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

Throughout this weekend I’ve loved seeing the comments come up in contrast to what I was reading here just a year or two ago. It wasn’t that long ago that I would suggest mixing manufacturers on a layout and there would be sheer panic in the comment section! But now it’s very much routine and oh-so-easy, it would seem. That has made me smile a great deal.

This challenge may be easy, but you need to follow it carefully. Choose two patterned papers with contrasting designs – things that are obviously very different. Chevron and doodles, hearts and stripes, sunshines and polka dots… just make sure they are very different types of patterns. Then use them to create the background of your page: two-thirds one pattern, one-third the other pattern.

Whether those thirds end up horizontal or vertical is up to you – as is the rest of the design! Keep it simple or layer it up – totally up to you!

If you’re looking for more inspiration to get the most from your patterned paper collection, you might want to check out Pretty Paper Party, which is available in a self-paced format at any time.

To enter this challenge, create a new page with two contrasting paper designs in a two-thirds/one-third design. Upload your project to your blog or a page gallery and share a link here! Entries close at the end of next weekend.

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These days I film about one in every five layouts I create, so in theory I share so very much in terms of how I create a scrapbook page from start to finish. But of course, editing is also part of that process and I guarantee the vast majority of my pages do not go from that very first spark of an idea to completed page in under twenty minutes. With each video I edit, I have to choose which things are worth including and which steps I should just gloss over. It’s a funny little game, because with each video there is someone out there who is brand new to my work and could benefit from something I have explained before – like why I ink edges or what little gizmo I use for doing so. But then again some of you have already seen every video I’ve made and I don’t want to bore you with the same information time and time again. Who knew it turning on the camera would make me think so hard?

So this week I was intrigued as to how changing the medium would change the explanation of how I create a scrapbook page from start to finish. Instead of showing that process via a step-by-step video, I joined three other scrappers (and one producer) to discuss how a specific page came to fruition. No visuals other than the four layouts themselves: just a conversation. On this episode of the Paperclipping Roundtable…

(Dina Wakley and I were the guests and hosts Noell Hyman and Nancy Nally also joined in to share their scrapbooking process. You can see the specific discussion of this particular episode here.)

So now I turn that same question over to you: how do you make a scrapbook page from start to finish? If your process is simple enough that you want to explain it in a comment, fabulous! If it’s something you want to think more about and illustrate with an image or two, you might want to blog it and leave a link. Either is fine. You could even put together your own video or podcast to show us or tell us about how you make a page! But I would love to hear how a page comes together for you… feel free to talk generally or pick a specific layout like we did for our discussion. (Bonus points if your process includes supplies speaking to you!)

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When I saw the bold background of hearts across this layout by Jill Sprott, I thought she had stamped one design over and over then filled in a few of the hearts with markers. I thought this was a great idea and made a mental note to look for a stamp in my own collection that could be repeated in a similar way. And then when I scrolled down to the supplies, I felt really silly. It’s not stamped: it’s a printed and flocked transparency by Fancy Pants. And I only felt silly because I have actually held that very transparency in my hands, yet somehow I just didn’t recognise it on Jill’s page at all. Either way, I love the look. (And I’m still going to try the repeated stamp idea sometime soon.)

_{layout ©twopeasinabucket.com.}

So here’s a challenge for those of you who like something a bit more prescriptive: scrapbook two photos on a bold background! You can scraplift Jill’s page directly or you can create an original design. As long as there are two pictures and the background is something that isn’t fading into the distance, you’re onto a win!

Your background can be a bold patterned paper, a bright and bold colour, a stamped design… just nothing pale and minimal!

See more of Jill’s work on her blog and in her page gallery.

To enter this challenge, create a new project inspired by Jill’s layout, with a bold background and two photos. The rest of the design is up to you! Whenever you’re finished, leave a link to your project to enter this challenge. Entries close at the end of next weekend.

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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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