put the papers together, the red seemed too overwhelming on its own, so I looked out for a stamp which I could use to create my own patterned paper. Shimelle’s globe stamp from the Starshine collection was the perfect candidate for this purpose!

The three embellishment clusters are scattered with hearts in different shapes and appearances, I even found this paper washi tape with hearts in my stash!

I also wanted to include my love for photography and added some cameras: The strip behind the photos is from True Stories and the little camera badge next to the title is from Starshine.

The journaling found its way onto the layout, just before I added some ink sprinkles and scattered tiny epoxy hearts.
- Daphne

You have a week to complete the challenge and share a link – but of course you’re welcome to set your own time schedule. Whatever keeps you happy and creative!

Today’s Guest Artist: Daphne Wuenn Rihm loves frothy cappuccinos, walking along the beach for hours, and maths. You can find more from Daphne on Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, and her blog.

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With this half of the world spending more time in the pursuit of outdoor fun, I hope you’ll enjoy this project from contributing designer Nicole Nowosad. Enjoy the ball game!

Lately I’ve wanted to make an effort to pull out some photos of my boys that I normally have trouble scrapbooking. My boys are both quite active and into sports. I have stockpiled quite a few action or sport photos. Truth is, at least for me, action photos can be difficult to scrapbook. Often you have way too many, or some could be blurry and out of focus.

I had way more photos than I used, I decided to choose just the right ones from the set of photos that were the most clear and depict a series of actions. I feel like the photos really show how much fun my son is having playing around on his skateboard and putting the photos in a slight angled line across the page gives the photos some movement on the layout.

Once I had my photos sorted, I dove into how to best create a page that was masculine but not too young at the same time. I find that I tend to gravitate to my more girly side and sometimes I get blocked with how to scrapbook about my boys. I decided to use a grapic diecut background by JustNick that felt masculine, then pulled some papers from Starshine and let that colour palette be my guide for the page.

I started with a yellow colour and then added in several different shades of blue, which seems almost natural for a masculine page. I think the mix of the blues with the buttery yellow colour is perfect for a boyish page, and there is even a small hint of pink in the striped paper which embraces my girly side too!

For me, there are lots of go-to shapes I like to use for masculine pages – take arrows and stars for example. For boy pages, I like to grab embellishments that are a little “harder” like the cork sticker, metal paperclip and even wood veneers.

I hope you are inspired to get a lot more of those boy photos you may have set aside to paper! Have a creative weekend!

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