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

I recently purchased a Minc machine for metallic foiling and have used it easily enough for cards and gift tags, but I’m at a loss as to how to use it on my scrapbook pages. I have plenty of foil, so it seems only right to make this investment work for all my paper crafting, including my layouts! Glitter Girl, can you help?

Of course I can! This week, Glitter Girl takes on the challenge to use the Minc on her pages by customising 3×4 Project Life cards with metallic foiled fish to match some toddler artwork that needs a spot in the scrapbook.

I have the full size twelve inch Minc but the foiler is also available in a smaller six inch machine if that better suits your budget, your space, or your needs! This project would work perfectly fine with the smaller size, since the journaling cards are 3×4 inches. Do be sure you buy the Minc for your part of the world: as it plugs in and heats up, you’ll need the version with the right plug. They are available!

Other supplies for this page include the Color Chaos collection and Sand & Surf papers from Bella Blvd, enamel dots from Doodlebug Designs, letter stickers by October Afternoon, word stickers by My Mind’s Eye, flair badges by American Crafts, and a variety of washi tapes.

In terms of kids and artwork, I can already see why this becomes such a challenge over the years! He’s only just turned two and of course I already have a significant stack of paint strokes, colouring sheets, and other creative projects! (Stickers are big here. Of course stickers are big here.) We have a big art-student-style book with plain pages to paste things in and leave a little label with any relevant notes, but I’d like to include just a sprinkling of the actual pieces in our chronological family albums, and it struck me that it will work perfectly to include things that are a) the right size for a 12×12 page and b) have a corresponding photo that helps tell the story. Aside from letting him doodle on a card in my Christmas journal, I’m pretty sure this is the first page where his artwork appears right in the album. It was a delight to show the page to him when it was in the album and he clapped! That’s probably the biggest accolade I’ve ever had for scrapping, so I’m flying high now!

I’ve long had the Paislee Press Mini Masterpieces project in my bookmarks, thinking that big student portfolio may become unwieldy over the years to come and thinking a Photo Book would be a lovely way to keep the evidence without the complication. I’d love to see other ways you’ve kept child art, be it in your scrapbooks or another system of saving things. If it’s something you’ve shared online, by all means leave us a link in the comments. Or feel free to just share a thought of what has worked for you. I’m sure many of us go through this stage of wanting to find some sort of guidelines for which pieces we keep and which ones go from the fridge to the recycling bin!

And of course, links to your projects with the Minc are also welcome! If you have the Minc, do you find you use it more for small format projects like cards and gifts or is foil becoming a definite design theme in your scrapbooks?

Disclosure: Product links in this post are affiliate links. All are supplies I use and enjoy! Affiliate commissions on shimelle.com blog posts pay the guest artists who share their work here. Thank you for your support.

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Today I’m delighted to share this beautiful scrapbooking project from contributing designer Meghann Andrew. Meghann and I would both love to hear what stories you love reading to young ones!

I could sit and scrapbook photos about my daughter as a baby all day long. Being a preemie, she was a very cherished, loved baby, and everything about her amazed me- from those tiny fingers and toes to her soft baby skin. However, I don’t have that much of a story to tell about her as an infant. She really didn’t do much besides eat, sleep and … well, I’ll digress. Now that she is a toddler, I have so much more to write about, including the funny things she says, and how she fearlessly jumps off of everything, looking to me for approval afterward.

But, I still go back to those baby days and look for stories to tell. Stories that may be deeper than, “today you rolled over for the first time.” That’s when I found the photos of myself reading my daughter her first story, when she was still in the NICU, a mere two pound little creature laying on my chest. Yes, reading Peter Rabbit to her for the first time was monumental, but there is so much more to the story than that. By introducing a story to my child, I was also sharing with her a world in which she could go anywhere and dream anything- a magical place where bunnies wore little blue coats and everything turned out all right in the end. I wanted my layout about this event to reflect some of that magical place.

The trouble is, I had an idea straight away of how I wanted my layout to look, and it only included one photograph. However, I had several that told the story, including an image of the book that I wanted to include. So, since my layout was about a book, I decided to also create one to house my photos in a neat arrangement on my page.

While I created the layout, I created a process video to show you just how easy it was to bring together.

This soft, dreamy layout is exactly what I had hoped it would be when I sat down to create it, and I love that I have an interactive book to flip through and remember this beautiful moment that I shared with my baby daughter.

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Glitter Girl has been avoiding one particular question for a while. It came from so many different people. Students with zero scrapping budget. Overseas scrappers crying from the cost of shipping and import tax. Scrappers with no space for stash or no cash for stash. And a scrapbooker who just turned her craft room into a nursery for twins balancing the emotion of probably not having time to scrapbook much for a while while also having an innate need to create in order to feel just right.

That challenge was to scrapbook without much in the way of supplies. No stickers. No purchased embellishments. No big stack of patterned paper and drawer of punches.

One sheet of white cardstock and whatever is left in a 6×6 paper pad that has done a fair bit already. Nothing else.

This is the most intimidating challenge Glitter Girl has ever taken on, I do believe!

And she cheated. That washi tape and the hole punch are totally cheating. Disappointing, really.

That toddler painting technique is something that needs to appear more in my albums, but it was only after I finished the page that I realised it needs to involve an actual toddler. I’m going to pull out some cardstock the next time he is painting and see if anything might make a nice background. I might as well put him to work, right?

But truthfully: this challenge has made me look like a deer in the headlights every time it has been asked in any wording, and yet I am so, so glad I tried it. You can too: grab a 6×6 paper pad and one sheet of cardstock for your background and go. If you end up needing to cheat a smidge, so be it, but the victory of getting to the end and realising the whole page was basically made with leftovers from a 6×6 paper pad? That feeling is pretty fabulous indeed!

I hope you enjoy watching this adventure!

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This week Glitter Girl sets off on a quest with two purposes: to turn her paper scraps into unique embellishments and then to make them work on a page with her favourite products. The question was posed by Tori Bissell, a scrapbooker with her own YouTube channel, who loves making her own embellishments from small scraps of paper she stores in a cookie tin. I love this both because a cookie tin means she is far more controlled with the amount of paper scraps she has left (mine take up an entire basket) and it makes me hungry (mmm cookies).

Cookies aside, Glitter Girl delved into the scraps and used stamps, scissors, and punches to create the embellishments on this selfie page, but there are store-bought supplies in the mix too: enamel hearts, stickers, and a transparency sheet in addition to all the patterned paper. Come along for the adventure, won’t you?

It’s a lot of embellishment. It was very much a more-is-more feel to the workflow, but if that much embellishment puts you a little on edge, there are a few things to consider. First, I think you can add as much or as little as you like as long as you enjoy making it! Second, I really like a mix of very embellished pages in my album alongside pages that are very simple and 12×12 photo prints. I love that mix together and I feel it makes me look at everything with a closer eye when I flip from page to page in the book. (The book in scrapbook is so important to me that it’s very difficult for me to break it down to one page at a time, actually!) And third, if all else fails remember you are in control of your pages and you can learn by your reaction that you don’t want that much embellishment on your page! It’s definitely easier and cheaper to learn that lesson by watching rather than doing. Anyway, I love a little more is more when I’m in a paper groove.

While we’re on the subject of handmade embellishments from scraps, don’t forget to check out Tori’s YouTube Channel and her Scrap your Scraps series for more ideas on working with those little pieces of paper you love way too much to put in the recycling bin.

You can ask Glitter Girl a question any time by commenting here, on her YouTube videos, or in the Facebook chat group, Scrapbook like a Superhero.

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I’m so grateful for the positive response to new things here, and seeing the first few layouts for this week’s scrapbook a selfie challenge pop up on Facebook made me grin from ear to ear. (Don’t forget to link them up at the end of yesterday’s post so everyone can see!) Today it’s my turn, and this video has been a long while coming – it’s the page I made right around my birthday, which isn’t itself a problem until you realise my birthday was in October. Oh well!

I’ve always used a selfie of just myself for this page in the past but at the last minute I was happier including someone small in the photo as well. For those who initially balked at the idea of scrapbooking a self portrait, maybe that would help! Take a picture with your child, parent, significant other, pet, some random guy on the street… whatever makes it feel right for you!

This is an As It Happens video, so unlike Glitter Girl, I’m a bit extra rambly and indecisive, but it gets there in the end. I do as little editing as possible in the As It Happens episodes so you can see everything in pretty much real time and the only thing I plan before I start filming is some of the supplies I will use and the photo!

Speaking of supplies, this one features mostly things from my True Stories collection, which is hard for me to admit is basically a year old now. We released it in January 2015 but it didn’t ship until later in the spring, so I guess there’s a technicality if you have too much of it on your desk! It hasn’t been there a year, I promise! I’ve added some buttons over there on the right to online shops who carry my products, and you can still find True Stories if you see something you missed before but fancy now. In fact, it will probably be on sale. (Disclosure: Those boxes are affiliate links, which makes it possible to pay guest artists for the work they share here.)

There’s still plenty of time to snap a selfie and scrapbook it, so put on that lip gloss you save for special occasions, stand next to a window for beautiful light, and look up to the camera. Then get cutting and pasting and all things scrappy!

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Happy New Year! We’ve been out for our traditional New Year walk and yet somehow have become so practical that it included a stop for groceries. That’s thrilling trivia, I realise, but I tell you this because the important part is the cupboards were not entirely empty. This was not buying groceries in a panic to get something two hours after a regular time for lunch, but a stop to get what we needed for tomorrow and the day that follows. And that, dear friends, is a huge difference to life on the first day of this new year compared to 365 days ago.

I know twelve weeks of baking posts here was a bit off topic, but it started to get my mind set in a good place again: making, sharing, keeping a schedule. I don’t care that I didn’t win – I baked something for every one of the twelve challenges. I didn’t just start and get overwhelmed by the rest of life partway through.

More on topic, however, has been Journal your Christmas. All the years of this class, and this year was the first that I have filmed and shared the making of my entire book. It’s not quite finished yet (class finishes on the sixth) but there is a video for every day, and my album is more complete at this point than it has been in years. Again, it’s a turning point for making, sharing, keeping a schedule. Only this time it hasn’t been weekly efforts, but daily posts. And while there may have been a few nights when I really wasn’t sure if I could keep on top of everything, it has worked! It’s been an actual joy. I cannot begin to explain how happy this makes me feel.

I’ve never lost my love of pretty paper, but having a messy-from-working (as opposed to messy-from-stacking) desk this December has made me swoon. Cutting and pasting and stitching and stapling and stamping and layering and writing and painting… YES. YES TO ALL.

But I’m learning from this slow path back to productivity. I’m not announcing anything. No big packed schedule. No massive intentions with no wriggle room that lead me to tears and disappointment on a day that I can’t make things happen as I imagine. Instead: I am here. I am making stuff. I want to share.

That’s enough for a New Year declaration, right?

Oh. Wait. Okay.
I’ll announce one thing.

I hope 2016 is feeling positive for you too.

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I think you will love today’s guest project – I really do! I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a page made by Nancy Damiano that I didn’t love. Her style is so clean and crisp but detailed and nuanced. It’s just always a breath of fresh air to me. I miss working with this lady all the time – she was also a Garden Girl back in our Two Peas days – and I’m so happy she is able to join us here today. Please welcome Nancy! -Shimelle

For my layout I was really inspired by Shimelle’s Scrapbooking Colour Schemes with Pink layout. The first thing that caught my eye was the beautiful colour scheme. I love bold pops of colour and this layout delivers. I also like linear designs that feature repetition of a shape or element. The repeated hearts on Shimelle’s layout inspired the band of painted wood veneer featured on my page.

Let’s take a look at this tutorial on how to dress up plain wood veneer and create a bold band of repeated shapes:

It’s a lot easier than it looks isn’t it? Using supplies on hand like a stash of veneer shapes and acrylic paint can add dimension, style and a splash of colour to your layouts. Individually, the painted veneer may not look like much but take a look at how repetition adds a punch of wow to a plain background.

Adding a small stamped sentiment to a layout lends a nice handmade touch. The fuchsia ink provides a nice contrast to the white card stock.

The fun painted accents and colourful patterned paper are the perfect background for these photos from Disneyland. They tell the story of a whimsical, happy place from the start. This layout is the opener for my Disneyland album and showcases the ‘where’ and ‘who’ went. The heavily embellished page is a delightful way to begin this story.

If inked hearts inspired painted wood veneer, what’s your next step in this bit of creative Chinese Whispers? We’d love to see what you’re inspired to make today.

Nancy Damiano lives in New Jersey with her husband, son and a gaggle of nieces and nephews she adores. She has a passion for the color aqua, Disney, and anything paper + craft. She currently designs for Simple Stories, Scraptastic Kit Club and Scrapbook & Cards Today Magazine. You can find more of her work and life at her blog, Instagram and Pinterest. You can also find a lovely collection of process videos on her YouTube channel.

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Oh, 12×12 scrapbook pages! How I love thee! So much so that I made another straight away. This feels like a massive victory.

This time it’s a bit further from my comfort zone but hopefully not so far that it doesn’t look like my work. That was my aim, anyway! The difference is I just had one teeny, tiny photograph to scrapbook, but I still wanted it in my album that has 12×12 pages rather than in a smaller format like pocket pages, Project Life, mini book, or planner. I love 12×12. But I just had this tiny photo from my day out with Barbara and her daughter while they were in London, from a selfie taken with her phone and printed on the spot with tiny little printer that makes photo stickers – the Polaroid Zip with Zink ink. It’s very cute and fits in her handbag!

Again I’m working with the Mind the Scrap September kit, which they sent me to have some fun. (Check this post for another video and page, plus shopping details for the items in the kit.) I just added some red acrylic paint and some mint green mist for my finishing touches. I love it when something goes to plan like using that London map paper and managing to get the actual location for our day still showing on the page. Moments of small scrapping happiness are important, right?

I hope this still looks like my style! That was my aim, at any rate. And it makes me smile, which is always my aim these days. Happy pages for happy days is my creative mood at the moment!

Oh little corner of just a smidgen of embellishment. I was really tempted to add lots and lots more here and I held back. Whenever I placed more there just to look, it felt like that corner ended up heavier than the actual photo, so I opted to keep it ridiculously simple. I cannot begin to explain how difficult that was. I’m putting it in the album right now so I don’t go change my mind and ruin it all. not that I am prone to doing that or anything.

What have you tried lately that’s just a little out of your comfort zone? I’d love to hear – or see!

AND speaking of see… I’d love to see you IN PERSON! Next Friday (the 18th of September), join me in London at the Canary Wharf Spiegeltent for a lunchtime mini book workshop for just £6. Book your ticket here. Or if London doesn’t work for you, perhaps Barcelona is better? I’ll be teaching at Somos Scrap on Halloween weekend, along with Amy Tan of Amy Tangerine and Liz Kartchner of Dear Lizzy. ¡Estoy emocionado!

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