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

Thanks so much for joining me this weekend for all the challenges and discussion! Not to worry – there are still a couple challenges left and they all remain open right through the end of next weekend, so there’s no rush to do all of that tonight. But there is a rush with just this one thing: the early bird offer for my new class.

Here’s what I can tell you so far:
…class starts on Monday the 7th of May and will run for four weeks, finishing on the 3rd of June.
…this class is not about just pages.
…this class is not about minibooks.

This class is a result of what happened when I found an album system that worked for me and made me fall in love with scrapbooking all over again.

It’s not about a single album system with steps to follow. It is definitely about options. You won’t need to buy specific supplies (though eventually you will need albums of your choice) and you won’t need to feel like you have to scrapbook certain topics.

Along the way, we’ll look at real ways to break down a story and make albums that have value to anyone, not just scrapbookers.

The class will include PDFs, videos, private message board and online chat. There is permanent access to everything so you will not have to follow along in those four weeks if they don’t suit your schedule or if you want to take more time.

In twenty-four hours I will announce the full details, including the name and how many of everything to expect and a specific run-down of what we’ll be doing throughout those four weeks. But that will be at the full price of £18 or $30. If you want to sign up within those twenty-four hours, before the full reveal, then you can take advantage of a bit of a bargain: £12 or $20. But just for this one full day: as soon as the announcement goes live tomorrow it’s full price across the board.

So if you’re ready to take a journey through from the single 12×12 to the stack of pages to a book you love, I’d love for you to go ahead and sign up!

Sorry, this special offer has ended. Please find class registration here.

You do not need a Paypal account to sign up – you have the choice when you click of secure card payment or from your Paypal account if you prefer. Please make sure you pay from a valid email address, as it is the only way I can reach you with your class supplies. You will receive a receipt for your payment via Paypal when you sign up, then tomorrow night you’ll also receive an email from me when the full class details are posted and registration opens fully. If you don’t receive that tomorrow night, please check your spam folder and if it’s not there, email me (shimelle at gmail dot com) so we can make sure your messages will reach your inbox.
ETA: Thank you for your amazing response. I need a little more time to get through the full list! All remaining early bird registrations will be processed on Tuesday! Thanks so much.

Tomorrow I will be happy to answer questions, but not until then! If you have been waiting for a new class here, then please take advantage of the discount with a little bit of mystery. If you would rather wait to know all the details, then just check back tomorrow night!

Thanks so much!

Comment [34]

There are so many things about Project Life that have had an impact on the scrapbooking industry this year, but one that has made me smile is the new surge in scrappers considering printable options for their albums. All sorts of different journaling cards and photo backings and other things to make pages attractive while remaining affordable, since you can use them plenty of times. Very cool. And extra affordable is when they are free, right?

I may have a little something for you in that case.

Click to download the free printable.
This challenge is that simple: download this free printable designed by Little Musings and use it on a project of your choice – traditional scrapbook page, something digital, your Project Life album, a card, whatever you fancy. It’s a JPG file so you can print it exactly like a photograph – you can add it to your photo library, you can digiscrap with it in Photoshop, you can open it in your word processor and change it to whatever size you want and print from there. All of those options will work.

You might also want to check out the set of cards in the top photo – they are available here, from Little Musings.

To enter this challenge, create your project with the free printable and upload it to your blog or page gallery, then link it up here. Entries close at the end of next weekend.

Comment [11]

The last of the question and answer posts for this weekend (though there are still four challenges and the class announcement left to go live before the clock ticks over to tomorrow in my time zone) brings me to this…

Where do you scrapbook?

At home? At a friend’s house? At a craft store?
At the dining table? Your desk? On the sofa, the bed or the floor?

When I first start scrapbooking, I sat cross-legged on my studenty futon and all of my supplies fit in a file box I had emptied when I finally finished accounting class. (It was required. The teacher was awful. The textbook came in three weeks before the end of term and was the most expensive book I ever had to buy and then the bookstore wouldn’t buy it back. Accounting class had the most loose paper of any class I ever took, which is saying a lot to someone who wrote a dissertation on literature.)

I now scrapbook at my standing worktable in the middle of our living room.

Between the two I’ve scrapped at dining tables and on hotel nightstands and once on a train with a friend.

By and large if I go elsewhere to scrapbook, it’s either at a friend’s house or at a weekend we’ve arranged at some place where we can all stay and not have to worry about kicking anyone’s family or partner out of the house! That picture of the pink suitcase is me ready to go to such a day – packed with an album of page kits, my tool bag and then a few extra bags of paper and embellishments thrown on top just in case. And the last minute realisation that I hadn’t packed any pop dots, so there’s a sheet of those thrown on top. That’s everything I take and I still only end up using about two percent of it. So then once I come home I’ll continue to scrap from what I packed until I’ve gone through all those page kits, for the most part!

So… where do you scrapbook?

Comment [84]

Sometimes we end up with a photo that we feel deserves special treatment on a scrapbook page. It might be a beautiful, well-staged portrait or it might be a simple snapshot that just makes us smile. We can fancy it up by printing it larger or scrapping it on its own or dressing it up with plenty of embellishments. But for this challenge, we have another idea for you.

_{Layout ©twopeasinabucket.com.}

Taking inspiration from Amy Heller’s scrapbook page, For Like Ever, take one photo you love and print it twice for the same page. You can try her treatment of one full colour and one faded image, or you can try something else that comes to your mind. Try colour and black and white or plain and covered with vellum or one big and one small… whatever you fancy as long as one photo is printed twice for the page!

See more of Amy’s work on her blog or in her page gallery.

To enter this challenge, create a new page with one photograph included twice, then upload your results to your blog or page gallery. Leave a link here, and entries close at the end of next weekend.

Comment [10]

Since we covered what we do with our paper scraps, it seems only right that we discuss full sheets of paper too!

How do you sort and store your scrapbooking papers?

My biggest suggestion with storage systems is always to sort by the way you think when you create. If you think ‘I need something blue’, then sort by colour. If you think ‘Where are my birthday papers?’, then sort by theme. If you wish you had a small pattern to work with, sort by pattern. And if you think in terms of ‘that Amy Tangerine paper would be just right for this’, then sort by brand and collection. If you store things by the way you think, then it’s far easier to go straight to them while you’re crafting or when you’re planning a project.

So my answer is that I sort my papers by brand. I keep my full sheets on two wire paper racks, with one brand per shelf, and in a few cases further subdivided if the stack is impractical for one shelf. At one point I had additional paper racks and kept a lot more cardstock, but I found I didn’t use nearly as much cardstock as I was keeping around, so I now only have solid cardstock at the bottom of one rack, over about six shelves. That is plenty, as I tend to use the same colours repeatedly rather than all different shades.

This system works for me because I think by brand, style or collection while I’m crafting, but I don’t suggest this system if you don’t think that way. There’s a funny thing that happens if you gather a group of people who have worked in a scrapbook store at some point – we all memorise papers! And some crafters do too, but plenty don’t, and if you don’t memorise papers by brand, you could miss the very best papers for your project because you can’t remember where they are… making it easier for you to find them by colour, pattern, theme or something else.

I’d love to hear your answer: how do you sort your scrapbooking papers? What does and doesn’t work for you? If you’ve tried various methods over the years, we’d love to hear your evaluation!

Comment [81]

Throughout this weekend I’ve loved seeing the comments come up in contrast to what I was reading here just a year or two ago. It wasn’t that long ago that I would suggest mixing manufacturers on a layout and there would be sheer panic in the comment section! But now it’s very much routine and oh-so-easy, it would seem. That has made me smile a great deal.

This challenge may be easy, but you need to follow it carefully. Choose two patterned papers with contrasting designs – things that are obviously very different. Chevron and doodles, hearts and stripes, sunshines and polka dots… just make sure they are very different types of patterns. Then use them to create the background of your page: two-thirds one pattern, one-third the other pattern.

Whether those thirds end up horizontal or vertical is up to you – as is the rest of the design! Keep it simple or layer it up – totally up to you!

If you’re looking for more inspiration to get the most from your patterned paper collection, you might want to check out Pretty Paper Party, which is available in a self-paced format at any time.

To enter this challenge, create a new page with two contrasting paper designs in a two-thirds/one-third design. Upload your project to your blog or a page gallery and share a link here! Entries close at the end of next weekend.

Comment [15]

These days I film about one in every five layouts I create, so in theory I share so very much in terms of how I create a scrapbook page from start to finish. But of course, editing is also part of that process and I guarantee the vast majority of my pages do not go from that very first spark of an idea to completed page in under twenty minutes. With each video I edit, I have to choose which things are worth including and which steps I should just gloss over. It’s a funny little game, because with each video there is someone out there who is brand new to my work and could benefit from something I have explained before – like why I ink edges or what little gizmo I use for doing so. But then again some of you have already seen every video I’ve made and I don’t want to bore you with the same information time and time again. Who knew it turning on the camera would make me think so hard?

So this week I was intrigued as to how changing the medium would change the explanation of how I create a scrapbook page from start to finish. Instead of showing that process via a step-by-step video, I joined three other scrappers (and one producer) to discuss how a specific page came to fruition. No visuals other than the four layouts themselves: just a conversation. On this episode of the Paperclipping Roundtable…

(Dina Wakley and I were the guests and hosts Noell Hyman and Nancy Nally also joined in to share their scrapbooking process. You can see the specific discussion of this particular episode here.)

So now I turn that same question over to you: how do you make a scrapbook page from start to finish? If your process is simple enough that you want to explain it in a comment, fabulous! If it’s something you want to think more about and illustrate with an image or two, you might want to blog it and leave a link. Either is fine. You could even put together your own video or podcast to show us or tell us about how you make a page! But I would love to hear how a page comes together for you… feel free to talk generally or pick a specific layout like we did for our discussion. (Bonus points if your process includes supplies speaking to you!)

Comment [60]

When I saw the bold background of hearts across this layout by Jill Sprott, I thought she had stamped one design over and over then filled in a few of the hearts with markers. I thought this was a great idea and made a mental note to look for a stamp in my own collection that could be repeated in a similar way. And then when I scrolled down to the supplies, I felt really silly. It’s not stamped: it’s a printed and flocked transparency by Fancy Pants. And I only felt silly because I have actually held that very transparency in my hands, yet somehow I just didn’t recognise it on Jill’s page at all. Either way, I love the look. (And I’m still going to try the repeated stamp idea sometime soon.)

_{layout ©twopeasinabucket.com.}

So here’s a challenge for those of you who like something a bit more prescriptive: scrapbook two photos on a bold background! You can scraplift Jill’s page directly or you can create an original design. As long as there are two pictures and the background is something that isn’t fading into the distance, you’re onto a win!

Your background can be a bold patterned paper, a bright and bold colour, a stamped design… just nothing pale and minimal!

See more of Jill’s work on her blog and in her page gallery.

To enter this challenge, create a new project inspired by Jill’s layout, with a bold background and two photos. The rest of the design is up to you! Whenever you’re finished, leave a link to your project to enter this challenge. Entries close at the end of next weekend.

Comment [8]