I have one small problem with paper: I fall in love far too easily. One collection catches my eye and I swoon. But the next week something else looks beautiful, and another. Soon my must-have list of paper collections makes me look a little fickle in which designs I really adore! The truth is I love a mix of patterns more than any one single collection in all my stash. With one collection, I get one look. Sure, I can dress it up with rhinestones or keep it casual with straight lines and so forth, but it’s still instantly identifiable as that one collection. Mixing those collections creates infinite looks! Infinite? I’m thinking you could keep moving things around and mixing more patterns in for ever if you really wanted to do such a thing so yes, I’ll go with infinite.
The key is in the mixing and the remixing: first finding a pattern that goes well with something else, then reinventing it by mixing it with a different selection and so on. That means you get unique looks even before you start thinking about photo sizes, titles and all of that stuff that comes into the design of every scrapbook page. And thus is born a little something I call Scrapbook Remix.
Scrapbook Remix is an online scrapbooking class that shares the secrets to mixing patterned papers of all kinds and then creating a range of pages with this combinations. We’ll talk colour, pattern, scale, size, technique and more. The class includes both PDF and video prompts: a total of twenty full-colour PDFs and eight videos over four weeks. In each PDF prompt, we start with a different paper collection, then analyse it and remix it with other papers and embellishments to create four or more different looks. The video prompts include a mix theory discussion (showing exactly why some patterns do and do not work well together) and the step-by-step process for creating specific scrapbook pages. All the featured layouts are brand new (I do show a few existing layouts as examples in the theory discussion, but just to illustrate a point here and there). So if you did the numbers just then, that’s more than eighty never-before-seen scrapbook pages! You’ll see plenty of my work but also that of some of my favourite scrappers who have joined me as Remix Guest Artists. That way you’ll be sure to see a variety of styles, including single pages and double, single photos up to many, small photos up to enlargements and all sorts of embellishment.
Scrapbook Remix starts Monday the 22nd of October 2012 and runs for four weeks. You can sign up at any time (I do not close registration on my classes) but signing up by the end of the 21st means you get to participate in the live run of the class, which gives you the most benefit of chatting with others doing the same project at the same time. I know this class with be exciting on the board as everyone puts the ideas to work with their own collection and posts their own patterned paper remix looks! But there is also a bonus video that will only be available to those who sign up by the end of the 21st. So that might make a difference to you whether you want to sign up now or later!
Scrapbook Remix includes
✂Twenty full colour PDF prompts emailed straight to your inbox
✂Eight corresponding videos you can watch online
✂Private class forum for all participants to chat and share their work
✂Permanent access to all class materials
✂A few other surprises along the way
One thing that’s quite important to know: just because each prompt starts with a specific paper collection does not mean you need to have that specific collection on hand. Scrapbook Remix helps you look at any collection and identify key factors about those papers so you can take what you learn here and apply it to any papers you have at home. You do not need to buy any new stash to follow this class and in fact, it’s quite useful as a means of using more of what you have already collected: new or old, full sheets or scraps. You’ll see all of that represented in the prompts and challenges throughout the four weeks. The twenty collections that start each Remix prompt also represent a range of manufacturers, styles and ages – so you might be surprised at just how much you do have on hand! But you can certainly use this information with any stash, and it needed be a giant stack of paper by any means.
Scrapbook Remix is £18 (British Pounds Sterling) or $25 (US Dollars). You can choose either currency, and if neither of those is your local currency, just pick the one you prefer and the system will automatically convert it when you make your purchase. You can check exchange rates at xe.com to see if one is more beneficial than the other. Click the button of your choice to sign up!
You can pay your class registration by credit/debit card or Paypal account, and both options are shown on the screen that follows. Please be sure to enter a valid email address as part of your payment so your prompts can be delivered to your inbox. If you would like to gift the class to a friend, please provide her email address. (You can email it to me if you like.) Class registrations are processed by an actual person (me!) and can take up to 24 hours, though it’s usually faster. If you don’t receive a welcome message in that time, please let me know by email.
I’m proud to donate £1 of every class registration to the Plan Girls’ Fund, which supports girls in developing nations, provided education, improving living conditions and passionately working to break the cycle of poverty and gender discrimination.
I really hope you can join me for some remixed tunes scrapbook pages and become a patterned paper dj princess! Can’t wait to see you in class.
It’s not often that London speaks up for itself, and I think that might be hard to understand from the rest of the world given this past summer. London Pride is a beer and several old oil tankers, and in order to not infringe those trademarks, London’s pride festival is technically called Pride London. London Pride is rarely a visible emotion. Of course, I get to be a bit of an oddball, coming from a land of outward displays of patriotism and being a genuinely gushy person. I will tell pretty anyone how much I love this city on any day of any year. You know that already. But just believe me: it is not really the done thing.
(I’m reminded of the great marketing ploy of Portland, Oregon: tell everyone Seattle is better. Thereby Portland stays small and keeps itself weird and a zillion people don’t flock there and ruin it all. Except I don’t think that quite works for a city as ridiculously big and old as London.)
But in theory, those chosen as London Ambassadors all shared some sense of London love that made them apply and want to give up their time for this project. When we applied, we answered on-screen questions about London landmarks and getting from one place to another and had to write a very short essay on our specialist subject – one topic in one neighbourhood. I wrote about coffee shops in the West End. Then a day of interviews to those successful in the first application. We had to match slightly cryptic symbols to the item they might represent on a map. The first thing I drew out of the hat was an army tank and it threw me for a minute until my head came round to the idea of the Imperial War Museum, of course. More from the hat, we drew a topic and had to speak for a timed minute, telling all we could about how that topic related to the city. I drew ‘fruit’ and managed to cover London’s legacy of fruit markets (from the Covent Garden Apple Market to the current network of farmers’ markets), the marketing origins of Innocent Smoothies when they took over London’s train stations with free samples (which we now see all the time with products but was shocking at the time), and what at the time was still the world’s largest Apple Store. In one minute. Then we were paired with other applicants to role play our part on the street – play a tourist who doesn’t speak much English who is looking for an affordable restaurant near Piccadilly Circus, play the Ambassador helping a panicking parent with a child who has lost her backpack. And so on… then a proper one-on-one interview about what you would bring to the team… and wait to find out if you were one of the 8,000 volunteers chosen to stand on the streets of London. It was one year ago today that I was offered my post as an ambassador!
Then, into training we went. After the first day of training, London pride wasn’t really obvious from person to person. Then in the second day of training, they showed this short film. Watch it full screen: it’s so very pretty. (Hello, crazily shallow depth of field!)
And lest Portland think it’s the only awesomely weird city on the planet, of course it closes with something a bit random from our eccentric mayor, who is a whole other discussion. But it was at this point in the training that the love of London started to become a bit more obvious, as people around the tables picked up different things from this film. We were all from different neighbourhoods and got a bit excited when we saw things from our own turf – either where we lived, worked or spent our downtime. We recognised different people in the narrative, and we had long discussions about how they were a mix of people pretty much everyone could love (Julie Walters is a national treasure of the highest order, right?) and those who not everyone adores (to discuss London investment in a time of financial imperfection was interesting, and people have pretty polar reactions to Tracey Emin). We giggled about the rain in Rome comment, as this was something the mayor’s office really pushed and we came across it in several forms before we were out there on the street in all our pink and purple glory. No matter what caught our eye in that film, there was something that every single person at the table identified with and wanted to expand on. It made us storytellers.
Once we were assigned to locations, we had further training in that area so we could know really specific things. If you ever need to find a loo on the south side of Tower Bridge, I can get you to about a dozen in moments. I can tell you about those giant black orbs by city hall that are actually an art installation by Andrea Schlieker called Full Stops. I can tell you all the places you can go on the Thames Clipper from London Bridge City Pier if you’re fed up of trains, tubes and buses. Where to get cash, which Thai restaurant does take-away, and your three best bets for a hotel room for tonight. In true preparation on our local training outing, it rained. Of course it did.
My time was a bit more flexible than some of the other ambassadors, so I managed to sneak in a few visits to some lesser-known museums in the area and may have overused the excuse to eat way too much at the glory that is Borough Market. I have a particular love of being able to point out London backdrops from memorable film scenes, so brushed up on things less obvious than the complete implausibility that Bridget Jones could ever have afforded to really live over The Globe pub in SE1. Then I prepared myself for that early morning train where everyone else would be sat there in their business clothes, barely awake, and I would be there in pink neon and a baseball cap.
Yeah, that train wasn’t pretty. The games hadn’t started yet. There was a fair amount of eye-rolling. And when the train became really crammed, I discovered the stain-guarding qualities of the hot pink top when half my coffee went right down my shirt… and continue to roll right on off of it like water from a duck. (Yes, I really, really am the kind of girl who shows up on the first day with half a cup of coffee down herself. Apparently they knew ahead of time and made precautions, for which I am grateful.)
I’ll admit that very first early morning was a bit of a false start. We were new at what we were doing, and as the very first shift to work that location, we weren’t sure what questions we could answer. Most people were really just on their way to work and had no interest in talking to us. We were paired up and plotted out across the space in view of the kiosk and the first person to ask us a question was clearly just testing us (unless the Australian Olympic reporters really didn’t know that the Olympic Park was not in the centre of town?) and we got a bit shaken but quickly found our feet and we were off! We could spot tourists to help and we found out what sort of stuff the locals wanted to know – including a lot about the torch relay as it zigged and zagged across the London boroughs each day. As the big day grew closer, we had more and more questions about getting tickets, watching the opening ceremony and where the big screens would be set up around town… but there was still a certain amount of hesitation. We could still feel the cynicism and the negativity that had come along with planning the games.
I think it’s hard for people to remember sometimes that the bid and all the preplanning for London 2012 came before the recession hit, and then after the city knew it had the responsibility of putting on this big event as promised, markets fell apart. If you took that sort of situation down to a family level, you would make changes. If you bought a huge house and a fancy car then lost your job and couldn’t make the payments, the first plan of action would be to make changes that would make things more affordable – smaller house, more economical car, fewer luxuries – and I know that is a huge oversimplification of the economy, but hey: this is a craft blog. The point was that when the economy changed drastically, London couldn’t really say Sorry, World, we just can’t have the Olympics right now. And to anyone who lives here, it has been obvious for all that time that it costs a great deal of money to host the games. There were so many times when local areas had to stand up and say something about how the games were affecting their neighbourhood. There were debates about how much money really should be spent on making all this happen and whether it was possible to ever make it back. Meanwhile, these photos of the Athens Olympic Park from just eight years earlier appeared and made many a little nervous about what would happen in East London post September 2012. Let’s just say there was a fair amount of stress in this city leading up to this giant event.
And then, just like that, on the morning of the opening ceremony, everything started to change. I headed into London early for All the Bells, and stood on Westminster Bridge ringing and listening. Then off to my Ambassador spot at More London, with more people smiling at the high-vis pink outfit than on the previous days, and a free coffee from a kind person serving the morning crowd at Borough Market. “I think you’ll need it even more today,” she said. The torch would be making its way to Tower Bridge, rowing down the Thames from Hampton Court, and along with it a mighty crowd of people hoping to catch a glimpse and quite a bit of speculation about what might happen when it reached the bridge. (That turned out to be a slight disappointment, as it mostly just hung out for a little while then went into City Hall with a security team, where apparently David Beckham was already camped out for the day if the rumours were true.) That night, eighty thousand people would be heading into the stadium to watch the ceremony, while plenty more watched on big screens around town or on the BBC in their own homes. That day, we didn’t get the negativity as we stood there with our maps and copies of Time Out. We got pure excitement.
We also got quite a few film crews showing up to ask us questions. This one had the easiest request: could I shout ‘Welcome to London’ to the camera? Why yes, yes I can. Somewhere there are also interviews with our London welcomes and facts translated into several different languages, as we smiled and answered questions for television coverage in Macau, Taiwan and Belarus. CNN interviewed a man from Utah while I helped a tourist in the background. Before all the sporting excitement started, there was definitely an interest in the vox pop footage with the bridge in the background. Oh, how iconic… even if the games themselves weren’t near the bridge at all! (No problem: cross over to Tower Hill and take the District Line to West Ham and walk the greenway from there to the Olympic Park or head back to Tooley Street to London Bridge, and the Jubilee line will take you straight to Stratford!)
At some point during the games, I saw a tweet that said something along the lines of Why can’t we have London Ambassadors all the time? and I have to say our team felt the same way. We were all volunteers, we all applied with one thing in common: that we wanted to help people see the same fabulousness we see in this city. But it’s big. It’s busy. It can be really, really confusing. Sure, there are guide books and websites and reams of information written about the topic, but it’s a whole other thing when you’re standing there on the street feeling overwhelmed and lost and confused. It was a pleasure to do just a tiny bit to help make that feeling go away whenever possible. And one of the best things is that it is quite possible that you’ll see London Ambassadors return to the streets again for other big occasions, admittedly in smaller numbers than what we saw this summer. The few ambassadors I’ve been able to chat with since our shifts finished have all been quite excited about that… and we’ve all had moments of our off-duty experiences too. It’s so much easier now to see someone in a worried panic and have the guts to ask if they need help and be able to point them in the right direction.
One final part of the process was an invitation to line the Mall for the Team GB victory parade. Everyone along that stretch was a volunteer: London Ambassadors, GamesMakers, Ceremonies performers and technicians. All in uniform (or costume!) and in ridiculously high spirits. And before the parade started, just chilling with Eddie Izzard, as you do. He was amazingly energetic, generous and friendly…
And rather full of London love himself.
Truck after truck of Team GB athletes cruised down the road, and the cheering never stopped.
I know I wasn’t the only volunteer a little bittersweet and emotional that day to know it was all coming to a real close. Happy to know there are more opportunities to come, but certainly not an experience to be replicated. So with today marking one full year of that adventure, I wanted to make sure I recorded a few words somewhere. A gold medal to you for reading them!
Over the last two weeks, Glitter Girl has been on a real mission of scrapbooking with die-cuts. Two entire adventures! The first deals specifically with manual die-cutting, whilst the second goes a bit more custom with cuts from a digital die-cutter like a Silhouette or the Cricut.
My personal rule is to only buy metal dies for shapes I will cut time and time again – so I have very few and what I have would all fall under basic or essential shapes, quite likely. The three sets I use most are all nested shapes (the same shape in several different sizes, perfect for layering) by Spellbinders – the small circles, small pinked circles and labels one (similar to the label die-cut shape from Jenni Bowlin). The pinked circles were sadly discontinued this year and I’ve continued to use them – but after this episode some scrappers started asking Spellbinders to bring back that shape. If you want to weigh in on that discussion, you can find it here on Facebook! Otherwise, you can find a few other options here and there or maybe find a shop that still has some in stock.
If you see anything in this episode you would like to add to your own stash, you can find a full shopping list here below the video, including additional dies on sale at the moment too.
Why yes, I do have new photo booth wedding photos to scrapbook! The lovely Rachel got married recently and we highly approve of her decision to have a photo booth at the reception. It’s a bit of a tradition now. I promise I didn’t wear a wooly jumper to her wedding: she knit those gorgeous owls for me as a thank you gift and we needed a photo or five to celebrate all that craftiness!
Rest assured, we can do more than just circles and such with die-cuts! I have a Silhouette for custom die-cutting, and use that for anything I might just want to cut once or twice. I love that I can design the cut myself or buy just individual designs from the Silhouette online store. With the cartridge based cutters, I always found I would like just a few designs on each cartridge, making each cut quite expensive. With the Silhouette store, I just buy the individual designs I like and that works out far more affordable for me. For this page I used three different cutting patterns from the Silhouette store – a suitcase, banner and a word card.
Supplies for this project can be found here. In addition to the Silhouette, that includes all sorts of fun stuff, like a new collection of tiny glitter pots, lots of label and letter stickers, and three paper collections I’ve really enjoyed using lately.
And it’s these photos that will make you think I will photograph and scrapbook just about anything. Which is possibly true. But I’ve been meaning to get the story of how we handled laundry while backpacking into this album. We became such experts in how to get our clothes clean and dry every single night, so it deserves to be recorded. I took a few pictures of this along the way and I think I even filmed a little video of one of us being a bit silly and faux-demonstrating to the camera how to wash something in a hotel sink. We had 100ml of soap concentrate and it lasted the full trip – just! That way we were allowed to take it on the plane as a carry-on. Of course it really came in a giant bottle to start, and we aren’t even halfway through that at home. It’s amazing just how concentrate a concentrate can be!
Onward, covered in glitter, my dear scrapbookers!
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.
This weekend, one commenter will win a seriously cute felted bear from gabrielefelt.
I am pre-warning you, this bear is GORGEOUS…. ready?…..
When it comes to her business, Gabriele is beautifully modest “ I still wouldn‘t call it a business, it‘s just a place where the bears pop in and out, play, jump around, make funny noises and meet new people. They are something to accompany you everywhere, to spread the joy while wearing a cute bear- brooch or giving one as a present to the one you love. I put my dreams into the little bears and hope that the inspiration will reach the homes they travel to.”
To enter, just leave a comment on this post letting us know what you would call this little bear should you be lucky enough to win him/her.
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!
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 bit of a longer adventure than usual, with a masterclass in clustered embellishments. You might want to grab a drink first… and maybe a few crafty pieces to play along with this week’s forty-two minutes of scrapping tv!
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 Laura Craigie, at PaperLuLu, a blog filled with the cutest of handmades. 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.
Have you ever finished a scrapbook page only to feel that you were missing that “something special”? Perhaps you are new to scrapbooking and looking for ways to take your layouts to the next level. Or you might be an experienced scrapbooker who is feeling the loss of your scrappy mojo, and looking for ways to increase the creative appeal of your pages. Well then this is the workshop for you!
You’ll find this class packed with surefire ways to take your layouts to the next level with a toolkit full of tried and true designer tips and tricks. The techniques outlined in each lesson are straightforward and easy to follow, but really pack a big punch in the design department. You’ll find your layouts have gone from “good” to “great” just by following a few of the design guidelines covered in this class.
Each lesson will focus on one of five main design categories: backgrounds, photos, titles, journaling, and embellishments. With 10 lessons per chapter that’s 50 designer tips & tricks to refer back to when you’re faced with your next “what’s missing?” dilemma. A brand new, never before seen page example by Lynn (as well as some other special guest designers) accompanies each lesson to help get you started. Additionally, an informative PDF and instructional video is provided for each chapter. Each video not only reviews the lessons included in the chapter, but also features the start to finish process of one of the chapter layouts as well.
To enter, just leave a comment on this post describing what technique you find yourself using time and time again.
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!
We have three winners to announce this week….
For the American crafts prize pack, our winner is…
Congratulations to Claire W!
For Julie Kirks beautiful Plundered Pages prize pack, our winner is…
Congratulations to CatesbyK!
Last but by no means least, for our True Scrap 4, our winner is…
Congratulations to Cheryl T!
Lucky winners, 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.
Are you ready to be amazed? I have not completely abandoned starting points! I had just a tiny bit of time to do some just-for-fun scrapping before the moving boxes arrived, so I started with this starting point for a new page: one full sheet of a subtle single-colour patterned paper, like a stripe for the background. Then everything else is arranged on the top third of the page – one 4×11 inch box, one 2.5×11.5, a smaller 4×5 box and a border-punched strip just shy of the full page width. I used my dwindling stash of Garden Cafe for this start – I love all those turquoise tones in that collection from last autumn.
Finished, it looks a bit like this! Some crocheted trim, that lovely rose ribbon from the first Dear Lizzy collection (I’ll admit it: I was afraid to use it and now I’m slightly ashamed that it’s still in my ribbon drawer. It may appear on a few more projects soon to make me feel much better about that situation!) and lots of paper elements from Dear Lizzy Neapolitan and 5th & Frolic (out soon!). Very pink Bella Blvd chevron tape. Plus those turquoise Amy Tangerine letters I’m using on pretty much anything that stands still at the moment.
New to Scrapbook Starting Points? You can find more here.
Well, most of my scrapbooking stuff is packed into moving boxes and by Friday it shall be all unpacked in my new studio in our new house! I’m thinking positive at this point. It’s definitely not been my favourite experience of all time, but it will be great to not live, work, eat and sleep all in the same room when we say goodbye to the tiniest of places I have lived since my first college dorm room.
With all that hassle for me, I have a little good news for you: a bonus giveaway this week! In addition to the fab giveaway from Julie’s Plundered Pages, this week Lain at True Scrap is also offering a prize to one of you: full registration to True Scrap 4, the live online scrapbooking and papercrafting experience, happening on the 19th and 20th of October.
With 15 fabulous instructors, five make-and-takes, and lots of live chat, you will have so much fun. Instructors lead brand-new classes on everything from photography to design to inspiration right to your computer by video and live interview. You log in from home and interact with the instructors and other participants, chatting, learning, and watching in real time. And it’s all recorded so you can go back and watch again and again.
I have taught at True Scrap three times, including The Perfect Collection at True Scrap 3. I’m sitting out this time (well not so much sitting as boxing and unpacking and repeated trips to Ikea, most likely) but some of my favourite ladies in this industry are teaching, including Jen Gallacher, Kelli Crowe and Noell Hyman – well, why don’t we just go with the full list of instructors? The line-up of fifteen:
• Julie Fei-Fan Balzer
• Erin Bassett
• Monica Bradford
• Kelli Crowe
• Laura Denison
• Jennifer Gallacher
• Nic Howard
• Noell Hyman
• Katrina Kennedy
• Nichol Magouirk
• Gretchen Schmidt
• Katrina Simeck
• Jessica Sprague
• Heidi Swapp
• Jennifer Wilson
This giveaway works slightly different to normal, but it’s nothing complicated, I promise. If you would like to enter to win full registration to True Scrap 4, visit this page and fill out the ‘more info’ box at the bottom of the page then leave a comment here on this post. Those two steps to enter, and entries close this Thursday with the winner posted on Friday. Got it? Awesome. Please make sure you enter a valid email address here when you leave your comment, as that’s how you’ll be contacted if you win!
If you’re a member at Two Peas (of course you are!) you might also consider the special sign up deal for Two Peas members. Find that special offer here, which includes a discount valid until the thirtieth of September. Or if you’re more interested in individual classes, you can find my three True Scrap workshops still available: Creative Stash Diving, Go with the Flow” and The Perfect Collection. (The first two are also included with Cover to Cover if that’s a better option for you!)
Okay, I think that’s everything! Good luck, and enjoy True Scrap 4!
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