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

This weekend’s winner is Joy who wins herself the stamp prize from Little Musings.
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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Fancy a series of scrapbooking challenges? With three prize winners each week? But no worry that you have to participate every single week or anything else stressful? Then Play Along with Scrap Factor is just for you! While our Scrap Factor contestants have five days to create their layout in response to each week’s challenge, everyone else is invited to spend the whole week, use the contestants’ gallery for inspiration perhaps and just generally have fun with each challenge.

Each week, the three mentors from the teams (that’s Mary Anne and Dolly plus me!) will each choose a prize winner for our category – paper, hybrid or digital. All you have to do to enter is create your page in response to the week’s challenge and upload it to UKScrappers by Sunday night. When you upload a page, you’ll see a special gallery called Play along with Scrap Factor and that’s the gallery you want!

This week’s challenge is based on a colour scheme including sky blue, two shades of blossom pink and two spring greens. You can see all the fab pages created by the contestants here and if you have time to scrapbook this weekend, you could still enter this week’s play along contest.

Or you can jump ahead to next week’s challenge – taking inspiration from advertising. Choose a print ad (from a magazine, poster, leaflet, etc) and use it as the visual inspiration for your next scrapbook page. Our contestants have been busy with that challenge this week and their pages will go on display on Monday when voting opens for the week.

Remember, there’s a prize each week for playing along – one for a paper page, one for a hybrid page and one for a digital page! So all kinds of scrapbooking are welcome, and as you can only win once throughout the challenge series, there are plenty of prizes to go around! We’d love for you to join in with Scrap Factor this spring.

xlovesx

PS: Don’t forget to enter this week’s giveaway before Sunday night – that just takes a comment to enter!

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This weekend’s giveaway comes from SJ at Little Musings.

Little Musings is a digital and clear stamp store where all the musings from SJ’s mind end up as cute digital stamps for you to use on your craft projects!
She is offering you a three part prize – one of the new angel stamps she has designed, a set of Birthday themed stamps (which sold out on QVC recently) and also your choice of digital product from her store.

To enter, leave a comment on this post about something you often “muse” over.

Entries close at midnight Sunday (UK time) and the winner will be posted Monday night, so be sure to check back and see if this was your lucky weekend!

xlovesx

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I may have tricked a few of you with this week’s sketch. At Two Peas, a new garden of pages from the design team goes live each Monday and I often base the week’s sketch on my pages there. So maybe you were thinking it would look a little like this. But as it’s Easter this Sunday, it seemed the right moment to grab something a little different! This page features Hipstamatic photos from last Easter, and I figured the five-small-square-photos option would make for something a little unexpected in this week’s sketch.

The layers of the sketch are relatively simple and make it a good candidate for a patterned background with a cluster of colour. You can even make this layout from scraps and leftovers. It also gives you plenty of space to really work the title, if you want to try something lovely with lettering! The sketch includes five small, square photos, but you can change this to suit something else, of course! It could even work with a single panoramic shot replacing the row of five pictures.

I love the pages posted from last week’s sketch! Here are a dozen of those scrapbook pages. Click any of these to see them in more detail and say hello to these scrappers!
Top row, L to R: one, two, three, four.
Middle row, L to R: five, six, seven, eight.
Bottom row, L to R: nine, ten, eleven and twelve.
Sorry about the problem with these links – somehow I had them in the reverse order! But they go to the right place now. So sorry for the mistake.

As always, the weekly sketch is a no-stress challenge that’s just for fun! If you find this sketch useful and create something with it, I’d love for you to leave a link in the comments! And while we’re very Easter themed today, I hope you have a lovely holiday weekend!

xlovesx

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I love the first day of a new class. It’s also somewhat insane, because everything tends to happen at once, and all the technical stuff comes into play so there’s editing email addresses and resetting passwords and helping people get my messages out of their junk mail folder. But by now I have a bit of a system for everything so it doesn’t outweigh the amazing stuff that happens on day one. Just like the first day of school when everyone has energy and puts their best foot forward. I love seeing the results of day one appear on our class board and for this class that means it has hit the blogosphere too. Today my Google Reader has popped up plenty of entries that relate to our first prompt, so that has made me smile so very much.

I also love that planning and researching and writing a class also gives me that back to school energy – just like lesson planning did when I was teaching. So many teachers dislike lesson planning and prefer to teach something that is already outlined, but devising new ways to present material was one of my very favourite parts of the job. Every once in a while I still get a chance to write academic curriculum and I still love it! So in writing the new class, I also have new things I want to share here, new pictures I want to take, new videos I want to make and so forth. Everything in a creative circle.

It’s also made me curious about you and why you happen to be reading this. That note over there to the top right (you know, that stuff you can’t see if you’re reading this through a blog reader – so jump over for a minute) makes it pretty clear I’m not ashamed to call myself a scrapbooker. It creates conversations that are always interesting, for sure! I’ve learned there are so many ways to explain what it means. So I’m curious… how would you define yourself, oh blog reader? Even if you’re reading there quietly and don’t really go in for leaving a comment, I’d love for you to click and let me know this tiny bit about you. (Again, you won’t see this in most readers, so click over just this once. Thanks!)

Have a fabulous week!

xlovesx

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This weekend’s winner is Laura Y, who wins a place for herself and a friend on the new online class, Beyond Blogging For Scrapbookers. Class started today but you can join at any time and have permanent access to the materials. We would love for you to join us on this adventure!

Please email me (shimelle at gmail dot com) to claim your prize, and don’t forget your friend’s email 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’s giveaway is a class place for you and a friend of your choice on the brand new online class Beyond Blogging for Scrapbookers, which starts on Monday! In fact, I’ll throw in two passes for the first class Blogging for Scrapbookers so you’ll have all the reference material.

And don’t worry: if you’ve already signed up for Beyond Blogging and your comment is selected to win, I’ll send you a full refund – so you don’t need to wait and see if you won!

To enter, leave a comment on this post with the name of a blog you really love! It doesn’t have to be about scrapbooking – any blog you love to read!

Entries close at midnight Sunday (UK time) and the winner will be posted Monday night, so be sure to check back and see if this was your lucky weekend! Make sure you leave a valid email address as class starts Monday morning so I’ll get you added to the class before the post goes live here to announce the winner.

Good luck!

xlovesx

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Today I’m thrilled to welcome Michelle Clement to shimelle.com to share five beautiful ideas with a brand-new paper line. I hope you’re ready to get crafty, because all I wanted to do when I saw these projects was start cutting, pasting and stitching!

Lately, floral and vintage-inspired scrapbook goodies have been my muse! I decided to focus on one of Sassafras Lass’ newest paper collections, Sweetly Smitten, and five cute and wonderful ways you can use it on your projects! I contributed designs to this lovely floral-full paper line in conjunction with Sassafras, so I can tell you firsthand that there’s lots of love, handstitched details, and even a few doilies in there to give your projects lots of character as you work with the super-cute paper, stickers, and dimensional ‘foldies’. Here we go!

Use Stickers as a Background
I love love love me some pretty paper, but the ephemera-inspired stickers in this collection were just calling out to me to make a little collage with them as a background, instead! (There’s a cute little ‘memory star’ certificate, a vintage button card, and a few cute lined journalling spots that lent really well to a quick and easy collage!) No need to worry about cutting and gluing for this collage, though – just stick them down onto your cardstock, overlapping! Super easy-peasy, and it gives a layered look in a flash – to make a few of the stickers a little more dimensional on my page, I stuck them onto a thin white computer paper and trimmed around the edges, first, and then stuck them on.

Make it Masculine
Lots of times, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with the ‘girlyness’ of a collection and miss seeing how versatile it really is! And believe me, this one is suuuper girly, so it’s easy to see just that. But can you still use it if you don’t have girls to scrapbook about? If you only have three boys or mister husband, or if you just don’t like flowers? Of course!

The stickers and papers have some beautiful masculine details to them – you just have to look past the flowers to see! The simple blue polka dot makes for a great masculine background paper, and the lined paper (even though it’s sewn) is a perfect neutral paper. There are lots of neutral and masculine stickers, too (the button card, the lined journalling tag, the stars, etc.) – and after collecting the boy-friendly bits from the collection, I added a teeny bit of orange and brown in, too, to set off the blue & yellow, and there you go! Boy-friendly!

Stitch the Details
If you’ve peeked at the details on the stickers and paper of Sweetly Smitten, you’ll see lots of hand-stitching already there. When you’re in a pinch and want to make a quick page – awesome! The handmade touches are done and you can just put them right on the page!

But if you’re feeling a little more crafty and have a moment to add a little ‘something extra’, try stitching your own details in – it works really well with the feel of things! For the layered flowers on my banner triangle, I cut them out of patterned paper, pierced some holes with my needle in the petals and leaves, and used embroidery floss to add a special little bit of dimension to them.

Layer it Up
There’s nothing I love more than layers on my pages (you could say I go a little crazy with it, sometimes…lol). Sweetly Smitten has tons of teeny little stickers that layer well together, and the new foldies that coordinate make layering even easier! They’re die cut, so you simply poke out the foldie you want, fold it where indicated, and then stick it onto your page using foam squares or another dimensional adhesive! So easy!

I also used multiple stickers to add dimension to this card – I stuck them onto plain white computer paper and just trimmed around the edges before adhering them with foam squares.

Paint or Dye It
This is something I do to nearly everything I work on, but for this card I decided to use one of the scallop sticker ‘extras’ (the part that was left on the sticker sheet after I used the scallop sticker) as a mask for some walnut ink. I stuck it onto my patterned paper and used a brush to paint walnut ink on the right side of the sticker ‘mask’. Once it was dry, I peeled off the mask and had a super-cute scallop dyed area with some of the patterned paper details still showing through! I also splattered a little bit of paint around for the finishing touch.

I hope you’re inspired to play with this lovely paper collection & scrapbook a bit, now! I had a blast both designing the papers & stickers and scrapbooking with them, myself – it’s so much fun! :) Thanks for having me share it with your readers, Shimelle!

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Michelle Clement is a 26-year old artist, and lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada. She works in children’s tv animation, and also freelance designs – she’s currently working on scrapbook paper collections for Sassafras Lass, as well as her shop-of-cute-things, Bubbly Shnooks. She loves living close to the ocean, getting her hands crafty in everything from scrapbooking to crocheting to sewing, and also enjoys summer jaunts out in the sun, like camping and napping on a cozy blanket. She has a weak spot for singer-songwriters, acoustic songs, hammocks, cinnamon dolce lattes, handprinted graphic tees, elastic belts, cardigans, thrift shops, floral linens, yellow, and anything octopus! You can find her daily ramblings and crafty adventures over on her blog, Scissor Quirk.

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