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

We have two winners for you today!

The first goes to Kitty Scrapper who wins the £100 credit from Roomorama!

Our second lucky winner is Margaret who wins a Haven goodie pack from Jenni Bowlin

Well done ladies! 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.

Have a great week!

xlovesx

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This weekend Roomorama are giving away 100 pounds of Roomorama credit for a stay anywhere in the world!
If you’re visiting London, for example, stay in this adorable room in stylish Shoreditch or search Roomorama for a selection of properties to find one that’s just your style. You don’t have to be an existing member of Roomorama, and there is no expiration date for the vouchers.

Roomorama is about living local and savouring the little things that make a city special. Forget the cookie-cutter hotels, and instead live it up in a historic London townhouse, an artsy New York loft, a gorgeous Cape Town beach pad, or a luxurious Balinese villa. Pick from 20,000 properties in 320 destinations worldwide, and have a peace of mind with Roomorama’s secure payment system and impeccable customer service. Best of all, insider-digs and discounts, and access to cool events, are all part of the deal. Happy travels!

To enter, just leave a comment on this post telling us how you would decorate your home for an out-of-town visitor?

Entries close at midnight Sunday UK time and the winner will be posted Monday evening, so be sure to check back to see if it’s your lucky day!

Good luck!

xlovesx

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I have a terrible secret to tell you. You’ve never noticed. I’ve kept it hidden all this time and now I’m ready to come clean and tell you.

I’m rather partial to scrapbooking with butterflies.

Oh. I guess it really wasn’t a secret after all. In fact, it’s so much not a secret that Two Peas in a Bucket is throwing a special one-day sale to say thank you to shimelle.com readers. And what did we come up with? Mark down the butterflies!

So today only (Wednesday, 20th July 2011), butterflies are on sale here. And that’s hundreds of products! Papers, punches, stamps, stickers – you name it, they’ve put a butterfly on it. So today is the day to stock up and save. You don’t need a special code, just click here to go to the sale and check out when you’re ready! Be ready before midnight central time. If you spend more than $50 (on any physical product – not just butterflies!), you can get free US shipping as well with code YQTUVC.

A little something else you might not know… for real this time. When you shop at Two Peas via a link here, you help support all the extra fun stuff on the blog. As a Two Peas affiliate, I make a small percentage for sales I send their way (when you click). That’s pretty common practice in linking to stores online, but since I first became a Two Peas affiliate, I have always taken those funds and put them back into the shimelle.com community. It pays for prizes, postage for giveaways, special guests and weekend crop events. I love that I can send it right back into this circle of readers. I hope you like that idea too.

Thanks Two Peas for the special sale and thank you to all of you who support this little site of mine!

xlovesx

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The Haven collection was a mid-season release so it’s already in stores… and it’s ready to give away! Jenni Bowlin Studio have provided a lovely Haven prize pack to a lucky reader. *Leave a comment on this post anytime before Midnight UK time Friday 22nd July 2011.

That page in the middle of the photo is one of my favourite new things in Jenni’s lines – an accent sheet. It includes the cute journaling cards she’s always made, but including them on printed cardstock makes them more affordable plus you get all the other coordinating stuff to go with it – like all those green labels plus some border strips. And it’s double-sided with a polka-dot pattern on the back, so if there’s anything you won’t use, you can use the scraps so easily.

I have to show you this project because it is partly made by The Boy! He is slightly addicted to Pinterest, despite not having an account, and saw a pin with gifts wrapped and stamped. Next thing I knew, he was wrapping a father’s day gift for his dad and searching through my letter stamps. So he did the wrapping and I used those green labels from Haven to create the card to match.

I know Jenni really loves the versatility of the thinner, single-sided papers of the older collections but I adore the cardstock weight she uses now. It takes paint just perfectly!

On another note, I guest posted on Ali’s blog today and you can read (and watch) that here. I will probably talk more about that everyday adventure idea soon. So happy that it seems to have resonated with some of you today!

Don’t forget – comment on this post to be entered to win a prize pack of Haven goodies from Jenni Bowlin! (Thanks, Jenni!)

xlovesx

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Congratulations to Tracey – her name came out of the hat for all the entries in the latest giveaway and she wins a place for herself and one for a friend in Explore, the new class. If you’re still considering Explore, you can sign up at any time, but please know I don’t have future plans to run it again live. I prefer to offer new classes and only repeat the two seasonal classes each year – it’s most fun that way! So if you want the live experience, go ahead and join us!

And a little heads up: this week will be a bit different around here! I’ll be reporting from CHA – the trade show where manufacturers of scrapbooking and other craft supplies release all their new collections for the next six months. So stay tuned for plenty of show photos and I’ll keep my eye out for what new things look like must-haves. But then there’s some other very cool stuff in the mix:
…a special giveaway from Jenni Bowlin Studio on Tuesday,
…a very different type of giveaway from Friday, and
…a special offer at Two Peas in a Bucket just for shimelle.com readers on Wednesday!
If you want to partake in that extra discount, you can start shopping now and have your bucket at the ready! But it’s only on Wednesday, so don’t miss out. You can check out their huge summer sale here.

So… with only a few hours left until the floor opens at the show, are there any companies you’re excited to see? Tell me which booth you would want me to check out first!

xlovesx

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It’s Thursday today. Somehow Wednesday seemed to completely disappear from my life this week. I’m not sure how that happened, other than spending most of the hours driving to a school prom, photographing a school prom and driving home from said school prom. Except we don’t have a car anymore so part of that time was interesting process of walking to the next town to pick up a car I can drive. Because although I can steer an elephant, I cannot drive a manual transmission.

True story.
Apologies if you now think less of me as clearly everyone cool should know how to drive a stick-shift, but I have tried to learn three times and each time I have decided I would just be a terrible driver with all that extra stuff to remember. I figure there is enough unpredictable stuff out there on the road that I want as few unknown variables behind the wheel as possible. And while The Boy can drive a car that lives at the end of our road, I have to journey to the nearest available automatic. Not that you really need to know any of this. I just somehow got onto this topic and I’m a bit unsure how to get to scrapbooking now so I’m just going to put the next image here and we’ll all quietly act like that was a seamless textual transition, okay?

This week’s sketch features three photos on three boxes and that means it a bit of a variation of March’s 4×6 Photo Love, but this time the pictures are smaller and there’s nothing hidden on my layout. On my page, I tried moving things around a bit and making the design a bit less like a grid. Now I’m thinking I’d like to try a second version and keep it just like the sketch, so that may appear here soon.

The red and green colour scheme is a little unpredictable, but those photos are actually from Christmas day, so I wanted to do something a little holiday-ish without going over the top with Christmas embellishments. I tell you that because The Boy looked at this layout and immediately asked, ‘Why did you make it look all Christmas-coloured?’ and when I reminded him we spent Christmas with elephants, he hadn’t remembered that. Today’s validation for why I scrapbook.

So no matter what your theme, colours or preference for nicely lined-up grids or haphazard boxes, I’d love to see what you create from this sketch!

As always, the weekly sketch is no-stress and just for fun! If you use it, I’d love to see, so please leave a link so we can see!

There were so many great pages submitted from the sketch last week. I loved them all! These are nine of my favourites, each with a little twist on how they adapted the sketch to work for their choice of pictures and and design. Click on the corresponding link to see each page in more detail and read about how these pages came to be.
Top row, L to R: one, two, three.
Middle row, L to R: four, five, six.
Bottom row, L to R: seven, eight and nine.
Thank you to everyone who joined in last week!

xlovesx

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For the first time in a while, I’m back to blogging from my very own living room in my very own chair at a respectable hour of the day. Quite novel, really. After my week in Portland, I stopped in Kansas City to visit family (as well as more work stuff) and found there was quite the collection of old Polaroids to go along with that first birthday photo I scrapped not all that long ago. It turns out my grandfather was pretty much in love with instant film for several years, as there are Polaroid images galore to document my life from ages one to five. Especially Christmas. I seriously have a Polaroid with me on Santa’s lap. I am completely in awe of its coolness.

So this is the very first thing I have scrapped upon unpacking all my craft gear from my suitcase. I wanted to share this with you yesterday but I was so stuck for a title that it sat on my desk overnight. This morning I woke up realising what I remember most about this place – that it felt glamorous to go to the lake and stay in a house so close to the water. Let me explain why…

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the geography of the individual states, if you draw an asterisk over the lower forty-eight, I come from the middle of the asterisk. That big purple rectangle in the middle that is Kansas? It is pretty much as landlocked as you can get. So beaches were not really something I grew up with. That big glamorous lake in the Polaroid? It’s in the next door state of Missouri, so a lake is still the only kind of beach on offer. And even then, this isn’t a natural lake. The Lake of the Ozarks didn’t even exist until it opened in 1931. So you can understand the midwestern spirit of a beachfront – let’s make a giant lake and be far more concerned with lots of land along the edge than how much open space exists in the middle, and as a result there will be a seemingly endless amount of beachfront (okay, lakefront) property.

One little work adventure on this trip took me not all that far from this lake, and I have to say it hasn’t really changed all that much since way back when. Lots of old pick-up trucks and small family-owned stores and the occasional hitchhiker at the side of the highway. I’m guessing there are many Polaroid cameras in closets of almost every house.

xlovesx

PS: My new class, Explore starts next Monday – sign up and join us in the fun!

_{Map image courtesy of Graphics Fairy.}

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This weekend’s winner is Chipper who wins the cutest flower cabochon ring from Josephines Jewellery.
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.

Have a great week!

xlovesx

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