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

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! Since last month, I’ve had five different videos at Two Peas: ideas with the new DIY Thickers, products and page ideas for travel themes, how to choose scrapbooking supplies for a page kit, scrapbooking with 8×10 and larger photos and the eight layout craziness that was my National Scrapbook Day challenge – maxing out a set of scrapbooking supplies. And tomorrow is Wednesday, so that means a new video from Glitter Girl. Here’s a little peek at this week’s episode… can you guess what her adventure might be?

Definitely the most inspiring thing for me at Two Peas right this second is Amy Heller’s new workshop on colour – Through the Kaleidoscope. I’m taking this workshop and I just started working on the ideas in chapter one yesterday, but I cheated and looked ahead at all the layouts because I couldn’t wait to see them all. I’m really loving how this is expanding my view of colour and making me try some new things mixing my papers and using colour to tell my stories… due in large part to the fact that I have never met an Amy scrapbook page that I didn’t like.

You can find her workshop here, but I’m also giving away a free place this week. Find that giveaway here.

That ‘max out your supplies’ idea may have gone the wrong way in my head because I’ve ordered two boxes of goodies from Two Peas this month! Oh goodness. I’ll have to keep scrapping in overdrive or I’ll be back to square one with nowhere for it all to live! (At least they weren’t gigantic orders. Medium-sized, I promise.) Five favourites I’m loving right now include this special kit with a gorgeous mix of things. It can be used for an upcoming minibook workshop but I’m using it for a series of 12×12 pages and loving the colours and designs; this exclusive stamp set has such a great mix of words that can be used on all sorts of projects and I love the clean look of the fonts; these paper pockets from Whisker Graphics are brand new to the shop and just twenty-five cents; papers from Summer Fresh by Simple Stories and the newest collection from October Afternoon, 9 to 5, made a big impact on my need-to-order-twice decision this month! Look for all of these products in layouts appearing over the next few weeks!

Now to kick off this month’s Gardeners’ Digest with a funny little giveaway this time! The more comments left, the better the prize gets. We’ll start with a $10 gift certificate to spend on anything you would like at Two Peas. After 100 comments are left, a second prize is added – the Oh Happy Day exclusive stamp set. After 250 comments, a third prize is added – five rolls of washi tape. If we get to 500 comments, I’ll add the Pieces of Me scrapbooking kit. And what the heck, if for some crazy reason we hit 1000 comments, I’ll add another ninety bucks to the gift certificate to give you a total of $100 to shop for whatever you want at Two Peas. Which means if we really do get that many comments, the winner would get a prize that is worth $185 plus shipping. Um… don’t expect this to be a regular thing! So yes – one comment per person, and you have one week to leave that comment. Entries close at 3pm UK time next Tuesday, the 29th of May 2012. Telling a friend is a good thing!

Now, once you’ve left that comment, remember to click on over to the next Garden Girl. Your next stop is the incredibly fabulous Jen Gallacher, a blog you should definitely bookmark if you haven’t already. Check out her sidebar for all the scrapbooking videos she creates. And enjoy the digest posts from all the Garden Girls!

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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Starting a new week with fresh energy and bountiful intentions. How are you this find morning? And would you fancy a scrapbook starting point, perhaps?

This starting point and resulting page comes from this month’s kits at JBS Mercantile. This includes elements from both the main kit and the minibook kit. (There are still a few of the main kits left. The mini has sold out, I’m afraid, but many of the items from that kit can be found here.)

Somewhat odd for my layouts recently, this actually requires two sheets of cardstock: one 12×12 for the background and one cut smaller to mat the two patterned paper boxes in the centre of the page. That full area in the middle pieces together to be 11.5 inches wide and 10.5 inches tall. Then a gathering of patterned paper scraps, a journaling card and some washi tape forms the start to the embellishment. But where will you go from here? Is that the space for writing, the title or more layers of pretty paper?

In this case, that spot was just right for the title, and a few more layers of paper both here and at the top left balanced things out, leaving room to add writing on the green patterned paper above the title. I’d been toying with how to write about these pictures without my album starting to have a sort of farmers’ almanac twist since the pink trees turn up in my photos every spring. Then I realise the farmers’ almanac was actually pretty nifty as it goes – so each year it will document that little bit of perspective on the weather and the seasons and so forth. This year there was very little of the pink on blue and instead pink on grey, with many of the cherry blossoms struggling through since we had one week of really warm weather followed by a cold front and freezing rain. In the end I photographed these under an umbrella in a downpour because I was afraid the rain would bring all the blossoms down, but I did manage to get a few blue sky shots the next morning when we had about two hours of sunshine. So yes, apparently I’m now so engrained in British culture that I will scrapbook the weather. Next: a page about queueing, obviously.

We’ve actually had two starting points since I last posted a round-up, so here are a few favourites from those two. Click the corresponding link to take a closer look and get to know the scrappers behind these pages: one, two, three and four.

If you use this week’s starting point to create a scrapbook page of your own, I’d love for you to share it here!

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On the twentieth of every month this year, I post a start-to-finish scrapbook page tutorial in just twenty steps. It’s called & Now for Something Completely Different… because each month we try… something different. Amazing, I know.

This month we’re scrapbooking with a strip of photos – either from a photobooth or one you make yourself. You can find notes on the supplies needed for this project (including options for making a strip of photos) here and the final twenty-step page tutorial here.

If you give it a go, upload your page to the gallery at UKScrappers by the end of the month, as three layouts each month win a prize pack of scrapbooking goodies. UKScrappers is free to join and although it is predominantly about scrapping in the UK, you can join no matter where you are in the world and participate in any of the challenges and discussions!

Happy scrapping!

xlovesx

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This week I’m excited to give away a place on an amazing new workshop all about something fabulous: colour.

Through the Kaleidoscope is a new self-paced workshop from Amy Heller. Almost every time Amy adds a scrapbook page to her gallery, I gasp in delight. I love the way she designs with a brilliant eye for detail. In my Hitchhiker’s Guide workshop, one of the videos shows my process in taking inspiration from a page Amy made and using her design in my own style… and it’s one of my very favourite layouts this year. I’m excited to be taking this workshop myself, because I know I want to see all that goodness from fifty brand new layouts and Amy’s insight into using colour, with her professional background in graphic design and art direction.

This new workshop includes five chapters, each with a printable PDF and a video. She’s also included flip card and colour wheel printables to keep on your desk while scrapping. Since this workshop is self-paced, you can access all the materials as soon as you sign up and you can work on them in any order and at any pace you fancy. There’s also a private message board to share your work and chat with Amy and the other participants.

The workshop is available for purchase here, and if you’re the winner of this week’s giveaway and you’re already signed up, no problem – you’ll receive a full refund or you can gift the workshop to a friend if you prefer.

To enter, leave a comment on this post including a colour combination you love. Easy! Please include your Two Peas username so the workshop can be added to your account promptly. 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!

Have a lovely weekend!

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Congratulations to Ann, who wins the stylish camera strap from last Friday’s giveaway.

Ann, please email me (shimelle at gmail dot com) with your address.

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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Glitter Girl is already on to her twentieth adventure of the year! This week she’s dealing with some supersized scrapbooking, after a cry for help on the message board asking what on earth we should do with 8×10 and larger prints. Never fear: Glitter Girl has some samples and suggestions, plus a start to finish page to share with you.

All of the products shown are available here, plus a collection of links to some of my favourite large-photo pages from other scrapbookers.

And while Glitter Girl may go around in hiding with a mask over her face, I may have to get on her case if she keeps scrapbooking embarrassing photos of my childhood, complete with interesting choices in hair styles! Oh goodness. Why yes, I did have a battery-powered curling iron in my cheerleading bag, now that you mention it.

This week Glitter Girl challenges you to scrapbook a photo 8×10 or larger and share it in the Two Peas gallery. You can also leave a link in the comments here if you like.

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.

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This weekend, one commenter will receive a brown ‘dreamer’ camera strap.

This strap is both functional and stylish and is available stateside from Photojojo or overseas from Uranium99, a toy camera seller on eBay.

To enter, just leave a comment on this post describing your favourite photograph.

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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Congratulations to Shanon (and friend), who win a class pass to Cover to cover.

Shannon, please email me (shimelle at gmail dot com) with yours and your chosen friends email addresses.

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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Oh hi there. The rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated… Okay, perhaps not that, but no, I certainly didn’t mean to leave you hanging for so long with nary an update to read. I could bore you with why, but I have this minor aim in life to not bore you, so I’ll skip that.

Instead, I’ll proclaim that I’m back and I’m going to stay on top of this, starting right now. Starting with getting this 10 Things on the Tenth post live right in the nick of time for this time zone (my apologies to all of those to my East who have already declared it tomorrow, but hey – bonus to those of you in Hawaii who haven’t even had lunch yet!) With this big gap in reading material in mind, why don’t I share the most obvious list of ten things: ten things I should have blogged here in the last two weeks.

1. How ridiculously quick and easy it is to make a happy and cute birthday card with the Sketchbook collection designed by the lovely Amy Tangerine.

2. Probably most importantly, the PRIZE WINNERS from the online scrapbooking weekend!! These will go live right here just shortly (Friday morning) and the gift certificates are being sent by email this Friday, the 11th of May. Thank you so much for your fabulous participation in all that fun. Next time I’m going to make it a goal to not fall over and stop blogging as soon as it’s over. Cool?

3. For the third year running, I popped over to Germany to scrapbook with the lovely ladies who gather for the Crop on the Rhine. I think this year was my favourite yet! I taught one scrapbooking workshop with three layouts and one more craft-based workshop with an old book that hides a secret inside its pages. And because it is Germany, I ate a ridiculous amount of chocolate wafer biscuits (seriously, even the bargain bags are like tiny bites of Kit-Kat taken to an artisan level) and refuse to make any apologies for eating multiple potato dishes at the same meal because frankly there is little in the world that could stop me from trying something as simply wonderful as potatoes cooked in a new or different way. Hmmm… have you ever noticed that pretty much every 10 Things list comes back to food? I know by now you’ve realised that I take in way more food tourism when I travel than national monuments. Priorities, I tell you. Anyway: Crop on the Rhine is amazing and sincere thanks to Barbara, Heike, Andrea, Conny and everyone who attends and makes this happen. Even special thanks to Ingo, the hotel manager who has come to embrace the special kind of fabulous that a hotel entirely booked by scrapbookers really can be.

4. I went to Germany on the train, as it is more sensible with class kits and also because I just like it more than flying. (Anyone else?) And I got to take The Boy along with me this year as a bit of a treat, so then we headed to Amsterdam for a few days before we came back to the UK. This was actually our first little holiday since we came back from our big trip just over a year ago now. We’ve each done a few journeys here and there for work or family things, but we hadn’t had a good opportunity to actually go somewhere new. This was new! Neither of us had been there, which is always fun. And what was extra super-duper fun was that essentially, this trip was on the house. A few months back I won an amazing prize from Hotwire by telling the story of how I once saved money on travel by sleeping on a pool raft in someone’s broom cupboard. A much easier way to save money while travelling is to use Hotwire – they offer cut-rate hotel rooms by not telling you the name of the hotel until after you’ve made the booking (you get to know its neighbourhood and amenities, just not the exact hotel). So anyway, I should both thank them and write a full post about this adventure since they were kind enough to send us to the mystery hotel of our choice for free! (It turned out to be a very recently built Crowne Plaza, for the hotel curious. Definite win.)

5. We rolled into Amsterdam on the eve of a national holiday. More like THE national holiday. We had no idea. The entire city was on the streets and clad in orange and holding an annual city-wide secondhand sale. Seriously fabulous timing.

6. I came home from Amsterdam, went to work on a super-secret Olympic project and immediately got crazy-sick, despite having gone the entire winter without a sniffle. But between ‘super-secret’ and ‘ugh I’m sick’, I don’t really think there is anything there to blog, so really this number six is a total cheat.

6. Glitter Girl has been out and about you know. There are three adventures I need to blog! In Adventure 17, she tries a variety ideas with the new DIY Thickers range from American Crafts, in Adventure 18, she talks about travel papers and makes a layout in under ten minutes, and in Adventure 19, she talks about what she puts in page kits, both big and small. All of those links have the project photos, videos and full shopping lists so you can catch up with her crazy pink-nailed scrapping antics. Whomever she might be.

7. It was National (or International) Scrapbooking Day. Such a day exists. We had an almighty fun weekend at Two Peas and I haven’t seen so many people on the message board there in years! I absolutely loved it. They even let mild-mannered little me share an extra special video for the weekend, which you can find here. When I say ‘they let me’, I basically mean that because it is ridiculously long. It is forty entire minutes of me scrapbooking. I kid you not. So you might want to schedule it in… but at least I’ve warned you up front.

8. Before Amsterdam and crazysick and supersecret and Scrapbooking Day, I took a giant stack of pictures and notes for the Week in the Life project with Ali Edwards. I’ve done this project almost every year since 2006, but I usually do a week in July. Spring was different and it was a good change! I’ve ordered my prints for that this week and have a few projects to finish first before I can work on that in scrapbook form, but I’m looking forward to it!

9. I should have shared some starting points or something, huh? Here’s one for today then. Made with the current kit from JBS Mercantile.

10. My new class Cover to Cover started this week. It is making my heart very happy. I’ve had some of my favourite discussions about scrapbooking ever, and I love that with this class lots of people are emailing me to talk about different solutions, already! (The forum is buzzy too.) Anyway, if you were thinking about it or you forgot, it’s not too late to join! Sign up and pull up a chair so we can scrap away!

And there are a few more things after that, but I promise I am officially behind but quickly catching up so thanks for not giving up on my little corner of the internet! (Extra thanks for those of you who blogged your 10 Things today even though I was absent until the last minute. I do plan to continue this series and you have ever right to twack me over the head with a teaspoon next month if the post isn’t up first thing in the morning! Thanks for your patience.)

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This weekend, one commenter will win a class pass for themselves and a friend to the latest class here at Shimelle.com Cover to cover
Cover to Cover starts on the seventh of May and runs for four weeks, finishing on the third of June.
It includes 25 full-colour PDF prompts sent to participants by email, so you can read straight from your inbox.
It includes an entire series of videos made just for this class so you can see all the concepts in action, including plenty of example albums but also the process of going from a stack of layouts (or um… many stacks!) to a collection of books that showcase your work in the best way for you.
There is a private message board to ask questions and share with other participants, we’ll gather for a live chat session and I’ll be available for questions and answers throughout in case you want a second opinion on what will work best for the way you scrapbook.

To enter, just leave a comment on this post telling us how you usually plan your scrapbook albums.

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 to announce this week. Firstly, congratulations to Angela who wins a place on the Sassy Scrapping with Shannon class over at twopeasinabucket

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Secondly, congratulations to Dalreen, who wins a gorgeous camera strap from Bluebird Chic.

Dalreen, please email me (shimelle at gmail dot com) with your address.

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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