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

For an expat, I find I mix with surprisingly few other expats here in London, but from time to time stumble upon someone with a similar experience of growing up stateside yet living here as an adult and how some things in that combination just become a little humorous or unexpected or occasionally downright frustrating. The writer behind Angloyankophile is one of these types perfect for these conversations, but we’ve only ever conversed on Twitter and, to our knowledge, have never been in the same place at the same time. I was very honoured when she asked me to participate in the ‘Writing Process Blog Tour’ by taking a week to answer some questions about how and why I write.

I started immediately.

It took me two weeks.

I think this says all you need to know about my writing process, but should you wish to know more, I can humour you!

What writing are you working on?
I’m getting back to my true inner voice. She disappeared a bit before Wonder Boy arrived and she is only starting to reappear. I’m okay with that: there are so many jokes about ‘baby brain’ for a reason, and it is something I have found very challenging. My mind is muddled, it’s difficult to focus, and broken sleep even leads me to get stuck in the middle of a sentence because I can’t remember the word I wanted to use. On the whole, none of this bothers me too much, because I assume it will gradually fall away. Some friends have told me it all falls away; others say they have never felt as sharp as before. The only worry I have had is that I really don’t want to forget the stories from those early weeks, and as a result I’m making some compromises in writing things more simply and succinctly than might have a year ago. (Though, looking at this paragraph, I can clearly still ramble.) My hope is that the scrapbook format means I can go back and add in more detail as I find my voice again, and I’ll be able to document everything I want in a way that sounds right to my ear at some point.

How does your work differ from others of its genre?
There are as many writing styles as there are scrapbookers, surely? I remember when we originally pitched ourselves as a team at Scrapbook Inspirations magazine (obligatory sigh), we each had a subtitle of ‘the one with…’ and I was ‘the one with all the words’. I love pages that have longer stories, though I certainly don’t have a long story on every layout. I love that I jump around and tell stories in bits and pieces, in this strangely organic way of building my life story as I reflect and learn from my experiences. Perhaps the part of my process that differs from many is how often I refer to my existing pages. I don’t make pages to file away and rarely look at them again. I make a page and put it in its home and when I decide to scrapbook something, I go to the album to find the place where that page will go. I read the journaling on the pages immediately before and after the spot where the new page will live. It directly informs how I will write on that page: it’s how the story builds over time, and it also prevents something that plagued me years ago. I would make multiple pages of an event at different times and then when put side by side, the journaling was pretty much the same. Now I know what has and hasn’t been said about that particular event and I can make a choice over what to write next to make that story more full and vivid.

Admittedly, I don’t think there is anything in particular that is exceptionally unique about the way I work from every single other scrapbooker out there! But we all have our own little patterns that feel right, and those are mine.

Why do you write what you do?
Because I don’t have the patience to write a novel. (I tried a few times when I was younger. I always failed, even if I bought a really special notebook and pen for drafting.)
Because scrapbooking is really my therapy. (It helps me remove the drama from life and focus on what is truly important.)
Because I am an observer. (The Boy and I can be somewhere together and we will remember the experience so differently. I always remember what people were doing and saying, for some reason.)
Because I am very, very fearful of what it would be like for my memory to slip away. (Honest admission. It has kept me awake at night since I was a very little girl.)

How does your writing process work?
I have notebooks all over the place. I write in a different voice in longhand than typing (something I loved reading studies about when I was teaching and I tended to be pretty vocal about long-term plans that took the vast majority of writing to the keyboard) and I don’t do well with keeping one ongoing book (which is probably part of why I can’t write a novel). The Boy is a dedicated one-notebook-at-a-time person, so he carries his from room to room and place to place all the time. I keep one in every room. Then sometimes I switch them around to help my train of thought. I cut and paste (literally, rather than with keyboard shortcuts) and scribble in arrows and replace words. Most of that process doesn’t flow to typing for me, so the stuff I write by hand feels more genuine and composed to me. What I am realising as I write this explanation is that I’m pretty haphazard and all over the place. And also, I love fine point pens.

And now… I’m meant to nominate two other bloggers to find out about their writing process. It doesn’t have to be a scrapbooker, but there are two scrappers who came to mind, so I’m going with them: Jill Sprott and Julie Kirk and hoping they will answer these questions on their blogs. But if anyone out there is reading and would like to take on these questions for fodder, please don’t be shy! I’d love to read about your writing process, be it for scrapbook pages, blogging, or some other worldy words on which you’re working!

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Hello there! Today I’m going to share with you my scrappy way to use gesso in spray format and do a colorful layout with lots of small pictures and embellishments.

First of all, I used a sketch from Studio Tekturek. I think it is a very funny sketch: you need to use three photos and draw something. That is kind of fun, yay! I used the Hey Kiddo collection from Studio Tekturek, in amazing purple colors. I put all my pictures with this lovely boy on a base and checked if it looked good before going any further. Later I added others papers and cards.

When I’m matching papers I like to be spontaneous; I really enjoy it. When my preliminary work is done, I use a cardboard box and spray the whole background paper base with gesso spray. It is a new kind of product for me. I always used gesso in a tube, but now I love this spray with my whole heart. It is easy, it is quick, and it looks amazing!

When the gesso was dry, I built my layout on top. I used lots of amazing stickers, badges, and wood veneers.

I stitched some shapes and filling some cross-stitch from heart card.

I added alpha-words, more stickers, and more embellishments. I love to create this way!

Finally my layout is done! It is colorful, vivid, and a little bit funny. And please, do not be afraid to use as many embellishments on your works as you wish!

Thank you so much for reading me today, it was fun! Thanks for stopping by and have an amazing day!

Ewa (itisallaboutscrap) is 30 and she is a Polish girl, who now lives in Torun – the city where Nicolaus Copernicus was born. She discovered scrapbooking in the beginning of 2011. Since then she can’t live without all the beautiful papers, embellishments, stickers, badges and so on. Her scrapbooking style is colourful and energetic. Ewa always try to make her works optimistic and funny – she wants to give people mass of positive energy! You can check out her work on her blog and Facebook page.

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It has rained a ridiculous amount in the last two days. It has rained so much that the pond on our street has overflowed its banks (do ponds have ‘banks’?) and there are geese sitting in the middle of the road squawking at cars because clearly the pond has annexed the road and the cars need to find another place to go. But I really cannot complain about the weather because this summer has been glorious and certainly the sunniest, most pleasant summer season of all my years in England.

I tell you all this to help make my summer Friday ritual make sense: a friend and I signed up for a mama and baby yoga class that is lovely but not exactly convenient for travel, and we just walked there every week. It was a good couple hours door to door, but that was the fabulousness of it all: walking with a friend and our two babies, born two days apart, in beautiful weather, with a break for yoga and another break for coffee and sometimes cake. But one Friday in July, I needed to continue with a bit more travel after class. Carrying a baby and rolling a suitcase, I started with that long walk, but then managed a bus, a tube, two trains, another bus, and a car ride to finally arrive at the seaside for a lovely weekend of girlfriends and children and walks along the water.

From this layout, you might figure out that Wonder Boy was not an instant fan of the British beach scene. I promise he wasn’t grumpy all weekend. That made these photos extra funny to me and I wanted to get that grumpy face in the album before he’s old enough to say no.

In other news, I was able to film this! And so I present the first video with my new collection from American Crafts!

_{Viewing on a blog reader? Click through to the full post to watch the video!}

For this page, I used patterned papers, Thickers, cork stickers, dies, embossing folder, word strip stickers, and pens from the Shimelle collection by American Crafts, plus a 3×4 card from the coordinating ‘Lovely’ edition of Project Life, as well as a patterned paper by Crate and sequins from Studio Calico.

This 12×12 page will go in my standard chronological albums (I have always called these ‘Our Lives’ – thank goodness for vague pronouns that mean I don’t need to rename them now!) but it’s quite likely the photos will also appear in Wonder Boy’s Project Life album, in a smaller format. That works out fine for me, as I’m finding the way I write my stories differs in the two styles, and my 12×12 pages have a more meandering tone that is quite true to my inner narrative when I flip from page to page.

I’m starting to see projects appear across the internet that use the collection in so many different styles. This is definitely an amazing feeling! Please feel free to let me know if you post such a project anywhere. You can tag me on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter, or use the #shimelle hashtag, or leave a comment with a link to your blog post or gallery. I’ve started pinning projects here, should you need a gallery of ideas for using your Shimelle collection stash! Thank you so much for sharing your crafty work.

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I’m currently trying to catch up on making a mini album all about my holiday to France last summer. I wanted to create a mini album with pages of different sizes and with lots of texture to invite people to keep turning the pages but I was very aware that I wanted to get each page done as quickly as possible. Today, I’d like to show you how I created a quick layered page for my mini album using some goodies from Shimelle’s amazing collection.

I cut a piece from this fab film strip paper from Shimelle’s collection that I absolutely adore and adhered it down one side of a glassine bag, adding my photo on top.

Next, I got a small paper doily and cut it in half. I then used one half to fold into a point, before adhering it to the bottom right-hand corner of the glassine bag to give it a more textured and decorative touch.

I picked one of my favourite wood veneer pieces from Shimelle’s collection to add some dimension to the mini album page and adhered it on top of my photo.

Originally, I had thought that I would punch holes in the glassine bag and put it in my mini album like that but decided that it was a bit too fragile that way. I decided to make use of the woodgrain embossing folder from Shimelle’s collection to create a more sturdy background for my page. I trimmed a piece of white cardstock to the same sort of size as the embossing folder, placed it inside and ran it through my manual die-cutting machine. I then adhered the glassine bag to the front of the embossed cardstock. I absolutely love the extra texture it gives, as well as the tone-on-tone effect!

Next, I punched holes to line up with the binder rings of my album, having made guide marks in pencil by holding the page against the binder rings.

On a tag, I typed my journaling and then tied some twine to the top for extra texture and detail. I then slipped the tag inside the glassine bag, ready to put the page in my album.

Voila! A cute page for my mini album with lots of layers and texture. I really hope you enjoyed seeing how I put my mini album page together. I’d love to see any layered pages that you make for your own mini albums. Leave me a link in the comments here and I’ll pop back and see what you’ve been making!

Stephanie lives in Surrey, near London, England. When not devoting time to her job as a teacher, she can be found hanging out with friends, cooking, watching films, reading Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, laughing uncontrollably with her sister and, of course, scrapbooking. She has been published in Creating Keepsakes and Scrapbook Trends and had the amazing opportunity of writing her own eBook for Ella Publishing, entitled Scrapbooking Your Single Years. She is currently on the Studio Calico Creative Team and can be found in her Studio Calico gallery on her blog, Life in Paper and Glue, and on her Instagram page.

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I’ve never scrapbooked my photos in chronological order. For the most part, that is how I choose to tell my stories within my albums, but as far as creating those pages, I need the freedom to jump from one thing to the next and back again. Last week I was reminded of just one of the reasons why.

Last week marked two years since the final day of the London 2012 Olympic Games, which was a pretty monumental evening in my life story. Not the most monumental, but in the list of all the nights, it comes pretty high. I’ve scrapbooked about it a fair bit.

Yet with that second anniversary date on the calendar, it was what I wanted to reflect on, and I do that in scrapbook form. Maybe I just need to indulge my nostalgia some times. I have always missed this group of people since the end of our crazy rehearsal schedule. I still see some of them here and there, but never as a big group, and there is no way to recreate the atmosphere of spending twelve hour days in a tent in a rainstorm, wearing a plastic bag over your costume and comparing notes on the nutritional content of our meals provided by the Olympic sponsors.

Some things really stick in my mind with dates and others don’t, so I love the Timehop app for reminding me of random things that happened on any particular day years ago. It shows me what I tweeted, Facebooked, or Instagrammed on that day going back through the years. (You can also set it up to work with your photo library if you don’t post your pictures to social media sites.) Most of the time, I just take a second to look and smile at anything that was quite sweet, but sometimes it prompts me to email an old friend or dig out a photo and scrapbook with a happy heart.

For this page, I worked with supplies from my own line mixed with the Notes and Things collection from Crate Paper, some gold sequins and a couple stamps from Studio Calico, and some little letter stickers from Simple Stories. Since the costumes for our team were all different shades of turquoise, from the blue end to the green and light to dark, I loved going through the papers, stickers, and die-cuts to find a similar effect in paper, then throwing it all together to frame one photo.

Fellow Timehop users: what were you doing this day in history? I hope it was something that makes you smile to remember.

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As slow as my workflow may be right now, I feel I’m starting to find my feet in terms of creating weekly Project Life layouts in my own style. It is definitely more of a challenge for me than a 12×12 page right now, but it’s a good challenge and I enjoy that part of the process too, embracing a few things along the way that aren’t how I imagined but grow on me with time.

Curious to how other, more established Project Life scrappers find their process and style, I asked three scrappers with differing approaches to share some of their work with you today, along with the latest completed spread in Wonder Boy’s Project Life baby album.

First up, a delicate entry from Annette Haring.

Annette says: I approach my Project Life® with a variety of techniques, depending on whether my focus is the photos, the story, or if there are products or colors that have inspired a page.

This example is an insert, using a Becky Higgins Project Life® Design G page protector, and it will fit in between my main left and right spreads, which are primarily smaller 3×4 iPhone photos using the Collect app. I knew I had these larger 4×6 photos I had taken of my girl around her 4th birthday, and I wanted to simply highlight them. So I started with the photos, then added a “self portrait” that she had drawn with a gold pen. That led to me choosing more gold in the papers and product, and I adore that cute Lindsay Letters gold card! I love the repetition of the gold and the use of single embellishment to keep the focal point on the photos. I finished it off with a little journaling on a card from the Project Life ® Baby Kit by Becky Higgins, because I love the personal touch of adding just a little handwritten sentiment.

Elise Blaha Cripe has recently made changes to keep her process achievable and her album relevant to her family.

Elise says: I have switched up my Project Life process this year as life has become busier! My focus is on getting my favorite photos into our albums and that’s it. Because of this, I tend to start with the photos and then pick 3×4 cards and small embellishments that match in color and tone. I don’t do a lot of “extra” embellishing and my style leans toward simple for sure.

Leena Loh has a beautifully detailed Project Life style.

Leena says: I’m now into my third year of Project Life and I have to say I’m still loving it! I wouldn’t say the same when I first started back in 2012, where I failed miserably in completing the year. Since then, I’ve learned and finally discovered my own style and picked up a number of routines that got me going throughout the second year successfully. I got into the groove and I’m definitely enjoying the memory-keeping journey. I have a fixed routine that I follow diligently every week. I would spend an hour over the weekend, usually on a Sunday, to upload all my photos taken for the week with my phone onto my MacBook, transfer them into my Project Life folder that I labeled by week and print them right away on my home printer. They would then go into my 12×12 protector. Thereafter I would pick my Project Life cards, insert them and finished off with some embellishments and journaling. I especially love using white or light base Project Life cards as they make my photos and embellishments stands out. My color selection would fall into places naturally as I don’t particularly coordinate my spread base on color theme. I just pick the cards based on the story of photos instead. This routine has helped me stay current and allowing me to enjoy every bit of documenting my day to day life!

And here is week five for my current album.

There are a few things that are starting to really endear me to this project, and they are coming from more freedom that I expected. When I started this album, I shared how I was using a few consistent things in each spread, thinking that would keep the layouts coming together relatively quickly because it would take out a few time-consuming decisions, and that is true, but I’m also embracing a freedom to use any supplies I love rather than just what is absolutely current. My favourite part of this project is looking at all the baby photos, of course, but the next thing in line is picking out all sorts of paper and crafty elements to mix and match together to create a new layout. For this week, I started with some elements from the Penny Arcade Studio Calico kit, but added in some old favourites too: Hambly and Sassafras. I may have muttered ‘I’m bringing Sassa back’ when I was picking out some stickers, because I really am that uncool.

The other thing I’m finding I really enjoy is the opportunity to tell a story that isn’t just ‘here’s what happened this week in chronological order’, but to focus on one element and get more in depth. The entire left page of this spread is about sleep. Seriously, it was such a big deal, I could write way more about it than one page, but this will do. I write this now, where we are at a much better place with sleep, but that particular week was a real, real challenge. Including the dread that some of you will no doubt notice in the top left: what do you do when the only position your baby will sleep in for more than ten minutes is the position you are never meant to let your baby sleep? Anyway, I’m getting off topic here, but the idea that I can say that side is going to be all about one specific topic and fit the rest of the week on the other side – that concept is something I’m really enjoying and I’m even planning ahead now taking multiple photos on one topic when I start to realise I have plenty to share.

And over to you… For those of you who scrapbook in this format, what do you find helps you love this project? What makes your album a little more you? I’d love you to share your thoughts.

Annette Haring lives near Austin, Texas, with her husband and their four year old daughter. She has been scrapbooking since childhood, when she loved adding memorabilia and photos to her journal. She loves to learn and to teach others and has recently been a contributing teacher to Project Life Lessons at Big Picture Classes, a contributing author to the eBook Project Dig Deep by Ella Publishing/Big Picture Classes, and has been on the Elle’s Studio design team. She shares her work on Instagram as well as her blog.

Elise Blaha Cripe is a blogger, crafter and business owner who lives in San Diego, California with her husband and one-year-old daughter. She designed the Seafoam Edition Project Life Core Kit and shares her pages as part of the creative team at Studio Calico.

Leena lives in Singapore and first started scrapbooking in 2007. Since then, she has been doing traditional layouts for about five years and made a switch to Project Life two years ago. Leena is currently on the Studio Calico Project Life design team. You can also find Leena on her personal blog Findingnana and Instagram where you can see her snippets of life on a daily basis.

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Good morning! I have to admit that I am not much of a stamper, but shockingly, I have a stamping technique to share with you today. And it’s super fun & easy!
Disclaimer: I am pretty sure this is not some earth-shattering, never-done-before technique but I am sharing it nonetheless. I am going to show you how to make a pretty flower embellishment like the one on this card.

All you need is a sheet of white paper/cardstock, a cateye ink pad, a pen, & scissors.

And this is what you do…
Stamp the ink pad all over the white paper. 
These will be your ‘petals’. I use five petals for my flower but I stamped a few extra so I could choose the ones I liked best.

Outline the petals with black pen. 
Don’t worry about outlining them perfectly. Sometimes the messiness is more fun!

Now cut them out. 
Once again, don’t worry about cutting them out precisely.

Arrange your petals to make a flower.

You can use the same technique to make leaves to add to your flower.

Add the leaves behind the flower and complete the embellishment with a fun center. Try using a button or brad or some bling!

And then you are done! And you’ve got a fun embellishment to add to a project! Thanks for stopping by the blog today. Have an awesome day!

Gretchen is a physical therapist by day and a scrapbooker by night! She started scrapbooking 10 years ago after she got married and had all those wedding pictures to scrap. She and her husband do not have children (yet); but between friends, pets, family members, hobbies, and travelling adventures she still has plenty to scrap! Gretchen was a Creating Keepsakes Dream Team member this year and she currently designs for KI Memories/Hampton Art and Noel Mignon kit club. You can keep up with her and see more of her work on her blog.

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For those outside this lovely country, I’m not sure I can entirely explain the phenomenon that happens here right now, known as the Great British Bake Off. It’s simple enough: a weekly television programme where they pitch a tent in the countryside, fill it with pastel Kitchenaid mixers, ovens, and a selection of the nation’s baking enthusiasts, and whittle them down to a winner week by week. That part is easy to explain, but the social impact is more difficult. This show becomes such the topic of discussion that it takes serious effort to avoid spoilers if you’re not watching on a Wednesday night and want to keep it a surprise. Plus it makes everyone want to bake.

It might just seem like ‘everyone’ to me, because I haven’t been baking much for the last few months and along with the rest of the things I’m not doing at the moment, there is a part of me that wants to do those things. Not all the time, not anything near as much as I was, but just a little. That makes sense, right? It’s like a create a dream to-do list in my head for all the things I’m going to do during nap time and then I’m lucky if nap time lasts more than twenty minutes. When nap time is over, the list disappears from my mind and I’m completely happy for it to do so. But there are quite a few things on that list of dreams, and they include baking.

Aside from learning I can’t pack everything into one nap, I’ve also learned to let go of my perfectionism a little bit for things that don’t matter. Like how I would normally spend more time on the icing than on the cake itself, just because I enjoy the process of getting to that perfectly covered final result. That just isn’t going to happen right now. So I’ve decided to embrace messy baking: baking that would get a severe scolding from the experts on the Great British Bake Off, but still tastes fabulous enough to make it worth that little window of time that could go to anything else on the list.

To help me along on this little quest, I’ve been inspired by my friend Leanne who participated in the Great Bloggers’ Bake Off last year, baking along with the challenges from the programme. She’s participating again this year and I’m going to try to keep up, though of course I have completed the first challenge a day two days late. Right now, a day two days feels like a big victory!

The first week’s theme was cake – right up my street! My messy contribution is a Rhubarb Amaretto layer cake.

Cake ingredients:
225g unsalted butter
375g sugar (I use caster sugar and through spent vanilla pods in the canister, but I promise regular granulated sugar works too)
4 eggs
325g plain flour
1.5 tsp baking powder
200ml milk
2 tablespoons sour cream (if you don’t have any in the fridge, don’t go get it specially. Up the milk a little bit – say 225ml in total – and all will be fine.)
1 tsp vanilla extract
1 tablespoon amaretto (use almond extract if you don’t cook with alcohol)

Preheat oven to 180c and grease and/or line three 8” rounds or the equivalent.

Beat butter and sugar together with a mixer for absolutely ages. This is something that really bothers me about a lot of cakes sold in London: not mixing the butter and sugar for at least a few minutes really chafes the texture of a cake. It is worth the five minutes, I promise.
After that, it’s just a case of adding the ingredients and mixing together. Past that initial five minutes, you don’t need to over mix but you do want the consistency to be even.

Pour batter into the pans and bake for 25 minutes. If a toothpick comes out clean, they are done. Add a bit of time if needed, but don’t wait for it to brown as it’s quite a light-coloured cake and will dry out before it browns much. Turn out onto a wire rack.

Filling ingredients:
Two or three lengths of rhubarb
Sugar
Amaretto
Whipping cream (double cream will also work fine)

I realise none of those have measurements and that’s because it’s all down to taste. I promise it’s easy.

Wash the rhubarb and remove any tough skin or ends. Chop into small pieces. Place in a saucepan.
Add a bit of water to the saucepan – about half the depth of the rhubarb – and sugar. I start with a tablespoon of sugar and once the rhubarb starts to break down, I taste it to see if it needs more. I find it really varies with the rhubarb. And possibly the extent of my sweet tooth on the day. Add amaretto (or almond extract) to taste as well. Simmer until the rhubarb starts to fall apart and the liquid has reduced to form a texture a bit runnier than preserves. Remove from heat and allow to cool.

Meanwhile whisk the whipping cream with sugar and amaretto until you have your freshly whipped cream. If all that amaretto is sounding too much, make the whipped cream with vanilla extract instead. Both work. I may have tried. Or if the amaretto isn’t sounding like nearly enough at all, cut a layer of marzipan for each cake to boost the almond factor.

Once both cake and rhubarb are cooled, assemble by spooning cream and rhubarb between the layers and on top of the cake, and dust with icing sugar. I find the recipe makes enough for a three layer cake but that’s far too much for us to have here without guests, so I either give away or freeze the third cake so it’s not a waste.

And then because I managed to put it together while still holding a baby, I embrace the messy look of it all and try to decide which is more exciting right now: making it or eating it. It’s possibly a draw.

Great Bloggers Bake Off is organised by Jenny at Mummy Mishaps. See more bloggers’ cakes in on her blog. Please no spoilers from the actual show in the comments, for those who watch later than the original broadcast! Thanks.

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