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

_{supplies: everything except the pearls and the tags is from Sassfras – a mix of Sweetly Smitten, Paper Crush and Mix & Mend, plus those grey letter stickers which I love so much it’s crazy.}

If I remember correctly, the first time I started drawing sketches for scrapbook pages was about a million eight or nine years ago when I worked on this ‘Use your Stash’ challenge for store customers. They were printed on index cards, so you could keep them in a recipe file, which was novel. And ‘Use your Stash’ seemed like a revolutionary phrase back then and now it’s more a mantra of the whole hobby. Funny how little things change!

But what hasn’t changed is how I work with a sketch. Way back then, I was a really linear scrapbooker. Straight lines. Barely any embellishment. I remember asking myself ‘would stitching on this layout be too much?’ when that was the only embellishment I planned on adding. Today, stitching would never be too much, even if I’d already added stickers and patterned paper and gems and so forth. So when I followed a sketch then, my page looked just like the sketch. Completely and totally – never, ever making a change.

I have a little secret to tell you about Kelly Purkey’s Sketchbook 3 class. I contributed a layout and when she gave me the sketch, I started making some changes. I was a little worried… her photos were angled, mine were straight. Her sketch had a grouping of papers in one spot; I had spread my grouping across the full page. I moved one of the page elements 90 degrees and added an extra area of embellishment. And although I liked the layout, I was really worried that when I sent the page to Kelly, she would think I had ignored too much of the sketch. But she said she liked the page and then I just waited to see how it would look with the other interpretations of that page. My face must have been a picture when I read her commentary: Shimelle stuck closely to the sketch… and to think I had been worried I had taken too much liberty!

So while some things change, others stay the same. If I follow a sketch, I just don’t go too far away from it. And this page follows that rule too: it started from this sketch challenge over at the Sassafras blog. That sketch caught my eye and made me wonder if a sketch that is quite square and streamlined could still work with lots of flowers and layers… and it gave me another chance to put the Foldies to use! (If you missed that last weekend, see this post for more info and a video.) The collection of blossoms below the title – with the big yellow flower – is a foldie accent; the floral pieces in the corners are cut from Sweetly Smitten patterned papers and layered with the matching stickers.

I think it’s just time I embrace that if I do follow a sketch, I’m really into the following part. And that’s okay, because the layout still looks like I made it… at least I think so! Curious though: do you really follow a sketch, just use it as a starting point then never look at it again or frankly can’t fathom starting a layout with a sketch at all? (If you do like a sketch, you can find all the weekly sketches from my blog here, in one place.)

I hope this week is treating you well. How did we get to Thursday already?

xlovesx

Comment [25]

_{Supplies: Butterfly stamp and patterned papers by Jenni Bowlin Studio, letter stickers by Sassafras and American Crafts, doilies by Little Yellow Bicycle, border punches by EK Success (small and large) and Martha Stewart Crafts and butterfly die by Sizzix.}

Lest you think I was exceedingly organised when I ordered those 691 photos a couple weeks back, I have to admit that part of that ordering frenzy was a case of clearing the decks. I found I actually had a bunch of photos uploaded that I had never printed… for quite some time. Like our honeymoon, and even some photos taken by friends and family at our wedding. So that works out well as something to break up all that kraft cardstock with the travel photos! What better to break it up than cupcakes? Exactly.

This week’s sketch has four photos and none of them are 4×6, shockingly! Three are cropped to 3×3 inches and the fourth shot is a larger print (this was an A4 print that I trimmed a bit), but you could substitute patterned paper here if you preferred. We had vintage cameras on all the tables at our wedding and this was a film shot taken with a camera older them I am… and I love the fade and the grain it produced. Just perfect for adding some journaling too – I used a precision pen to write right over the top.

I want to do a page just about the lovely friend who made all our 300+ cupcakes – Jackie, do you have a blog?! Seriously, she is amazing. And I have some photos of her all decked out at the wedding so that definitely needs to get in my album. Soon!

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 in the comments.

So many lovely layouts from last week that it was so difficult to choose! I stopped at nine… but they are all lovely.
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.
Click on any of those to see and read more and say hello.

Thank you to everybody who took part last week! Now it’s your turn – everyone is welcome! Upload your layout to a page gallery or your blog and link it up here to share. Happy scrapping!

xlovesx

Comment [12]

Sometimes it’s all about the outlook. Over the weekend, I was enjoying scrapping quickly, getting lots done and flitting to and from my desk as I mixed crafting in with all the other things that normally happen on a Saturday and Sunday in our little corner of the world. Choosing supplies helps me work quickly but it doesn’t always help me create my favourite pages. I always find if my outlook is to aim for speed, then I take the same shortcuts. It doesn’t mean the pages are bad… it just means I can look and know if I was working quickly or taking my time.

Then I came to this photo in the stack. Perhaps it’s a picture that could be overlooked – there’s nothing particularly vital in focus. It might be hard to recognise without knowing where I snapped that image. In a way, it’s nothing more than some neglected grass at the side of the road.

Except I remember taking that exact picture for a reason. For that tall grass grown to dried grain was something I very much remembered from growing up in the countryside. Of course that’s not what I called it then. I called it The Sticks. It’s only grown-up citygirl me who uses words like countryside. But for as many times as I have seen grain at the side of the road, it was not usually against a backdrop of sea and mountains. So that was what made me take the picture: capturing something familiar and something foreign, all in that little moment of scenery at the side of the road.

So yesterday I scrapped that photo. Same supplies still out on my desk but no need to rush. A change of outlook while I stayed put at my desk and didn’t mind if I pondered for ten minutes over which flower or which punch. Making this page made me quite happy indeed. And that’s always a good outlook anyway.

Two little notes: Today is sketch day and it shall be online later today (and it’s not a single photo layout). And all the weekend challenges are still open until this Sunday, so do check them out if you have crafting time this week.
Getting started (just comment to enter)
Challenge one (patterned paper as a background)
Challenge two (create a triangle of embellishments)
Challenge three (add a border between two photos)
Challenge four (scrapbook a photo that needs an explanation)
Challenge five (try a photo edit – with or without the tutorial included)
and my challenge for Two Peas (to create an embellishment with bits and pieces) is open until Sunday too. All the challenges have prizes, so enter as many as you like.

xlovesx

Comment [18]

When we were headed out of Laos and catching a plane to Hanoi, The Boy had this great idea to go via this old rickety bridge that a few people had mentioned and then catch a tuk-tuk to the airport from the other side. This was a lovely idea and I was actually quite excited about the bridge, because I love heights. Weird, I know. And the bridge truly was an adventure, as the footpath is in pretty bad condition and we crossed as school was getting out and dozens of children came running from the other side, despite it being very much a single-file bridge. But adventure accomplished and on we went.

Except there are not really any tourists on the other side of the bridge. So there are not really any tuk-tuks on the other side of the bridge. So we had to walk to the airport. It was only a few miles. And it was only something ridiculously hot. And at some point along the trek I may have said it was perhaps not his best decision that we should walk all this way, and as a compromise, he ended up carrying my stuff. So in this photo, you see everything both of us took for our fourteen week journey, with the only exception of the clothes I am wearing and the camera I used to take the picture. Right there in those two bags – that’s everything, right down to the book I was reading at the time.

Here is my share, and why it seemed so ridiculously hot. It was very cold that morning so I was wearing a long-sleeved shirt and a cardigan. By lunchtime it was baking but we’d already checked out of our accommodation, so I was kinda stuck in all those bulky layers. But there we go.

I promised I would share how I lived out of that one little bag for all that time, so here is the play-by-play on what I packed!

The Overview
This is my bag and all the major stuff that lived inside for the entire trip. At the top is my camera, with the Black Rapid camera strap, which I really recommend. It’s a shoulder strap rather than a neck strap, so it takes the weight off your neck and it keeps your camera at your hip so you can grab and shoot really easily. I also took a GorillaPod as a smaller and lighter alternative to my full-sized tripod.

Carry on to the right and there’s a pink microfibre towel – useful for budget accommodation that doesn’t include towels as well as water activities. Below that, the black thing that is hard to make out is a black pashmina – like a big scarf. Bought for £2 from a London street vendor right before we left. I was worried this would be a waste of space because it’s a bit bulky, but I am so glad to have taken it. It served as a belt, a blanket and an air filter as well as being useful when we hit the odd day of unexpectedly cold weather. And I loaned it to a few girls who arrived at various temples with their shoulders bare – tank tops and temples do not mix. Also at the top right corner, I had a book on the go for all of the trip. I started with one book and when I finished it, I would just find a used book store that did trades or I would trade it with another traveler. Worked perfectly, aside from when I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and really started to wish I was carrying a book that was smaller and thereby easier to pack!

Continuing clockwise, we each packed a silk sleeping bag liner even though we weren’t carrying sleeping bags. The liner was perfect for places that were cold or had too many mosquitos. And it weighs almost nothing. The pink thing is my rain jacket. For several weeks of our trip we had beautiful sunny weather and I started to think packing a rain jacket was a waste of space and money, but then we arrived in Bali where it did nothing but absolutely pour with rain the entire time we were there. Rain jacket – with a fitted hood – is a requirement, definitely.

Basic first-aid stuff included pain killers, stomach settlers, some bandages and some mild antibiotics, which we also took as anti-malarials for the part of our tour that went through mosquito trouble. We used everything we took but didn’t really need anything more, so that was just right.

The black rectangle is a small external hard-drive. We bought this along the way and used it to back up our photos as a just-in-case measure.

A red hairclip and a blue make-up bag – contents revealed later in this post! And my clear bag of liquids. Since we weren’t going to check any bags on any planes, we couldn’t take anything sharp nor any liquids over 100ml. I bought a bag and 100ml bottles from Muji, and that held shampoo, conditioner, perfume, toothpaste, lotion and sunblock.

Which brings us to that funny looking bag in the middle, which held all my clothes. While The Boy went with the option of three special shirts that would work for everything, be easy to wash and dry and wouldn’t wear out, I knew I would get sick of whatever I was repeatedly wearing and want to change it for something else, so I did that a few times, but the total contents of my clothing bag remained pretty consistent: two short-sleeved tops, one long-sleeved top, one cardigan, one pair of hiking trousers, two pairs of leggings and two skirts/dresses, basically. All that plus my pajamas and stuff would fit into this bag and then get seriously, seriously smooshed by pulling all the straps tight on the compression sack. Basically, without the compression sack, my clothes would have filled the entire backpack. But with the compression, they just took up the room you see here. I had never heard of these bags before but am now a total convert.

What’s not shown: whatever pair of shoes I wasn’t wearing – either sandals or Converse All-Stars. And hilariously, one of these because I cope well with neither disgusting public loos nor fifteen mile hikes in the middle of nowhere.

The Little Blue Bag of Looking Beautiful
Some girls can just stop wearing make-up when they travel, but I am not such a person. When I am in some place where I’m not settled, I can be really harsh on myself. I just feel I am in more control if I can pretend I have a lovely complexion even when I’m on the road. Plus, more layers of spf on my face are totally welcome. But I couldn’t take very much, so I narrowed it down to the contents of the little blue bag:
Eyeliner – the one thing I stopped wearing pretty quickly, as it was so hot it would run.
Mascara.
Powder.
Foundation – I am still in a funk because my favourite foundation was discontinued and I haven’t found one I like yet. I’m not singing the praises of this mousse stuff but that is what I wore, so there we go.
Eyeshadow – one little pot in the most neutral colour imaginable.
Lip balm – my favourite lip balm is actually called My Favorite Lip Balm. Hilarious.
Moisturizer.
Lip gloss.
Plus an emery board, a teeny box for keeping bobby pins and hair bands from going astray and the most high-tech of all brush/comb hair implements in the world. Yes, I got that free on an airplane. Yes, it is the only thing I used to style my (nearly waist-length) hair for the entire trip. Yes, I am very proud of that but no, I do not care to see that brush again for the rest of my life really!

What’s not shown: nothing really for this one. I did pick up one big hair clip at a market, and it’s in the first photo.

The ‘It would be nice to SEE you’ collection
Let’s just say I do not have 20/20 eyesight. I’m also a little paranoid at being without my glasses. So this is my little bit of extra gear to take that into account. At the far right is my spare pair of glasses. I actually carry these with me all the time, pretty much. Not just when I’m on the road. It’s just an older pair of glasses and they fall off less than my everyday pair, so they are good for more active days. But really I just carry them in case my regular glasses break. Even though in twenty years of wearing glasses, I’ve never had a pair break. I think it might just be a paranoia I developed from too much Harry Potter exposure.

I also have a pair of prescription sunglasses. I very rarely need them here in England and I actually bought them a few years ago for skiing, because the glare on the snow is harsh, and that’s why they are pink. But they still work for sun – just not as well as a pair of dark lenses – and I wear sunnies so infrequently that I just couldn’t budget a different pair. These were fine in the end. And also some contact lenses. Contacts and I don’t really get along, but they are more sensible for things that involve the sea or running or whatever. I use the daily lenses so I don’t have to worry about jars and solutions and stuff. I took a whole box of lenses but only used one strip of each (oh – my eyes can’t even agree on being equally blind, so I have different lenses for right and left).

What’s not shown: the other set of glasses were on my face. I didn’t have to pack them. If they weren’t on my face, I wouldn’t be able to find them to pack them anyway.

The paperwork pile
Of course a passport is required for a trip like this. I actually have to travel with two passports – my current passport and an older passport which has my visa that explains that I’m a UK resident and I’m allowed to stay here as long as I like. (I’ve been in the UK for twelve years as of this week, but I keep leaving the country too many days in a year to apply for my UK passport.) So there are two passports in my passport case – and mine have stayed in quite good condition with a case. The Boy doesn’t carry a case and his passport looks like it’s been through the wringer!

The yellow booklet is a vaccination record. Partly for our own medical info so we would be able to show a doctor outside our own medical system in case of an emergency, and partly to show at immigration in some countries. We’ve now been through areas that have yellow fever, and some countries won’t let you in if you’ve been exposed but not vaccinated. But we had those jabs before we left, so we can just show the yellow book if needed. (By the way, vaccinations are probably the only thing that made us not be able to leave immediately – it’s a three to four week process to get the basics, so make sure you plan those ahead of time.)

And I packed a small moleskine notebook and an American Crafts precision pen (of course). I added all the contact details for everyone along our journey and a list of addresses for sending postcards so we wouldn’t have any extra bits of paper but we would also have a hard copy with some emergency numbers in case our phones or computer were stolen or something. Then I still had plenty of space to take notes along the journey and collect a few stamps, stickers and ticket stubs.

What’s not shown: my driver’s license and debit card, which were on me at all times via zip pockets in my clothes.

…And that is it. Since there were two of us, we split some things, like I carried the camera and the hard drive, but he carried a laptop and my other lens. He carried a Kindle with all our travel guides so we wouldn’t need paper copies. But otherwise, it was pretty much the same!

We did manage to pass the dress code at a few nice restaurants (I think I got away with more casual shoes because I could wear a dress) and we didn’t have any trouble with theft. We had to refuel a few consumables, namely shampoo, toothpaste and sunblock, but those things were easy to purchase everywhere. I may have even bought hair dye once or twice.

I had never packed lightly in my whole life so I didn’t really think this would work, but it did… and I was very grateful for that every time I saw someone trying to get somewhere with multiple wheeled suitcases in the middle of the jungle, the desert or the beach. I had days when I struggled with missing nail varnish and hair dryers, but really that was pretty minimal. It was much easier to just enjoy the moment without having to worry about having so much stuff to carry, plus it was always fast to pack and we couldn’t accidentally leave something in the hotel room, because we would notice any gap in our bags!

And just last week, the dress I posted home from Singapore in January? It arrived here in London when I had totally given up hope! When I sent it home I was positively sick of wearing it every second day, but now I’m thinking it looks quite cute again. Amazing what a little time apart can do.

For the record: there is no way I could pack this lightly for anything crafty. I carried this one bag for more than three months. Last weekend I took this, a suitcase and two shoulder bags on the train to go away for three days. One bag with these essentials and everything else? Craft supplies. Well, craft supplies and cake.

Priorities.

xlovesx

Comment [43]

After all that kraft cardstock over the weekend, I think I need to do a few non-trip pages to embrace some colour. But I have this page to share with you today, and it’s not so much about colour. It’s kraft. At least it’s kraft with a liberal addition of red paint. It’s a start.

It also features something else that I can’t fully explain: photos with somewhat abstract cropping.

Abstract cropping. Yes, that’s what I’m going to go with. It sounds a lot better than ‘chopping people’s heads off in pictures’. Abstract cropping it is then.

_{layout ©twopeasinabucket.com. Click here for supplies and details.}
I vaguely remember composing the shot like this so I could journal about The Boy’s shoes. But I didn’t journal about that here. And I think I may have already journaled about his crazy footwear on another layout. Perhaps I should check. Do you ever do that? Forget what you have and have not included in your scrapbooks? Sometimes I think it’s quite funny to tell the same story on two separate pages and then realise that the way the story flows is a little different depending on the mood in which it was written. Instead, the journaling here is about how amazing I found it that the forest goes right up to the beach. You’re hiking through the woods (going on a bush walk!) and then suddenly there’s a white sand beach. It amazed me a bit. Of course, it also made me worry a bit about smoke monsters and time travel and well, that’s a discussion for a different day. I’m not sure I’m quite ready to write the journaling for the page entitled Why I still feel cheated after six years of Lost. It’s decidedly easier to scrapbook about lovely days at pretty beaches, even if they seem to come from nowhere.

And time for a giveaway winner! Many thanks to Sparklehen for offering a set of adorable prints for a lucky reader. She’s also offering a free print when you purchase any two, so please visit her shop and have a look at her lovely goodies – perfect for yourself or for giving as gifts!

And our lucky winner is…

Congratulations Sarah! Please email me (shimelle at gmail dot com) with your posting address so Heather can send you your Sparklehen prize!

Have a lovely week, everyone! Any good plans?

xlovesx

Comment [3]

Here’s my final challenge, and it’s my contribution to all the NSD celebrations at Two Peas this weekend. Build an embellishment out of bits and pieces. I think this might be my favourite way to scrapbook, and it feels like scrapbooking in a traditional sense – a bit of this, a bit of that, put it all together to make something lovely. Yep, sounds like scrapbooking to me. You can find the challenge on the Garden Girl blog here.

As this post goes live, I’m also hosting a chat on the Two Peas message board for an hour or so. Find us here and say hello! UK girls, you should definitely pop by – I think I may be a bit lonely in the chat room with so many of the American scrappers out for lovely Mother’s Day lunches and such.

All of the challenges here and at Two Peas are open till next Sunday, so there’s still time to join in, even if you were busy this weekend. There are also two giveaways here that only take a comment to enter. This one closes today so go comment now! And this one is open until next Sunday.

It’s been so lovely to scrap with all of you this weekend! I finished eight layouts and think it’s probably time I tidy up my scrapdesk. How about you?

xlovesx

PS: The big NSD sale at Two Peas closes tonight, so don’t forget to finish your order if you want to pick something in the sale!

Comment [10]

And so my weekend-long scrapping spree continues… with so very much kraft cardstock!

Jamie’s second challenge is all about questions and answers. I was stumped for a bit, I have to admit! It led me to interviewing someone for journaling and well, there wasn’t an obvious candidate around for an interesting interview. Back to the drawing board and a flip through some pictures and I realised there is one question that keeps coming up, and that would work for a page. And actually be something quite sweet to record now, because who knows where the future will take us.

The Boy grew up in several different countries and generally thinks it was a pretty amazing and defining experience. So although I already live in another country than where I started, he looks at new countries with the question Could we live here?, which can be funny. Sometimes we agree. Sometimes we disagree. But of the dozen countries we visited, there is one that we agree we could happily call home for a few years, should the opportunity present itself. And that was New Zealand. It’s our answer to all the ‘Where was best?’, ‘Where do you want to go back to?’ and ‘Where should you have stayed longer?’ questions.

And then for something completely different… the next challenge is scraplift a Garden Girl. I chose this layout by Chelsea Parsons. Chelsea’s style is so different to mine, but I always love her pages – both paper and digital. So I gave it the old What Would Chelsea Do try. I tried her technique for the background paper and rubbed lots of red chalk over a sheet of kraft dotted swiss. I think the background is lovely fun but then I had a hard time getting it to look right with my patterned papers and such. I wished I had started with a big photo like Chelsea did! But I used a few other things that come up in Chelsea’s albums, like lots of tape and stitching. And then splashed it with a bunch of white paint. I’m not sure if our styles work together or not! But it was fun to try all those new things… and I have plenty of photos in front of that wall, so a bit of variety is a great thing.

Three challenges down, and there are currently four more on the Garden Girl blog, plus I will be setting my own challenge at the start of my chat session today. So there is plenty to pick from, all week long!

xlovesx

Comment [7]

Instead of just yesterday, Two Peas is celebrating Scrapbooking Day for a full weekend, so today I’m focusing on the challenges there. Just like the challenges I set here yesterday, all the Two Peas challenges are open until next Sunday the 15th of May and there are prizes to be won, of course! So you’re invited to join in. I’m hosting a chat there today – 8pm UK time, 2pm US Central time – and I’ll post a direct link here when that starts so you can come say hello!

If you are not a member at Two Peas, create an account and join in the fun. They have a great community and so much inspiration. Plus fabulous shopping! But you can join in the community without shopping if you need to save your pennies. One tip for creating an account if you don’t live in the US: the registration process asks for your address, including a state. Of course, not every country has states, but if you leave it blank, sometimes it says your address isn’t valid. Type XX in that box if you don’t have a state, and that usually does the trick! You don’t have to give any payment details to join and you can choose which newsletters you would like to receive by email.

Jamie is the community manager at Two Peas and she manages all the cool things like events and also takes care of the message boards, the design team and all the fun stuff that goes on at Two Peas. On Friday, she set three challenges to kick off the weekend. The first challenge is all about folding. Include some folded element on your layout! That means you could even do this month’s 4×6 Photo Love and enter for both challenges if you fancied following that project this week! Or of course, anything else that involves folding… so I’ve pulled out the new Sassafras Foldies. I love these embellishments but I don’t think their full potential is obvious when you see them on the sheet, so here’s a quick video that lets you see how they work.

Really loving the foldies on my pages and hoping Sassafras continue to make them with their new collections. (They are showing a new sheet in their Sunshine Broadcast collection that will hit stores soon, so I think it’s a good sign!) Michelle used them here in her guest post last month too.

So that’s one challenge done for the Two Peas weekend event… now I’m on to challenge two – Questions and Answers – and hoping I can come up with something clever!

I hope you’re having a lovely Sunday!

xlovesx

Comment [5]