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

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This week, Glitter Girl’s scrapbooking challenge was something very specific: how can we embellish pages without using premade embellishments that can quickly add up if you’re scrapping on a budget or just don’t like their look? And the answer is my staple product: patterned paper!

In this week’s video, Glitter Girl shares two layouts: one that makes an embellishment similar to something you might buy and another that depends more on the mix of colour and pattern in paper scraps than any specific embellishments added on top.

This video starts with a look at the new collections from LilyBee – so lovely! Layout one starts at 5:28 and layout two at 14:59, if you’re stuck for time. You can find all the new LilyBee products (plus the new Thickers I used and a variety of brads that would work for pinwheels) here. Just scroll down to the bottom of that page to shop!

While my reload of kraft cardstock is in transit, I’ve switched back to some older travel photos, including these two shots from our honeymoon. I’m already stunned at how young we look in the pictures! I don’t remember us getting any older in the last few years, so how on earth could this have happened? Or perhaps everyone just looks young on honeymoon. Do you think it would work if we booked a trip now and just called it a honeymoon? I am totally willing to do this as research for all scrappy girls out there who would appreciate looking extra young and happy in their photos.

Does this page format look a little familiar? That’s because it started in the same place as this page, but I wanted to take the challenge of creating a similar design but without any stamps or premade embellishments that drove up the ‘price’ of making the layout. Stamps and punches are tricky when it comes to questions like this. They are far more expensive than patterned paper and a fair bit more expensive than most premade embellishment packs, but they can be used so many times that their price per page can end up so much less. Seems like the best plan is to have a few of these little investments but to be very sure it’s the shape or design you will love to use on plenty of projects and not tire of at the sight of a new trend. But for this page, they were out of bounds, and the only thing that is really an embellishment is cut from a sheet of patterned paper – and the rest of the page is made entirely from patterned paper scraps.

Now it’s your turn! This week Glitter Girl challenges you to create a project using just patterned paper for embellishment – nothing premade allowed. Take a photo of your project and upload it to Two Peas and check the box for the Glitter Girl challenge in step four of the upload process to share it with us all – and you’re also welcome to share a link in the comments here if you fancy!

Onward, covered in glitter, my dear scrapbookers!

The Adventures of Glitter Girl is a weekly series on Two Peas in a Bucket, and goes live every Wednesday. I’ll share each adventure here shortly after that. I hope you enjoy her quests for crafting happiness, and if you ever have a scrapbooking dilemma yourself, you can always call her to action on the message board.

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Okay, all finished so I’m back with the completed page and the round-up. If you haven’t already, read this post first!

And here it is all finished. With four photographs on a single page layout. This is something that’s been asked a couple times – how do I start if I’m not going to scrap just one or two photos? So I wanted to show that for me, it mostly starts the same. That before version could easily work for just one or two photos, but one of the easiest ways to include more photos per page is to print them smaller, of course. This page includes one 4×6 photo and three 2×3 images, all portrait. That is something that repeats through the vast majority of my pages: either all portrait or all landscape. I just don’t like working with one of each – simple as that! I like the look of everything in the same direction and if that means making more than one layout to incorporate both types of photo, I’m totally okay with that.

The only page format that looks very different at the start is a three 4×6 page – three 4×6 photos in a line is a design I use often and I don’t see any need to waste half a sheet of patterned paper underneath those photos, so in that case I almost always stick the photos to the background paper before I add anything else. You can see that process here, if three photos is something you might find helpful.

And some favourites from last week. Have a closer look at these: one, two, three and four.

Now it’s your turn! Create a page from this starting point and share it with us. But don’t forget to check out this post for some extra fun this week.

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Today scrapbook manufacturer My Mind’s Eye are launching their new look blog with a little something special: a blog hop celebrating some of the fabulous products MME has produced over the years. As Mondays here in Shimworld are usually dedicated to scrapbook starting points, it seems just right to combine the two.

This week’s starting point comes entirely from the Follow your Heart collection designed by Rhonna Farrer for My Mind’s Eye. One 12×12 graph paper design for the background (and the lines are important for where I’m going to take this page), a large box of patterned paper across the middle and a grouping of a few small pieces of patterned paper plus one detailed element cut from the patterned paper at the top right corner of the large box.

For the finished layout and a round-up of favourites from last week’s starting point, please pop over to this post.

But let’s indulge in a little My Mind’s Eye fun for a bit too! If you’re new around here, there are two recent videos you might want to check out: this one features MME transparencies and this one focuses on patterned paper. But My Mind’s Eye have been around for a long while! I have some of their earliest products in my albums: the Frame-Ups die cuts, more than ten years old!

As part of their big launch today, check out the My Mind’s Eye blog, and also their updated pages on Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest. This week they will be announcing three brand new lines. And now the fun part… how about a prize? MME is giving away a sheet of layered stickers to a lucky shimelle.com reader. Look closely, these are a peek at one of the new lines! You can see more from this new collection on the My Mind’s Eye blog later this week.

To enter to win the new stickers from MME, just leave a comment on this post. Entries close Sunday the 8th of April and I’ll post the winner with the new starting point next Monday!

Your next stop on the hop is Stacy Julian, and if you’ve lost your way, the full hop includes Jennifer, Nichol, Rhonna, Stacy, Stephanie and Studio Calico, plus the new blog at MME!

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This weekend, one commenter will win a personalised print from Little Musings.

The personalised prints from Little Musings make ideal gifts for birthdays, weddings or just “I love you” presents. The prize is for any one of the prints from the shop, and you choose the words and colours to suit you.
“I really think it is important to offer gift ideas that will suit most budgets – having something so personal and unique in your home will certainly be a conversation starter!” You can find SJ’s prints at Etsy and Folksy

To enter, just leave a comment on this post describing what word best describes you or your family.

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

Good luck!

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Congratulations to Kevin, who wins the beautiful Bird necklace from Tiny Cottage Treasures

Kevin, 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.

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This week Glitter Girl comes across some multiphoto mayhem, spurred on by this discussion of ideas for scrapping plenty of travel photos. Her adventure takes a look at various strategies she has used in a travel album plus creating a page using the divided page protectors from We R Memory Keepers.

Come along for the adventure, won’t you?

Depending on how long you’ve been reading (or watching?) you’ll have seen more or less of that album at the beginning, but this gives you a look at how the first volume is coming together. I’m currently on three full albums and need to start the fourth as this one is a bit overstuffed for my liking right now! But I’m just keeping all the pages in chronological order of our nearly-four-month adventure, and adding a divider page whenever we cross a border into a new country. Or at least that is the general idea: I’ve actually only made two of those divider pages and I’ll need ten more, but I’m not in any rush so it’s okay, right?

You may also start to see why I was in a panic recently when I realised I was completely out of kraft cardstock. When I had last stocked up, I bought 250 sheets. But it turns out, it is possible to burn through that much in about five months if you use it constantly. (Not to worry, have now reordered!)

You can find all the supplies and plenty of divided page protector options here. And of course you can use this same design as a sketch on a 12×12 page without the fancy page protector – just use three portrait 4×6 photos along the bottom and work with the 6×12 space at the top separately. Either way, you end up with four 4×6 images on a 12×12 page, plus room for title, writing and embellishment.

Now it’s your turn! This week Glitter Girl challenges you to try this four photo design – either with the special page protector or on a 12×12 page. Take a photo of your project and upload it to Two Peas and check the box for the Glitter Girl challenge in step four of the upload process to share it with us all – and you’re also welcome to share a link in the comments here if you fancy!

Onward, covered in glitter, my dear scrapbookers!

The Adventures of Glitter Girl is a weekly series on Two Peas in a Bucket, and goes live every Wednesday. I’ll share each adventure here shortly after that. I hope you enjoy her quests for crafting happiness, and if you ever have a scrapbooking dilemma yourself, you can always call her to action on the message board.

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Happy Monday! How about a new scrapbooking starting point to start a crafty week? This week I started with the Gardenia collection and cut a bunch of squares from patterned paper, each a half-inch smaller than the previous. The white polka-dot print is 7×7” and then smaller from there. Plus an extra layer in the background: I cut a 7.5” square from plain typing paper and used that as a mask to spray white mist onto the green striped background. Then there are two vertical elements – one is the branding strip from one of the patterned papers I had already used and the other is an off-cut of the b-side of one of those papers. So surprise surprise: another layout that could come together with scraps!

I finished my page with letter stickers and a tag from the Gardenia collection, plus some Amy Tangerine washi tape, tiny letter stickers from My Little Shoebox and gems by Queen & Co. The tiny banner pieces are actually the ribbon portion of this rosette punch by Jenni Bowlin for Fiskars. I just punched it from the little pieces left over by my trimmer and then used a zillion tiny pop dots to put them all in place, and topped them with a bit of baker’s twine.

I actually had both of these photos as 4×6 prints but they are originals and I don’t have the negatives, but things just didn’t work with the cake picture at the 4×6 size, and although the other shot is quite busy, I loved all the little bits and pieces that were in the photo, so I didn’t want to crop that. So I took a picture of the cake photo with my phone and processed it with the Camera+ app so I could get a good balance of quality plus the retro feel and then printed it at 3×3, which was a better size for all things concerned, and no original photos were harmed! (By the way, something you might appreciate in the busier photo: obviously there is cake and ice cream, but there are also birthday presents, cards and some dollar bills that I presume came from the cards… and that week’s sale ad for the local craft store. I think I was actually planning where to go spend my birthday money before we had even had cake and ice cream!)

A note about the writing: this has been coming up in various comments often recently – what exactly do I write about if things are pretty obvious in the picture? Nothing in the writing here says anything like ‘this is my twelfth birthday and we had a family party at my grandparents’ house with cake and ice cream’. It doesn’t need to say that, because that is obvious. I am really, really not a who-what-when-where-why writer. I mean, I understand what those concepts are and that they are basically what is important in creating a timeline of events, sure. That is the sort of thing I want to see in a news report, and I want the most important things to come first, filtering down to the lesser important parts of the news story and so forth. But my scrapbooks are not a newspaper. I reserve the right to ignore those basic keys of journalism. I reserve the right to ramble. I reserve the right to talk about things that are only slightly in the picture or possibly not in the picture at all. I reserve the right to put the most important thing at the end, and maybe even create a little suspense along the way to get there. That’s the kind of writing I enjoy. Journaling is not a task for me. It is an indulgence.

This week, I’m going to work on explaining my thoughts on scrapbook writing a little more each day, but I’ll start with this layout. Although it doesn’t contain the obvious bits about what birthday and where I am, it does explain something that could otherwise be quite a mystery in the photos: why on earth was my birthday cake shaped like a drive-in burger joint with a sign reading ‘Spring Hill Hard Rock Cafe’? And the truth is from around age ten or so, I was strangely fascinated by the very idea of the Hard Rock Cafe. I had never been to one, nor even been near one to my knowledge. I had no idea what was inside such a cafe. But whenever I saw someone with a Hard Rock Cafe shirt, I thought they were completely glamorous and probably a worldwide adventurer with page after page of stamps in their passport. Of course, if you remember the sheer volume of Hard Rock Cafe shirts in the late eighties and early nineties, you will no doubt be completely aware that there was absolutely zero glamour involved in these shirts. But alas, I was a kid and I was convinced. So word got around and my souvenir from family and friends who did venture out of Kansas often became a Hard Rock Cafe t-shirt. I think I owned about a dozen of them at one point, despite never going to one myself. And so my grandparents created this birthday cake as a team effort I think – constructing a cafe out of cake and marshmallows and making a sign to label it as the very own Hard Rock Cafe of the tiny little town where I lived.

And I’m so much happier to have recorded that in my album rather than just ‘this is my twelfth birthday and we had a family party at my grandparents’ house with cake and ice cream’. It is not from ‘news in brief’ and in truth is newsworthy in no one’s life but my very own, but that is what makes it valuable to me. I hope that makes a little sense. But also, the story of my Hard Rock Cafe love is not something that is difficult to tell. It’s just the idea of looking at all the details and remembering that stage of life and thinking what is really worth telling about that. Other things I could have written on the very same page include the detail about spending my birthday money on craft supplies or an explanation of why I’m wearing something different in nearly every photo from that day, as I would want to try on each new outfit before opening the next gift. But for now, the Hard Rock Cafe will do.

I promise I eventually made it to a real Hard Rock. I was twenty and on spring break in Las Vegas (which is as ridiculous as it seems as Vegas is very much a twenty-one-and-over town). I ate a ridiculously overpriced veggie burger and sat next to a collection of Michael Jackson action figures. And did not buy a t-shirt.

Here are a few of my favourites from last week’s starting point. Go take a closer look and say hello to these four scrappers: 1. Nancy. 2. Jennifer. 3. Lehtipollo. 4. Daphne.

Should you like to give this starting point a try, I would love for you to share! And of course you can write whatever suits you and your page. Of course!

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A little something from a place that would be a mystery to overseas readers but a familiar name here in the UK: Hobbycraft! Hobbycraft is chain of general craft stores, filled with all sorts of things from baking to painting, sewing to scrapbooking! And each season they produce a rather nifty craft magazine available exclusively in their stores with all sorts of crafty mages and interviews with designers.

I’m honoured to be a guest in their spring edition, with notes on just how easy it is to start scrapbooking and in this day and age of digital photographs it can be ever so lovely to actually print our photos, like we used to!

What really made me excited about working on this little project was how Hobbycraft was trying to find out if there was anything they could do to help their scrapbooking customers! So if you are a scrapper who shops at Hobbycraft, let your store know if you would come to a demo day, a class, a crop – whatever suits your fancy! And of course, let them know if you would like to see more scrapbooking in their in-store magazine!

Thanks so much to Hobbycraft and the editorial team for the invitation to work on this fun project!

xlovesx

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This weekend, one commenter will win a gorgeous Bird necklace from Tiny Cottage Treasures

Tiny Cottage Treasures is an Etsy shop full of beautiful jewellery, from birds nests to lilies, from keys to pearls. “I love to create beautiful things. I believe finding beauty in nature and beauty in those things created by people is one of the best stabilizing factors amidst the chaos of everyday life.”

To enter, just leave a comment on this post describing the last “treasure” you found, even if it was a button you thought you had lost.

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

Good luck!

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This week we have THREE winners.

Congratulations to Dawn who wins the St Patricks day bird from Cootie Lugs!

Congratulations to Helen who wins the Dear Lizzy stamps!

Congratulations to Marie-Eve who wins the All Access pass to True Scrap 3!

Dawn, Helen and Marie-Eve, 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. Don’t miss this chance to win – it also closes next Thursday.

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