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

The past few weeks I have been surrounded by Christmas scrapbooking supplies and I wasn’t allowed to cut and paste any of them! I’ve been preparing the preordered Christmas in a Box kits for UK addresses, and they’ve started posting and yesterday I had an email from one scrapper who had unpacked her kit – that always makes it feel quite real! Today I can share details about that kit and it is now available for purchase in the US and worldwide, complete with a discount code!

For pre-ordered kits in the UK
If you pre-ordered in July you were sent a click-to-pay invoice email for the balance of the kit and these started shipping last week. All remaining boxes here that have been paid will be posted tomorrow (Monday, 12th November). I even have a car for the day to make that happen – how fancy! If you haven’t paid your invoice, your box won’t ship until that’s paid of course.
Also, there is a little something extra coming to each of you in a separate little delivery that will arrive right around the first of December. It’s just a little bit of Christmas happiness from me to you and I hope it brings you some Christmas cheer!

For those in the UK who did not pre-order
There are a very limited number of extra kits available here. These will go on sale here Tuesday morning at 6am, and they will be shipped straight away. Kits are £44, which includes postage. There may also be a few later on if some pre-ordered kits are not paid for by mid-November, but please don’t bank on getting a kit that way as you know there are not many scrappers out there who don’t like a box of new crafting stash!

For those anywhere in the world
The kit is available from today from Two Peas in a Bucket, who will ship to anywhere in the world. You can find my kit list here, and just add one of each to your bucket to order your kit. There are just a few small differences between that kit and what I’ve boxed up here: sadly there are no more of the Jenni Bowlin rhinestone stars (unless you find them in a store that still has stock) as they were a limited edition item, so I’ve suggested enamel dots as a replacement as they are also red and can be used in the same way. There are two sheets of paper different, plus I’ve added a set of Thickers and the Two Peas exclusive Christmas stamp set. The list lets you pick and choose what you would like so you can make any changes you fancy and you can stick to whatever budget you would like. But there is a great reason to add the stamp set to your kit: if you spend at least $50 with your purchase and use code DDKP25, you’ll receive 25% off your items! That’s $12.50 off a $50 purchase, so that’s almost enough to cover the fab stamp set! But it doesn’t have to just be things from my list, so if you wanted to add an album or more shopping, go for it as the 25% discount will cover that too. (It cannot be combined with a free shipping code, but it can be used for any amount of shopping past $50, so it’s quite likely your savings will be much greater than the shipping discount – plus it can be used for international orders and those usually only get a $5 discount on the shipping.)

Please don’t wait to order as the discount code expires on the 16th of November and items may sell out, so go ahead and go shopping now to get everything you want, including the discount.

What about an album?
The kits do not include an album so you are free to choose whatever album style you would like! This year I am using the Studio Calico Handbook album with the coordinating page protectors. It comes in a few different cover styles (all the same size but different patterns embossed on the cover) and is a neutral cover designed to be customised however you would like. You can find the albums and the page protectors here, and if you’re spending more than $50 at Two Peas then use that DDKP25 discount code to get the 25% off these too. If you’re in the UK and looking to source these albums, they are available locally from Sarah’s Cards. (I will not be stocking these albums.)

If you would like some other album types to consider, check out this list of those available at Two Peas and see if something suits your style. You might also want to make your own album and not need a formal book at all – that works too and can help keep the cost down if that’s a priority for you this year.

Do I have to have a kit?
There is no requirement to use any certain supplies for Journal your Christmas, of course! You can use any supplies you would like! But it can be fun to treat yourself to a lovely box of new goodies to enjoy throughout the holiday season, and these are the supplies I will be using throughout my 2012-2013 album, which means you’ll see them in the prompts and videos of this year’s class. Having some or all of the same supplies can make it super easy to follow along if time is limited throughout the holidays, but you are always, always welcome to use your own supplies and scrap in your own style, so please don’t feel it’s a requirement in the slightest.

Thanks so much, and if there are any questions just let me know!

xlovesx

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I’m not sure I can top last year’s November edition of 10 Things: ten favourite Christmas journal entries, so I’m not even going to try. I’m going super-simple this month: ten photos I want to scrapbook soon. Starting with a little snapshot of what life looks like right now. or at least, ‘right now’ a month ago, but also including…

a little fanciness from Rachel and Rob’s wedding…

a bit of complete chaos from the joy that was being able to bake again…

a birthday treat of queueing for London’s best toasted cheese sandwich with Jen at Borough Market…

a lovely adventure at a WI birthday party talking up scrapbooking as a fabulous craft, of course…

just, you know, an ordinary day with a colourful Red Arrows flyover…

possibly the craziest photo booth set-up I’ve ever seen (at the V&A)…

some pretty equestrian pictures snapped in the 3.4 minutes in which it was not bucketing down with rain…

the fancy lights on the Thames, which I had somehow entirely forgot to print…

and a somewhat hilarious group photo I completely forgot we snapped at Legoland earlier this year!

So now it’s your turn! On the tenth of each month, we share 10 things. It can be anything as long as it’s ten! Link up your post to share it this month and mark your calendar for the tenth of December!

PS: Christmas kits for the US and the rest of the world? They go on sale TOMORROW and I’ll have a special discount code here for you!

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This weekend, one commenter will win a place on Amy Heller’s new Two Peas in a Bucket class Seasonal Storytelling

Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn. Each season brings about its own wonderful and memorable moments for us all.

Perhaps Winter, when celebrating Christmas or Hannukah and the New Year, is your most memorable time of the year. Or maybe it is Spring when your family celebrates a number of birthdays, or you love preparing your garden and celebrating Easter. Then there is Summer – full of outdoor activities, 4th of July, camping and family vacations. And of course, Autumn with the beginning of school, the glorious changing of nature’s color, bountiful harvests, Halloween and Thanksgiving. When you break the year up into seasons, there certainly are plenty of stories worth telling!

In Seasonal Storytelling: Mini Books for Sharing Each Season’s Special Memories, we break down the year into the four seasons. This provides a naturally broadened perspective through which to document your special memories. Because of this broadened view, we introduce you to four different approaches to creating seasonal mini albums – Events & Traditions, Timeframes, On-the-Go and Reflections. With each chapter, we will focus on a different season and share two of these four approaches for tackling that season to create a mini book filled with a memories that fits your lifestyle, your scrapping habits and your style of creating.

Showcasing eight different and unique mini albums filled with over 100 pages of ideas, Seasonal Storytelling covers each of the seasons, throughout four chapters. Every chapter contains a printable PDF containing two beautifully crafted mini albums along with a coordinating video. Also included are two exclusive printable journaling cards used as the base for one of the mini albums featured in the workshop.

If you like the look of this class – then you are bound to love Through the Kaleidoscope Workshop. A wonderful class on colour schemes, very inspirational.

To enter, just leave a comment on this post telling us your favourite season, and why. Please leave your 2peas username with your comment.

Entries close at midnight Thursday UK time and the winner will be posted Friday evening, so be sure to check back to see if it’s your lucky day!

Good luck!

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We have two winners this week.
First up is kikik who wins the place for the new SCRAPBOOK REMIX class

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And the winner for the Two Peas in a Bucket shopping spree is Julie!

Ladies, please email me (shimelle at gmail dot com) with your details.

There’s a new giveaway every Friday night, so check back next week for another chance to win just by leaving a comment.

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This week Glitter Girl takes on an older product that is back on the scene: she’s scrapbooking with vellum! Inspired by this discussion on the message board at Two Peas, she has a few suggestions for product choices and benefits, then a new layout to share in this week’s adventure.

There are plenty of vellum options available at Two Peas and now and many of them are on sale this week. Scroll down to the bottom of this page and you’ll find all sorts of goodies related to this week’s adventure, but be quick if you want to grab the discounts as the hot products sale ends on Friday.

And yes, that is a school photo from my early teaching years! We had to have a staff photo taken each year and once the school had taken the necessary number for bulletin boards and so forth, the remaining prints would appear in our pigeon holes in the staff room, and ever since I’ve had this small collection of grown-up school portraits. I am pretty sure this is the first time I’ve put any of them on a page. I also have yearly class portraits of my tutor group – that’s basically like homeroom for those of you stateside. I had the same group for four years, so those class pictures show them starting as teeny kids and growing up one year at a time, all in school uniform of course. Some day I will figure out the best way to scrapbook that entire experience too… but this is a start. Interestingly, the top I am wearing in this photo caused me no end of trouble in my first teaching job (I missed the memo that red did not meet the dress code there) but that is a different story for a different day and a different page entirely.

This week, Glitter Girl challenges you to scrapbook with vellum and share the results! You can link to them in the comments here too if you like.

The Adventures of Glitter Girl is a weekly series on Two Peas in a Bucket, and goes live every Wednesday. I’ll share each adventure here shortly after that. I hope you enjoy her quests for crafting happiness, and if you ever have a scrapbooking dilemma yourself, you can always call her to action on the message board.

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For the second video in the series with Studio Calico’s November kits, I opened the first add-on kit, Bobby Socks, and combined that with the main kit. Bobby Socks is quite a neutral kit – lots of grey, white and cream – with a shot of turquoise and red. All the grey drew me to a black and white photo I’ve been meaning to scrapbook, and the stamp set was a good theme match for the story, so that seemed to set the wheels in motion. It’s quite a simple page really, but with the writing on the tiny lines I don’t think I would want to cram too much more onto the 12×12 space.

But enough chit-chat: the video will cover all those details!

The Bobby Socks add-on kit is already sold out, but you can find many of the items available individually here, including several items discounted until Friday in the hot products sale.

If you’re liking the idea of Sock Hop, you can start a subscription with the main kit at 40% off with code Shimelle40 for a limited time. See this post for further details.

That was just the first add-on, so there are plenty more pages (and videos!) to come from the November kits. I hope you’ll stop by tomorrow for the next project!

xlovesx

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I should probably like… post something. On my blog. Or something. Right? I think I can manage that. This week, I have a series of new videos for you, featuring the November kits from Studio Calico. You can use them as inspiration if you get the kits themselves or you can try the same designs and ideas with your own stash if you’re not a subscriber. Either works!

All the supplies for this project came from the Sock Hop kit, courtesy of Studio Calico. I usually put together a separate shopping list for cases like this in case you’re finding this post after the kit has sold out or you’re not able to purchase a full kit, and I have done that here but because the Sock Hop kit includes many exclusives plus it features some papers that have not yet arrived in most stores, it’s not possible to make as close a list as usual. But I have compiled a list here to act as a bit of a help. In includes some options, like the green arrow washi tape isn’t available but there is green tape and there is arrow tape, should either sway you! But right now the Sock Hop kit is available, so that would be your best bet if you wanted the exact supplies used.

…Now, if you wanted to subscribe would a special offer help? For just a few days, you can take 40% off the first month of a new subscription with code Shimelle40, which expires at midnight EST on the ninth of November. You can find that here and click the option to subscribe rather than buy the single kit. Enter the code when you check out to get your 40% discount.

In the time since I’ve last seen you here, I’ve been spending lots of time mixing patterned papers and scrapping with the Scrapbook Remix crowd (you can still join in, if you fancy!), packing approximately one point six zillion Christmas in a Box kits and anxiously awaiting the last item to arrive at Two Peas to link you up to the worldwide edition of that same kit, proving to powers that be that I am a real website and not a spamhead who deserves her entire site to be scraped off the face of the internet, having the time of my life with a kidney stone, complaining about the cold weather, deciding we really need a holiday, and… getting ready for JOURNAL YOUR CHRISTMAS. Oh huzzah. There will be new details about that posted here this week but you are welcome to sign up with the 2011 details at any time as once you sign up, you have access to material from all years.

But yes, consider me back to work here and I hope you’ll stop by for plenty of video fun this week!

xlovesx

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Today I had my alarm set for quarter to six in the evening to wait for a call from the team at Paperclipping – so we could record a new episode of their podcast, The Paperclipping Roundtable! I was so excited to talk about one of my very favourite topics – album systems – with fellow guests Stacy Julian and Ashli Oliver, host Noell and producer Izzy, of course. We covered all sorts of things and had a moment or two of talking all at once, of course. You can listen to the episode now via the Paperclipping blog or through iTunes.

We covered a lot of ground quite quickly, so I hope it wasn’t too overwhelming. I’ve tried to go through and find all my posts about how albums work for me, and it’s quite a bit of stuff! But I can at least make it a little easier to find. If you’re new to my album philosophy, here’s some further reading for you in the archives:
Cover to Cover is my album class. You can sign up any time and work through this as a self-paced workshop. (You do not need to wait for it to run live as it has finished its live run and I don’t tend to repeat classes on a schedule like that. If you feel you’ll do better with a team effort, ask a friend or post on Two Peas and you’ll likely find at least one other scrapper who will join in with you at the same time. You can keep each other accountable!)

Sorting pages into albums describes my process as I got a handle on what I wanted to do with my books and made that happen over a very rainy weekend.

A look inside my Early Years album shows how those new pages live right alongside the old. Also, if you scroll down below the pictures in that post, there is an Album Q&A that may answer some basic questions about what albums I use and so forth.

General notes on why I think albums are awesome, which may sound strange but there are plenty of scrapbookers who don’t use albums at all and the very idea leaves me sad and confused, because I depend on albums every single day. (That’s just me, of course.)

Maintaining album continuity is a video I created for the Two Peas Design School series that expands on the kraft-and-a-camera idea I discussed on the PRT this week.

There are also some videos that show albums. You can see Early Years pages here, volume one of our Round the World trip here. (There are more album videos in Cover to Cover too.)

The workshops I’ve done for True Scrap in the past also include different angles on my album philosophy. The first two workshops – Creative Stash Diving and Go with the Flow – are included with Cover to Cover. (Go with the Flow is what Noell was referencing as knowing I liked to pick up visual cues in my albums, as she was also an instructor at True Scrap. That workshop video is all about planning one section and making it all come together with continuity in the design.) The third workshop is The Perfect Collection, which is available on its own rather than with Cover to Cover. It’s all about using a collection pack or a kit to create a stack of pages, which might be a specific album depending on a few decisions you make in the process.

When it comes to writing in my albums, you might find Tips for writing about places, True Stories or Write it Down to be useful.

Random other things I mentioned on this episode include:
The 7-Up documentary series, except in my excitement of wanting to share that with Stacy I was way off on their ages – the most recent edition was indeed 56 Up this year. I have only seen the UK and USSR versions, but on reading more via that link, I’m very intrigued by the Australian edition as it was a Gillian Armstrong project, who is rather amazing. Anyway, Stacy’s pick for the week, The 5000 Days Project instantly made me think of the 7-Up series, so I just wanted to mention it quickly.

Gathered was my pick of the week. It’s a weekly craft magazine for the iPad from the makers of Mollie Makes magazine and it’s just beautiful. Simple, weekly, crafty and pretty.

Luang Prabang, Laos and Nong Khai, Thailand were the places I mentioned in the specific example of looking through an album and thinking consciously about the part of the story that’s missing and how I want to connect the two sections through the visual style and journaling.

Scrapbook Remix is the online class that just started, all about mixing patterned paper collections. You can still join in, of course! We’d love for you to mix it up with us.

If there’s anything else I missed that deserves a link or more explanation, just let me know! And if you want to discuss the topic with all the panelists and listeners, be sure to leave a comment on the episode post at PRT. It might even be discussed in the mail segment next week!

Thanks to the PRT team for inviting me – it’s so much fun to be on the show.

xlovesx

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On the twenty-second of every month, we bring you Gardeners’ Digest – a blog hop of scrapbooking news from the Garden Girls at Two Peas in a Bucket!

This week, Glitter Girl went on a colour binge! Three guesses what colour Glitter Girl uses most on her pages.

This month, Two Peas itself has given me design inspiration! If you haven’t visited in the last few days, you’re in for a whole new design. Go take a look! One of my favourite things about the new design is the look of the project pages, which now put more attention on the pictures of the project and include bigger, brighter shopping pictures for the relevant supplies at the bottom of the page, like this.

Having used quite a bit of patterned paper making eighty pages for my new class Scrapbook Remix, my Two Peas bucket is currently filled with paper! It includes Dear Lizzy 5th & Frolic, BasicGrey Lucille, Simple Stories Sn@p, Crate Acorn Avenue and Lost & Found 3 by My Mind’s Eye. So much pretty paper!

How about a shopping spree? This month’s Gardeners’ Digest giveaway is Two Peas shopping money! For every hundred comments, the prize goes up by $10. Ten bucks for the first hundred comments… then twenty, thirty, forty. You can only comment once and you have until the end of next Thursday. If there are lots and lots of comments, that prize pot might make it up to a $100 shopping spree perhaps! You might want to tell a friend.

Now, once you’ve left that comment, remember to click on over to the next Garden Girl. Your next stop is the lovely Lynn Gharary, who recently launched the Step Up Your Scrapbooking workshop. And enjoy the digest posts from all the Garden Girls! You can also catch up with the Two Peas blog for everything happening in Pealand!

Gardeners’ Digest is a monthly update from the Garden Girls, the design team at Two Peas in a Bucket. To keep up with the Garden Girls throughout the month, check out the garden gallery, find us on Twitter or subscribe to all our blogs with just a couple clicks.

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