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

Earlier this week my glittery friend talked a bit about preparing page kits while she was looking for ways to combine older supplies with new. Page kits are certainly not the only way to gather supplies for a page! But they are exceptionally useful if you want to scrapbook away from home or without making much mess, and they can help with supply economy, either because you want to make sure you use what you have or because you need to get the most from a limited crafting budget.

But what do you actually put in your page kits?

I start with paper – usually a mix of scraps and full sheets (including at least one full sheet for the background but I will often include two so I have a choice). I err on the side of too much paper rather than not enough.

I also need lettering in my page kits. Although I have a die-cutter, I prefer to use that just for embellishments and not for lettering. I nearly always use Thickers and another small flat letter sticker style for my titles, so most of my page kits will have at least two kinds of peel and stick lettering.

Then I turn to embellishments. Sometimes this includes more paper that can be cut apart to make embellishments (like those viewmaster reels). But it also includes stand-along items like the tag and paper flags here. I’m usually looking for something that includes dimension and at least one texture other than flat paper, so in this case the pins on the flags provide some dimension and the stitched tag includes the texture of the thread rather than just another printed paper. If I don’t have predetermined embellishments I want to include, I might die-cut or punch papers that I can layer to create my own embellishments. If I’m going to crop at home, I just leave the paper in the page kit and use the punches or dies as I come to that step. If I’m going to crop elsewhere I will go ahead and cut the shapes I think I will need and add them to the page kit (just loose shapes in the page protector) so I don’t need to pack so many heavy, bulky items.

My last step is to look to the in-between elements that will tie it all together. These include things that can work as a strip, trim or border, so it will commonly include border stickers or washi tape along with either twine, thread or ribbon. I often use a border punch in that category too, but that would be packed with my tools. I try to plan on using just one or two border punches if I’m cropping away from home so you’ll see designs that are more general and less specific to the page theme. (Or I may borrow a punch from someone else at the crop. If we’re really organised we make a plan of who will bring which punches so we can have the maximum number of shapes with the least weight to carry. No duplicates!)

Then I place that page protector in an album and start to fill the next one! But what about the photos? It depends on my mood and the project as to whether I create the page kit to match the photos (photos first) or create a page kit and then decide on the pictures (supplies first). I do both equally! Whichever comes first, I just pop the photos in the page protector too so they are ready to go. Putting them all in the album makes it easy to transport and the finished pages can go right back into the page protector so they are safe for the journey home. I also really like this format of album planning so I can see a project come together from the beginning even if I haven’t made or sketched out a single layout just yet.

I also pack a separate kit of my basic tools: scissors, adhesive, journaling pens, pop dots, sewing needle, black and brown ink pads and ink applicators, and anything else that I know I want to use but is too bulky for the page protectors, like spools of twine, punches or bottles of paint or mist. That plus my album of page kits and I am ready to go!

Your turn… do you use page kits? And if so, what do you put in them? Do you err on the side of too much or too little? I’d love to hear your process!

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I’m guessing you’re at least partly motivated by scrapbooking challenges or you wouldn’t be stopping by this weekend really! I hope the different challenges have helped you get a few things made that just needed a little push or the permission to sit down and craft. But I know there are plenty of times when I see a challenge that looks like a great idea that totally motivates me, but I just don’t have time to make it happen before the deadline. So guess what? I have a challenge to answer just that.

For this challenge, you pick an outdated challenge and consider it reopened for this week. Take your pick from these options:
4×6 Photo Love, which has twelve page ideas for standard-sized prints, from one single 4×6 picture right up to a dozen on a single scrapbook page.
& Now for Something Completely Different, my monthly class for 2012 at UKScrappers (though open to anyone in any country). Each month the preparation notes and supply list are posted on the tenth and the step by step project is posted on the twentieth, with a full page from start to finish in twenty steps. Each month works with a different photo requirement (different numbers or sizes – you’re free to choose any picture theme you like!) and different techniques, but as each page has to be possible in just twenty steps, the pages offer something different but nothing overwhelming. You can find the first three tutorials of the year there already, plus the April project will be posted this week.
The Adventures of Glitter Girl, the weekly series shown at Two Peas in a Bucket. If there’s a Glitter Girl challenge you’ve been meaning to try, go ahead and use this as your motivation!
Scrapbook Starting Points, with plenty of options for ways to just get started with the cutting and pasting.
Scrapbook Page Sketches, with dozens of sketches, many with videos and all with a variety of examples.

So take your pick and set your own challenge, and consider it current again! Create a new project and upload it to your blog or a page gallery, then share a link here. Entries close at the end of next weekend.

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Some of the questions that come up in the comments here make me giggle. This is one of them. How do you store your paper scraps? Or rather it is usually How do you organise your paper scraps? and that makes me giggle because there is no organisation of the scraps here. They live in a basket. All mixed together. No rhyme nor reason to size, shape, colour, pattern or collection.

The basket isn’t something special to scrapbooking. It was something I picked up at a department store a few years back without knowing what it would become because I had a few extra pounds on a gift card that was nearly to expire but I didn’t want to spend lots more on something expensive just because I had a few extra pounds of credit. I saw baskets marked down to three to five pounds, and figured there would be something in my flat that could be stored here. At first it was the mail, but that idea was abandoned because it was too easy to just stack it up and not deal with it. Then it became magazines, but I didn’t like not being able to see the spines to go straight to the issue I wanted. And then I went into crazy deadline mode on a project, which is this funny little world I enter when it hits me that I have umpteen million layouts I need to make in the next forty-eight to seventy-two hours and I better not do anything except breathe and scrapbook, and sometimes the breathing is optional. (I realise these conditions sound a little extreme, but it truly is something I do about three times a year and at that amount, it is something that makes me thrive and I do some of my favourite work in those conditions… but any more than three times a year and I think I might develop some serious issues in not being able to cope with life! Know your limits, right?) Suffice to say I am not very interested in tidying up between every single project in this sort of time frame, so I brought the basket to my table and at the end of every project, I swept all the scraps left on the table into the basket for instant clean up.

After about twenty pages and one conquered deadline, I realised this basket had all the makings for plenty of layouts and I could instantly see all sorts of colour and pattern combinations appearing that inspired me to make more things. Ever since, this basket has been my one and only storage system for paper scraps and off-cuts. Everything just gets thrown in there together and I start the majority of my pages by choosing a few things from the basket then mixing with full sheets as backgrounds and so forth.

When the basket gets too full to be able to flip through the papers easily, I take out a big section from the back and spread it all over the table. I pull out any lost favourites that I really must have and the rest goes into a bag that I donate to the hospital crafting club. Presto: basket back to useable again and bonus of kids getting to craft with plenty of pretty paper without their parents having to worry about something so trivial as buying craft supplies.

So that’s my system – if you can call it that! Some scrappers have highly organised systems and that works far better for them. I’ve learned that if I file it away, I’m less likely to use it than if I see it there in the basket. I also find the basket is a great way to create easy page kits if I’m going to plan out an album or scrap away from home. I just dump about half the basket on the table and start making groups of papers. Each group becomes the beginnings of a page and I pop them in page protectors to be combined with whatever else is needed for each page and then it’s easy to make those pages and I know I’m getting good use from all my paper scraps! It encourages me to try new colour combinations and to mix manufacturers and design styles I might not have put together otherwise.

Your turn… what do you do with your paper scraps? Do you use them? Store them? Sort them? File them? Give them away? Leave a comment and share your answer!

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Oh stamps: you cost more than a sheet of paper, but we can use you time and again. It makes perfectly rational sense… yet why are there plenty of stamps sitting in our collections that we don’t put to good use more often?

On a recent episode of the Paperclipping Roundtable, the idea of how to consider your spending on stamps (and other tools that can be used multiple times) even entered the discussion. If you buy a stamp for five pounds and use it fifty times, then you could say it only cost ten pence per use, and that’s a pretty economical craft supply! (Of course that doesn’t include the cost of ink or embossing powder or anything else you like… oh my, that gets a bit overwhelming very quickly!) I think we can all agree that a stamp used fifty times is a good investment. It’s the stamps we buy and just use once or twice that can be more humbling. Say I buy a set of alphabet stamps for ten pounds, thinking I will start using them on all my titles thereby saving me lots in letter stickers and such. (Of course, I have already paid for enough letter stickers to spell quite a bit, but that’s beside the point for now.) If I really did that, and fifty of my next hundred pages include that stamp set, then those titles were just twenty pence per page and I have the added benefit of my pages starting to have a unifying style from the repetition of those stamps.

…but what about the scenario that I come home and use those stamps promptly on those three layouts, then put them away while I’m cleaning up and the next time I scrap I go onto auto-pilot and go back to my letter stickers and eventually forget about my master plan to get my money’s worth from those stamps? Using those stamps on just three layouts means each of those titles was £3.33… which is more expensive than quite a few kinds of letter stickers!

This is partly why I slimmed down my stamp collection by about half over the past two months. (The other part being I just didn’t have room for so much and I needed to figure out what could go!) I still have plenty of stamps for all sorts of things, both letters and motifs, but the designs I had completely forgotten to use and wasn’t falling in love with again? Those went to new homes where they could be loved rather than ignored! And now with an amount of stamps that doesn’t overwhelm me or make me feel guilty, I can focus on using them on my pages in ways that work for my scrapping style. That’s a win all around!

So that leads me to the next challenge: take one stamp (or one set of stamps, like an alphabet) and use it as a prominent feature on a project. If you would prefer to do something other than a scrapbook page for this challenge, that’s fine! In this five ideas post, I decided to get more from a stamp by using it on more than just a 12×12 page and I’ve repeated many of those ideas with other stamps since then. Whatever the project, I feel a bit better about my stamp investment when I really feature the design on a page rather than hiding it away under lots of other elements, so I encourage you to highlight one design you love so your favourites show through your scrapbooking.

Have you been collecting stamps but not putting them to use as much as you would like? Check out the brand new Scrapbook Stamper’s Workshop and last year’s Scrapbook Stamping class for plenty of tips specifically designed to help you get the most from your stamps on scrapbook pages, and they are taught by two ladies who get way more creative with scrapbook stamping than I do!

To enter this challenge, create a new project featuring a stamped design and upload it to your blog or a page gallery. Share a link below. Entries close at the end of next weekend!

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Taking another question from the comments earlier this week, we have one posed by Boo, a young scrapbooker who asks How did you start scrapbooking? …and that’s a question I’d love to ask you too!

You can have the short or the long version of my answer. The short version is I started scrapbooking while I was a university student, with a kit I found at a discount store, and I had no idea the larger world of scrapbooking (or indeed the word scrapbooking) existed until I had nearly finished that first book. But I was hooked, and I’m so very happy to have had this outlet to evolve from those humble roots to something that allows me to combine a love of so many little things (like writing and taking pictures and crafting) into one neat little package called scrapbooking.

The long version is something I wrote over the course of several posts called the Time Warp series. You can read that story starting here, then follow the links at the bottom of each post to go to the next part of the story. I wrote those celebrating ten years of scrapbooking… and I’m now closer to fourteen so I suppose I should take a closer look really and consider adding a chapter to cover the years since 2008!

Now… I would love to hear your answer to Boo’s question! You can share your story with a long or short answer too! If your story is short you can leave it in the comments. If it’s something longer that you want to think about and write about at length, you might want to make it a blog post of your own and leave us a link to come check it out!

So… how did you discover scrapbooking?

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It may be the last day of the weekend, but today is the day that has me very excited: so many challenges plus this evening, all about the new class! But I’m getting ahead of myself… after all, I have ten whole challenges to share with you today! I better get on it!

Although she’s quickly become part of my regular life, it was only fifteen weeks ago that someone extra glittery started taking over my craft desk in the middle of each week. And way back in her very first adventure, she covered ideas for keeping memorabilia, including putting things like tickets and confetti into paper pockets. (You can see more – including that how-to video – here.)

Of course, memorabilia isn’t the only thing you might want to keep on your page. Pockets and envelopes can also keep writing you don’t want to put on show, like the sort of writing that can be very good for the soul and important to you but something you really wouldn’t want just anyone to read as they flipped through your pages. It can be especially useful if a page with quite serious writing fits in your album between several other pages that are quite lighthearted, which is the case with this example.

Envelopes can also be filled with things you print out at a smaller size than your photos. The top page includes printed conversations from Facebook plus a printout of all the image thumbnails from images where both of us were tagged. I love how those printouts include a real mix of just plain everyday things (including me getting lost on my way somewhere… which is really everyday for me) and photos of things that were pretty big events so many years ago.

By the way: if you’re looking for more help on writing on your layouts or finding ways to include evidence like this to capture your stories more fully, the True Stories online class is available at any time in an archived format. Just drop me an email if you want to ask any questions about whether it’s the right project for you.

What will you put in a pocket or an envelope? That’s your challenge, of course! Create a new page for this challenge (sorry, existing layouts in your albums can’t be entered to win, though you are welcome to share them in the comments for inspiration!) and upload it to a page gallery or your blog. Link it up to be entered – entries close at the end of next weekend.

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Like with so many things, there has to be a balance with scrapbooking, right? The need to be in the moment has to balance the desire to have photographs of plenty of real life events, both big and small. I will be the first to admit that this very balance creates some very imperfect photos in my collection. Pictures I could certainly compose, focus and light much better with even thirty more seconds of thought. But if it’s a moment that will be gone thirty seconds later, what’s the use?

And so I end up with photos like this: this is a picture from this past week taken in a total spur of the moment, straight from the camera (except for resizing) so you can see all its flaws. Like how I didn’t even notice the line in the mirror join went right through my face, how the focus is not sharp (and it was taken with far too shallow depth of field to ever get all six of us in focus), how the colouring isn’t great. But that’s the shot I have from that particular moment: take it or leave it, right? And as a scrapbooker, the keeping is far more likely.

So my question to you this time is How do you deal with imperfect digital photos? Do you delete them except in certain circumstances? Do you try to identify them quickly and recreate the moment as much as possible? Do you try printing them small or large or editing them to look a bit better? Do you include them in pockets or somewhere less obvious than your clearest, most beautiful images? Do you keep meaning to scrapbook but just put them back in the file? Dish the dirt on your strategy and whether it works for you.

Faced with an image like this, I’m likely to turn to Photoshop and make the best out of an imperfect photo by arting it up just a bit. None of these strategies will take an out-of-focus, poorly composed photo and make it win prizes, but they do make things just a little more clear for me to remember that moment in my albums. The four options I come back to each time are to sharpen the image (to see if it’s possible to crisp up something that is just barely out of focus), to cool the colours and soften the focus even more so there’s an obvious look of something other than digital precision, to warm and fade the image so it mimics an analogue photo that sat on an old roll of film for far too long, or to convert the image to a black and white that captures the right feel.

After a long time using Totally Rad’s separate actions for my photo editing, I switched to their RadLab system, and it is definitely my favourite way to edit images – both the everyday snaps that come out a bit rubbish and the favourite fancy shots too. (If you’re looking for a system like that, I reviewed RadLab here and code 1128SHIMELLE gets you 15% off your purchase.)

I also find the printing small option works wonders for not emphasising an imperfect photo when on a scrapbook page! Easy.

Now… what are your strategies? (And if you’ve been editing with Picnik – have you made any decisions about what you’re going to use after their site closes next week? A bit sad about that!)

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For your next challenge, I’m delighted to introduce Relly Annett-Baker as a special crop guest. I love her take on the process of how she takes an inspiration piece and makes it her own, which you might see as a unifying theme so far this weekend! I hope you enjoy her story of creating a scrapbook page! Don’t miss her challenge at the end of this post.

I’m what you might call a time-poor, stash-rich scrapbooker. I have mucho mucho paper, embellishments, photos and stickers and maybe an hour or two a week in which I can scrapbook. I travel a lot, work hard and I also have two little boys who fill all my hours with hilarious antics and sweet moments. This means I have a lot I want to scrapbook as well.

After my second baby was born, I stopped scrapbooking for over a year because I wasn’t sure I’d ever have time again but I kept checking message boards and blogs, always thinking ‘I should really …’. Most of all the thought that Thing 1 would have a scrapbook of his baby and toddler years and Thing 2 wouldn’t was what prompted me to start making pages again. Before I had children and much more time to myself, my pages were detailed, distressed, very layered and artsy. When I returned I made a decision – I was going to keep stuff a lot simpler, and I was going to focus on the story behind the pictures. I didn’t have time right now for making miniature artworks. Just for memory keeping.

So, I started by doing something I’d never done a lot previously. I scraplifted. I started by scraplifting myself. I found pages in Thing 1’s album that I could copy (and simplify) for Thing 2’s album. I looked at design team galleries and started copying stuff from there too – sometimes whole pages, sometimes details. One thing I found a lot was that I was drawn to pages with sweet girly details but with two digger-dirt-and-danger little grub attractors at home I needed to do some rework to turn them into a page that fitted my photos. Slowly, this became a challenge to me. Can I recreate this pink and frilly page in a style that fits me? I came up with a process and I’m going to share it here, so please play along!

_{Click here for more about this album.}

First, I get the original layout up where I can see it – usually on my phone or laptop. Here I took a layout of Shimelle’s (doesn’t she look adorable in her ballet outfit?) with a variety of photo sizes on it and made a start.

I then take a scratch piece of 12×12 – usually an insert from a page protector – and use that to copy down the sketch. I’m pretty rubbish with proportions so if I do it on actual 12×12 paper I get a better feel for the sizes I’m going for.

I knew I had a ton of pictures in 3×4, 6×4, and 7×5 of my oldest boy that I had taken over the years. You know the sort, super-cute snaps but no particular story to them. The ones I picked out were all from various times in previous summers, around his birthday, so I decided to tell that story and show him growing like a weed!

I assembled my papers, looking for at least three contrasting patterns as I wanted to mount my pictures, and one small repeating detail pattern to replace the floral design in Shimelle’s original layout.

I then chose some stickers and embellishments that I thought would fit. Shimelle’s design had several clusters of small embellishment around the pictures and I wanted to recreate this. I tend to get this stuff out early, so that I can look at what I want to work with, rather than tripping up on boxes round my studio as I rush to finish. I often have to make my layouts in several 15 minute blocks so this helps me remember what I was planning too.

Next I cut the paper, according to my sketch and mounted my pictures. I knew my photo sizes were a little different from the original layout so that some re-arranging would be required. I decided to move the largest photo down a little and move the journalling block to the bottom left. The baby picture would balance it on the other side. I then went ahead and inked all the pieces.

I also chose two border stickers to put back to back alongside the left-hand strip of patterned paper, like in Shimelle’s layout.

Once the photos are down, I usually create my title next and that’s what I did here. I copied the contrasting small flat stickers and larger dimensional letters for my title from the original layout. I’m plagued by lots of leftover numbers on my sticker sheets, so I decided to use all the numbers up to five. (Although I guess you might assume my son is 12,345 years old! )

I looked back at the sketch and remembered that there was a large round embellishment top left and a large heart top right. Weighing up my options, I decided to ditch the heart cluster and instead focus on the top-left. This had been a clock but I decided the summer theme needed some sunshine. I also found a matching kite that I mounted on sticky pads for dimension.Finally, I added some sticker clusters to add some horizontal lines to a very vertical layout, and some primary colour embellishments to match my pictures.

And so, my challenge to you is to find a layout you love that isn’t in a style or colour scheme you’d usually use and scraplift it with a twist that makes it yours.

To enter this challenge create a new project by changing something dramatic – like how Relly started with something very girly and made it a boy page. You can use any page from your pins, bookmarks or favourites – you can even scraplift yourself and adapt a favourite page. If you prefer more direct inspiration you can use these two layouts as your start or take a look at a few favourites I’ve bookmarked recently: one photo, two photos, two square photos, three photos or four photos. Then upload a picture of your project to a gallery or your blog and link to it here! Entries close at the end of next weekend.

By day, Relly is a Content Strategist, helping companies sort out their online content. By late-afternoon until around 8pm, she’s Mummy to two little boys. By 10pm, she’s usually in bed. In the twilight hours between these happenings she scrapbooks, bakes and makes things for her house. She tweets prolifically as @RellyAB and has a new blog, Loves Handmade, which she absolutely promises she will update with some tutorials and layouts. Right after this cup of tea. Zzzzz.

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