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

I’m a firm believer that we all have our own unique blend of why we scrapbook. For some it is 95% about the photos and 5% about trying new stamps. For others it is 33.3% a love of pretty paper, 33.3% a love of pretty photos, and 33.3% a love of a little quiet time not to worry about much else in the entire world. And as much as I love the pretty paper and as much as I love the pretty photographs, my personal blend weighs very heavy on the writing. Sometimes it’s a lot and sometimes it’s just a little, but for me, the journaling is what makes it part of a bigger story I tell page by page, and that makes me a collector of ways I can incorporate those words on my pages when there are times I don’t really fancy just adding a journaling box or some lines.

Here’s a case in point: a tutorial Kirsty Smith shared here many moons ago. It’s such a favourite of mine that I’m bringing it back this week specifically for this challenge.

I challenge you this week to make journaling the heart of your scrapbook page, taking inspiration from Kirsty’s tutorial. The subject matter and how you take the inspiration is completely up to you, so you can go 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 Mari Clarke. As a bonus, both have shared videos of their process today!

Taking inspiration from Kirsty Smith and her layout with “How to hide journaling in plain sight”, I wanted to use the journaling as a design element on the page. Typically, I add the journaling into the design already on the page and size it to fit on my computer, then print it on my home printer. This time, I thought about how I could still stay true to my style, but incorporate the journaling in a more unique way, thinking about the journaling at the beginning of the process rather than near the end. That’s how I came up with the little labels stitched to the bottom of the page. The EK Success label punch made quick work of punching out all those little journaling boxes.

The next portion of this teen layout came about really quickly once I found this free cell phone cut file from Scrapbook and Cards Today Magazine. What goes together better than teens and cell phones? After I chose a variety of patterns from the Shimelle Starshine line – I used 12 in all – I cut the shadow from the patterned papers and the cover in white. Added a vellum “screen” for the phone and they look so cute!

Next, you can add vellum, transparency, or printed cellophane like this one from Heidi Swapp, under the die cuts at the top of the page for added texture and interest.

Then, you can add more patterned papers under your photo to tie in all the color at the top of the page. It was so much fun adding in different layers of embellishments with the Shimelle stickers, wood buttons, enamel shapes, epoxy paper clips, and cardstock and acetate pieces from the die-cut pack.

My focus for this layout was teen life now, so the title “Life @ 17” came to mind. All the little journaling labels tie in with facts about life and technology, and facts from the US Census Bureau on US households and computer and internet use. Use your country’s stats to personalize your page, and have a go at this fun challenge! You can capture this moment in time for your teen, and wouldn’t you love to have a page like this from your teen years, or your parents’ teens? What a different set of pages they would be!

Thank you for stopping by today, and enjoy the rest of your day!
- Leigh Ann

I love to scrapbook using photos of my son and daughter when they were teenagers. They were such fun years, and I love to document the stories of those days so we won’t forget the details. Teenagers can be very sensitive when it comes to what parents share about them. When I was creating this layout, I chose to keep the majority of the journaling hidden to ensure that the big story would remain a mystery when first glancing at the layout.

The ‘hidden in plain sight’ technique from Kirsty was just right for this page, and something that was refreshing to try without being difficult or time-consuming.

The journaling is handwritten on 12×12 white cardstock; I then placed a piece of vellum over the journaling and created the rest of the layout on the vellum overlay. I secured the vellum to the cardstock with a paperclip from the Starshine collection. Just remove the paperclip and slide the journaling out to read the details. The floral washi tape from Starshine made for a beautiful but super easy detail to divide the page and add colour.
- Mari

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: Mari Clarke loves creating, teaching, and drinking lattes in the sunshine. You can find more from Mari on Instagram, YouTube, and her blog.

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I can’t entirely explain why I have collected a full box of Distress Inks in a range of colours when I don’t do much in the way of inking techniques. I love the looks and could watch card making videos of Distress techniques all day in some land of fairy tales and yet I only seem to make cards when I’m in panic mode and can’t devote time to trying something new and experimental. But I do spend time on my scrapbook pages! There is no good reason not to just put those inks to use, even with all the little tricks that make them different to a standard dye ink pad. It’s time for Glitter Girl to get on the case.

The combination of pencil and the heart stencil was inspired by Kirsty Smith’s page here. Kirsty often works with many white elements on a page, but I almost always go for fully saturated colours, so swapping from traditional pencil to coloured pencil was perfect for adapting the idea!

This page features the Starshine and True Stories collections, along with washi tape strips and tiny heart stickers from Studio Calico, and Ranger Distress Inks.

If you enjoy Glitter Girl’s Adventures and chatting about scrappy things, please find us on Facebook: Scrapbook like a Superhero is a group of scrappers with plenty of ideas to share and possibilities to discuss.

After beautiful sunshine this weekend, there is a sky filled with clouds over my house this morning and it feels just about perfect to make some coffee, put on some music and do one of two things: read a good book… or scrapbook. Of course. Shall we have a challenge this week to combine those two things?

This week, I challenge you this week to scrapbook about books or reading. Go specifically to your favourite book or journal about a wider scope like books you’ve read over the years. Everything else is completely up to you, so you can take your inspiration in any direction you like! A few years ago, Glitter Girl created a few pages for my Harry Potter album, and there is much Alice influence in my albums too! To get you started on this week’s challenge, take a look at these examples from contributing designer Gina Lideros and guest artist Tanya Hubbard.

Quality time to myself is a big deal in my household, so I decided to scrapbook about a special moment that is sacred to me – coffee and books. When my children were younger we had a local book store that we were at every weekend – sometimes multiple times a week – and I would grab my favorite coffee while they grabbed their favorite books. I would often get lost in the books and the stories that they told. I always looked forward to a couple of moments of peace. Sometimes it was my only peace at the time because my children were little and my husband was deployed.

Using my Silhouette software, I used a floral background available at Just Nick. I backed each flower with a different piece of patterned paper and then adhered them onto background paper (Hubble, part of the Starshine collection) I then added bits of spray mist, my photo, and journaling. Pieces from the Shimelle True Stories and original collection were used as well to help bring my layout to life.
- Gina

I love the theme for this week, a favourite book. I do feel I might have stretched it a little by going with my favourite author, Terry Pratchett but I do love all of his books, so it fits. I have had in my stash a number of Shimelle’s elements from her first collection and thought this was the ideal opportunity to use them and when I looked through her sticker book, I knew immediately what I wanted to do.

I love long titles and working premade elements into them, so Shimelle’s word stickers were perfect to tie in my love of reading and getting lost in a book with my love for creating scrapbook layouts, a win-win all round.
- Tanya

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: Tanya Hubbard loves cats, scrapbooking, and her family (not necessarily in that order). You can find more from Tanya on Youtube.

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A girl after my own heart: Kirsty Smith loves globes, journaling, and finding ways to include even more photos on her scrapbook pages without losing the fun of layered embellishments. I hope you enjoy her project today just as much as I do!

All the birthday talk around here lately is great timing for me as I have just turned twenty-nine. Each time I celebrate a birthday, I like to look back on the past year and think about the highlights, the things that I have loved and the changes that have happened in my life. And then I scrapbook it! When I thought about it, being twenty-eight was a pretty big year, and I realised I had so much I wanted to include. But I also wanted to be able to use all the pictures I wanted, and say everything I wanted to while still keeping my page relevant to my style scrapbooking: using layers, white space and little details.

So today I’m going to share a way to include lots of photos and journaling in a layout without making it seem overcrowded.

To do this, we’re going to use a divided page protector to act like one half of a double page spread. I personally prefer to work on single 12 by 12 layouts, and using a pocket page to be the other half gives me the opportunity to include more photos without the need to design a full double spread.

Let’s start with the 12 by 12 page. I chose a single photo to be featured and used it as the inspiration for my colour scheme as I loved the beautiful blue of the sky. I paired the picture with a vellum envelope, stacking the two in a column on the page, and structured the rest of the design around this. To emphasise the vertical construction of the design, I used a Shimelle stencil to add a background of little hearts. However, I wanted it to be a subtle effect, so rather than inking or painting over the stencil, I used a pencil to produce an outline. The result is delicate but helps to anchor the rest of the design.

Next comes the detail and the layers. I love to use vellum envelopes as they offer a sneak peak of the goodies inside. In this instance, I used leftover scraps of some of the Starshine papers to punch out little circles of confetti in yellows, blues and greens. I filled the envelope and sealed it.

I love all the little die cuts in the Starshine collection as they are just perfect for adding little layers of detail. I pulled out any that fit my colour scheme and stacked them up with a paperclip, topping the layers with a globe cut from patterned paper. I like to ink the edges of papers and die cuts as I think it helps to add definition to the different layers, and using different elements such as transparent die cuts will add texture.

I felt the page needed a little something else however, so I hand-cut a title inside square frame, to echo the photo. I placed this over my picture, and I like how this tied the theme of adventure and exploring through the embellishments and into the title. That’s how I like to think of the last year; as an adventure!

With the page coming together, it was time to write my journaling. I had a lot to say, even though I was just drawing together a few highlights. I used a little journaling pad to pen my thoughts and to write as much as I wanted. Once finished, I put the sheets into a little stack and slid them behind the vellum envelope. As the envelope was full of confetti and sealed, I couldn’t put them in the envelope, but by sticking the vellum down on only 3 sides, it effectively makes a secret pocket where I can conceal as much journaling as I like without affecting the appearance of my page. I also like that if you look closely, you can see a hint of writing just peeping through.

To finish off, I added a splash or two of ink, and some of the lovely little puffy stickers from the Starshine collection.

Now comes the time to turn this into a double pager! I filled a divided page protector with photos that I wanted to feature. Any size photos can work for this – just fill the pockets! Equally, a 12 by 12 page protector will work just as well if you stick your pictures to a sheet of cardstock to keep them in place.

I used 4 by 4 photos with a white border to match the picture and frame on my page. Having repeating elements in your photo page is a great way to tie the two together and create a sense of cohesion. Finally, I used a transparency featuring the word ‘adventure’ as an overlay, with a couple of pops of embellishment to link back to the scrapbook page.

And there we have it: an almost-double-page-spread featuring ten photos and log journaling…and you’d never know it! I hope this idea will help you to incorporate more into your pages.

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This week, Glitter Girl is on a quest to help with those situations where you have lots of photos and quite like the idea of using more than one size of photo, but that’s where the stumbling block hits. I’ve She’s chosen Wonder Boy’s first birthday party as the plentifully-photographed event, and a year on, there is just one page in my scrapbook from that day. There are about fifty photos in a folder on my computer so perhaps it’s time to make some progress with that!

I won’t scrapbook all fifty, but I do think I’ll make about four 12×12 pages on this, and I know two of them will be single photo layouts – the one I already made and one I have in my mind with a photo that doesn’t really match the look of the other pictures I have from that day. That leaves me with two pages left and forty-eight photos to choose from!

Going through that folder and thinking about the day helped immensely: I knew I wanted a big picture of the cake, then I have a bunch of other snapshots from various moments of the day that aren’t really stunners in the same way as those two that will get their own layouts, but they capture the way I remember that day now and that’s exactly why I want to get them in my book. I knew it would be way too many to include all those on just one page, so combining two with the cake worked for me.

There’s lots of True Stories supplies on this page, though in the complete layout there is actually at least something from all four of my collections with American Crafts, since the red letters are from Christmas Magic! But definitely plenty of True Stories rockets, as that was the big design feature of the party. Is using a particular paper line for the party decor and then using it again to scrapbook those photos venturing into the territory of buying patterned paper or die-cuts first then going out to buy clothes to match? It just might be. I think I’m okay with that.

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It’s (almost) finally time for an all new class here. It’s been a while since I’ve developed a big workshop with daily emails and all new content and a specific direction. I’m excited, and I really hope you’ll find it worth the wait!

My favourite classes all come from a key personal experience in my own crafting. Journal your Christmas came from keeping my own diary one year, Cover to Cover came from my frustration at stacks of layouts and no order and no easy way to show someone what scrapbooking could really be. Both of those experiences completely changed the way I worked going forward, and I’ve had more changes in the past year as I got my head round this craft again. The changes all came in my process, and most importantly realising that one single process is not the way I work best on every project.

I kept coming back to this word, process, and it wasn’t lost on me that a film of a scrapbook page being made from start to finish is now commonly known as a process video. We tend to think of a process video as just one layout being created, and like I talked about so much in Cover to Cover, one layout at a time is not where I find the greatest value in this craft. I love the book in scrapbook. I needed a way to go beyond the page at a time of a process video and share how each of those layouts is just one small part of my process of creating a bigger and more valuable project. That’s where this class comes into fruition.

The Scrapbook Process is an online class that begins Monday the 2nd of May 2016 and runs through to the end of the month. It includes 22 videos, each accompanied by a PDF, emailed directly to you Monday to Friday, plus a weekly review sheet for weekends to help you put the ideas into practice with your own scrapping, no matter the style or subjects you scrap. The class also includes a private forum to chat and share your work with other participants, and you’re welcome to email me at any time to discuss anything you’d rather not take to the full group. Like all shimelle.com classes, this course comes with permanent access, which is something I take very seriously and I’m happy to discuss with you if you have any questions about what that means here. I’ve been teaching online for twelve years now and all of those classes have archives available to the participants. Work at any pace and return at any time, so if the schedule of materials throughout May doesn’t suit you, you can make it work with a better time on your calendar.

In those twenty-two videos, I’ll take you through three specific albums in depth, including creating new pages (one and two page layouts are both covered) as well as other relevant topics dealing with printing photos, selecting supplies, and writing your stories. One is a plain old family chronological album with no specific theme and the other two albums have a narrower focus, but I promise you do not need to have an album with a similar topic to apply the ideas to whatever themes you want to document. Each of the three albums has a different process, each with its pros and cons, each with its way of being just right for a given situation. You may find one process is the best for how you work or you may find it useful to flit from one to the other. Both options are worthwhile! Along the way, we will talk extensively about making it your process, and that means that everything is just how it works best for you, from choosing what to scrap to creating the embellishments on your page. This is definitely not a ‘now do this just like me’ class and more a class for picking, choosing, and adapting to find things that not only work for you right now but invigorate your process and leave you wanting to push everything else aside and scrap!

There are no specific supplies needed for this course, and it’s quite likely you’ll want to use supplies you already have on hand.

I’ll share a bit more about The Scrapbook Process throughout April as we near the first day of class, but I think that’s enough food for thought for now. The class is $30 US dollars or £20 UK pounds, and if neither of those is your currency you can click on either option and it will automatically convert to your currency. XE gives currency exchange rates if you want to see what that works out to in numbers that make sense in other countries.

To sign up in US Dollars:

Email Address for Class:

To sign up in UK Pounds:

Email Address for Class:

Thank you so much for the tremendous response to the early bird offer. I had hoped to open the forum today but today we have been finding a remedy for a technical hiccup that was preventing some participants from accessing their classes. First thing Tuesday, I will verify that everything is indeed working and open the forum! Don’t worry, there are no class materials until the 2nd of May, so it’s just for friendly chat between now and then.

Happy scrapping!

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This page is a bit of a blast from the past! It’s a design I’ve been meaning to come back to lately in terms of birthdays, as a certain small person in this household has one of those coming up later this week! I’d love to take this idea of journaling by numbers and instead of documenting just one evening, document a longer time frame, like possibly two whole years of milestones on one page. Could that fit? And more importantly: could I use a massive stack of number stickers?

This week I challenge you this week to scrapbook with numbers. Create a new scrapbook page that highlights numbers as a significant part of the design, be it in the patterned paper, the title, the journaling, or the shapes on the page. Everything else 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 Heather Leopard and guest artist Chris Robertson.

It’s a big deal when it comes to turning double digits so I decided to go big with this layout. I have a couple of goals with this page: 1. document how my little girl still makes wishes even though she was turning 10 and 2. include a space to include either 10 things she’s into or a space for me to write my thoughts, wishes and feelings for this little girl.

_Using my Silhouette software, I mocked up the size and placement of the numbers and words to make sure that I could get the numbers as large as possible. I used a font that has the middle of the “0” cut out but you could also cut your photo and place it on top. I then cut little strips of paper and added them to the outside edge, overlapping here and there. Once that was all complete, I stitched them to the paper. The next step was to cut the title and add confetti, using pattern paper circles and mist. Last but not least, I added journaling strips to the section of the “0” that is opposite the photo. Now I just have to decide if I write my wished for her or if I quiz her about her wishes and dreams for her future. You can see more photos of this process on my blog
- Heather

Birthdays are so much fun to scrapbook! I love the fact that all my glittery numbers reinforce the milestone birthday that my daughter was celebrating at the time. When I started to work on this page I wanted each of the special number clusters to resemble the colorful balloons we had for this super fun celebration.

The balloons were a great sparky addition to the day so I thought the glittery numbers would always remind me of that. All the supplies used to create the layout are from Close to My Heart.
- Chris

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!

If you’re looking for the new class information, that will be posted here later today. Thanks!

Today’s Guest Artist: Chris Robertson loves, her family, photography, and paper crafting. You can find more from Chris on Instagram, Pinterest, and her blog.

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Today I’m delighted to share this beautiful scrapbooking project from contributing designer Meghann Andrew. Meghann and I would both love to hear what stories you love reading to young ones!

I could sit and scrapbook photos about my daughter as a baby all day long. Being a preemie, she was a very cherished, loved baby, and everything about her amazed me- from those tiny fingers and toes to her soft baby skin. However, I don’t have that much of a story to tell about her as an infant. She really didn’t do much besides eat, sleep and … well, I’ll digress. Now that she is a toddler, I have so much more to write about, including the funny things she says, and how she fearlessly jumps off of everything, looking to me for approval afterward.

But, I still go back to those baby days and look for stories to tell. Stories that may be deeper than, “today you rolled over for the first time.” That’s when I found the photos of myself reading my daughter her first story, when she was still in the NICU, a mere two pound little creature laying on my chest. Yes, reading Peter Rabbit to her for the first time was monumental, but there is so much more to the story than that. By introducing a story to my child, I was also sharing with her a world in which she could go anywhere and dream anything- a magical place where bunnies wore little blue coats and everything turned out all right in the end. I wanted my layout about this event to reflect some of that magical place.

The trouble is, I had an idea straight away of how I wanted my layout to look, and it only included one photograph. However, I had several that told the story, including an image of the book that I wanted to include. So, since my layout was about a book, I decided to also create one to house my photos in a neat arrangement on my page.

While I created the layout, I created a process video to show you just how easy it was to bring together.

This soft, dreamy layout is exactly what I had hoped it would be when I sat down to create it, and I love that I have an interactive book to flip through and remember this beautiful moment that I shared with my baby daughter.

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