I’ve been following the handmade Christmas card series over at Scrapscene and at the same time trying to motivate myself to get started making my own Christmas cards for this year. This lovely card by Dawne Ivey seems to have done the trick…

Gorgeous isn’t it? And here’s my attempt at reproducing the effect…

Obviously I’ve made a square card instead of rectangular one…but you can still recognize Dawn’s fantastic design. I’m reasonably happy with how it turned out.

To see previous cards featured in the handmade card series at Scrapscene, go here.

For specific instructions on making Dawn’s card, go here.

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Having trouble getting your Christmas cards and handmade gift projects done? Quite a number of scrapbooking blogs and sites are running Christmas “countdown” events in the lead up to Christmas day which might provide you with some holiday inspiration.

Christmas countdowns I’ve discovered include:

• Katie The Scrapbook Lady’s 24 Days Of Holiday Inspiration – Linking you to lots of different Christmas ideas including gifts to buy, gifts to make, Christmas recipes etc.
• Scrapperie’s Christmas Cards A Day 2008 – A Christmas card idea supplied each day by the Scrapperie design team.
• Pink Paislee’s 12 Days Of Christmas – Daily Christmas ornament ideas from Pink Paislee. I think my favourite so far has to be this simple felt square ornament (below).

• Ana Cabrera’s Christmas Countdown – A few different ideas here, including this holiday board sampler (below). Even if you don’t want to make something to frame and hang on the wall, the idea could be translated into a Christmas card instead.

• Two Peas’ 36 Days Of Christmas – Some delightful gift ideas to look at in the Two Peas gallery. My favourite was this card idea by Joy Uzarraga featuring upside down hearts to create a tree…now why didn’t I think of that? Fabulous!

• Melissa Goodsell’s 25 Days Of Christmas Craft – Melissa shares an assortment Christmas craft ideas on her blog. These are last year’s (2007), but they’re still useful for us in 2008.
• Melissa Goodsell’s Month Of Handmade Christmas – This year, Melissa features handmade Christmas projects submitted by her blog readers.
• Lisa Vollrath’s Holiday Printable Countdown – An online advent calendar. Lisa reveals a new printable images each day. Handy images you can add to cards and projects.
• Cheri Wenger’s 30 Days Til Christmas Countdown – A mixed bag of digital layouts, a digi quote and card ideas to have a peek at here. I especially loved this reusable wish list (below).

• Tim Holt’s 12 Tags Of Christmas – Tim features a new tag project each day with detailed how to instructions. (A great insight into the techniques he uses.) I’ll probably only have time to drool at these gorgeous tags because they look quite involved. My favourite is this reindeer tag (below).

• Ali Edwards’ December Daily Album 2008 – A lovely mini album project idea documenting the lead up to Christmas including daily photos. Unfortunately it assumes you’re somewhat organised…which I’m not. (Hmmm…maybe next year.)

Hopefully some of these Christmas countdown events will provide you with some ideas and inspiration for your own Christmas scrapbooking projects. I’ll keep an eye out for more, but feel free to fill me in on any that I missed!

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A little while ago I bought myself a copy of Best of Becky Higgins’ Sketches, so I thought I would share my impression of the book…

Cover

It’s a small, hard cover book that’s only a little bigger than A5 (23cm long x 17cm high to be exact). It’s also spiral bound with semi-gloss pages. The back cover actually folds around the pages and over the front cover and the two covers are held together by magnets – an unusual feature that does a very good job of protecting the pages inside from getting damaged.

Inside The Book

Sketches are groups into tabbed sections according to the number of photos for easy reference. There are six sections beginning with 3-4 photos and stepping up through to 14+ photos (refer below).

The sketches themselves are approximately 1″ high by roughly 2″ wide (not very big disappointingly) and appear at the top of each page. Underneath each sketch is a sample layout and a basic supplies list. At the bottom of some pages there is also a little comment by Becky (usually one sentence) about the sketch in question.

Content

There’s a total of 196 sketches in the book (I counted them twice just to be sure…but I could be out by a couple.) Here’s a breakdown of the sections the sketches were categorised into:

• 3-4 photos (14 sketches)
• 5-6 photos (45 sketches)
• 7-8 photos (61 sketches)
• 9-10 photos (33 sketches)
• 11-13 photos (26 sketches)
• 14+ photo section (17 sketches)

Surprisingly, there are no sketches catering for less than 3 photos on a page – a tiny bit disappointing. You also need to keep in mind that some of these sketches are quite a few years old now and scrapbooking styles have since changed. A couple of examples of what I mean are:

1. All of the sketches are double page sketches, very antiquated these days. On the up side it is possible to split a double page sketch into two single pages sketch ideas, so in sense there’s double the number of sketches in the book if you use them this way. Sometimes the design on one side of the sketch is completely dependent on elements on the other side, so this approach won’t work with all of the sketches.

2. The majority of the sketch ideas do not have any layering or overlapping elements. Instead they tend to feature lots of elements “floating” together on the page. This may not suit some scrappers who follow the current trend of overlapping, layering and “grounding” page elements. A skilled scrapper can probably adapt the sketches to suit today’s styles.

Pros

• Sketches are well organised into tabbed sections.
• Spiral binding contributes to the ease of flipping through pages quickly.
• Simple sketches ideas that are well-suited to beginners.
• Some double page sketches can be split into single pages ideas (effectively doubling the number of sketches in the book).
• Sample layout provided with each sketch.

Cons

• Some sketches may be a little out-of-date in terms of current scrapbooking trends.
• No sketches featuring less than 3 photos.
• Not a lot of sketches in the 3-4 photo section. In fact, 137 of the sketches feature 7 or more photos! (Some people who have a large stash of photos might actually consider this a plus – for me it was a con.)

Cost

I’ve seen the book available here in Australia for around the AU$50 mark, not including shipping. Ouch! My hubby had been telling me how cheap the books were on Amazon at the time, so I finally listened and did a price comparison. Much to my amazement, it worked out much cheaper to purchase from Amazon in the US than locally here in Australia. I purchased the book for AU$28.88 (including delivery from the US). This represented a saving of AU$21 over the cheapest price that I’d seen in Australia (AU$49.95). My order took 3 weeks to arrive, which wasn’t huge issue for me. (I should qualify this by saying that I purchased the book in July 2008 when the Australian dollar was very favourable against the US dollar. You do have to take the prevailing exchange rates into careful consideration when purchasing from overseas.)

Summary

Overall I was happy with my purchase. The book has definitely been a great addition to my scrapbooking library and I find myself referring to it over and over again when I’m stuck for an idea. The sheer number of sketch ideas provided in the book is exceptional value for the price. Although some of the sketches could be considered a little bit dated, they’re still a very good starting point for beginners. To be fair, it’s also up to the individual to think creatively and get the most out of the ideas.

Rating

I’d give the book a 3.5/5 (very good).

Availability

In writing this review, I took a quick look around at where the book is available at the moment (Nov 08). Here are some of the places I found it:

• AU$49.95 plus delivery at Anna’s Craft Cupboard.
• AU$52.95 plus delivery at Scrapbook Shelf.
• AU$59.95 plus delivery at City Scrapbooking.
• US$19.77 plus delivery at Amazon (aff link).

Other Books By Becky

• Creative Sketches for Scrapbooking (aff link).
• Creative Sketches, Vol. 2 (aff link).
• Family History Scrapbooking (aff link).

I hope this book review was useful. Upcoming reviews include Scrapbook Page Maps by Becky Fleck and 52 Scrapbooking Challenges by Elsie Flannigan. Stay tuned…

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Task 4 of the SBS #36 Challenge at The Scrap Witch is to place our selected photos in a horizontal line along the bottom third of the page. Detailed instructions in this thread.

Here’s my photo placement:

Task 4 - Placement of Photos

I’ve actually added a white border to my photos which wasn’t part of the task to make them stand out a bit more from the patterned papers.

If you’d like to check out the previous stages of this layout, you can see them here and here.

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Task 3 from the SBS #36 Challenge at The Scrap Witch is to cut a selection of strips from patterned paper. Detailed instructions are in this thread. Here’s my strips…

SBS Task #3 - Patterned Paper Strips

As you might be able to see, I incorporating some freehand doodling on some of the strips to add a little interest. I’m not great at doodling but it’s still quite effective…

Doodling on some of the strips

Of course this layout is a work-in-progress and nothing’s stuck down or set in concrete yet. The golden rule of an SBS scrapbooking challenge is not to stick anything down until you’re told to at the very end. It helps avoid mishaps if you’ve misunderstood one of the instructions slightly.

Another view of the doodling

I’m reasonably happy with the result so far, although I’m thinking I might cut a strip of faux rick rack with my Craft Robo for even more interest. What do you think?

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I’m doing the SBS Challenge here at The Scrap Witch this week. What is a SBS Challenge? It’s the Step-By-Step Challenge – you can read a bit more about them here. To summarize, it’s a scrapbooking challenge where participants are given small daily tasks which culminate in a completed scrapbooking layout at the end of the challenge. A bit like a drip feed really.

Interested? You’re welcome to take a look over in the SBS Forum where the daily tasks are posted. You can do the challenge on your own, or please feel free to join some of our members who are doing the challenges with me.

The first day’s task was to choose some photos. Here’s mine…

Task #2 - Freehand Page Frame

Day two’s (today’s) task was to grab a sheet of white cardstock to use as your page background and to use some pens to make a freehand page frame. Here’s a better look at my frame using black, blue and pink lines…

SBS Task #2 - Freehand Pen Page Border

The daily tasks for SBS #36 are being posted in this thread. If you’re interested in participating, you’ll need to check them out to make sure you haven’t miss anything too vital.

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A new Craft Robo model has recently become available called the Craft Robo Lite (model CC300-20). It’s basically a more portable version of the Craft Robo II.

As I understand it, the Craft Robo Lite is a very similar machine to the Craft Robo II, with a few important exceptions:

• It doesn’t have the optical eye which allows print and cut operations – the ability to print a design and then cut around the outline to create a coloured die cut or decal.
• It cuts a maximum length of 300mm or 12 inches as opposed to the Craft Robo II’s ability to cut designs up to a metre in length. (This probably isn’t a concern to many scrapbookers.)
• It cuts a little slower than the Craft Robo II – 70mm per second as opposed to the Craft Robo II’s 100mm per second. (To be honest, I rarely cut at the Robo’s maximum speed anyway, since cutting at lower speeds provides more accuracy and minimizes the possibility of the Robo’s blade tearing your design in mid cut.)

The Craft Robo Lite also boasts the following new features:

• SD memory card slot to save and store designs. (Eliminating the need for the machine to be connected to your computer during cutting!)
• LCD screen to view, resize and send multiple copies of a design.
• Latest version of the ROBO Master software including offset and welding functions. (Offset means outlining. Welding means joining…as in joining letters or other objects.)
• New carrier sheets with grids for easier positioning.

Note that the latest version of the software and the new carriers sheets are also compatible with earlier Craft Robo models (the original Craft Robo CC100-20 and the Craft Robo II CC200-20).

At the time of writing the Craft Robo Lite is priced at approximately AU$399 which should place it in firm competition with cutters made by other manufacturers such as the cartridge-based Cricut and Making Memories Slice.

(The Craft Robo cutters have dropped dramatically in price, considering I paid around AU$900 for the original Craft Robo model when it first became available here in Australia a few years ago.)

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It appears that no one in the scrapbooking industry is immune. Take this story over at marketwatch.com as case in point:

The Antioch Company, parent company of Creative Memories, a leader in the memory celebration industry for more than 20 years, announced today that it has reached an agreement with its lenders to restructure its debt.

This is somewhat of a shock. To many people, Creative Memories are part of the furniture in the scrapbooking industry. A huge number of people started their scrapbooking journey with Creative Memories, or at least have been involved with them in some way, at some point – myself included.

Creative Memories US Website

CM co-founder, Rhonda Anderson, is quoted as saying:

We are focused on our bright future as we further expand our offerings into digital scrapbooking and other innovative memory celebration options while continuing to serve our traditional scrapbook market.

Sounding a little too cheery perhaps?

So what exactly is Chapter 11? Basically it means a business can’t pay all of its bills. In other words – not good.

Wikipedia has this to say on Chapter 11:

Chapter 11 is a chapter of the United States Bankruptcy Code, which permits reorganization under the bankruptcy laws of the United States.

And also this:

…it may be more economically efficient to allow a troubled company to continue running, cancel some of its debts, and give ownership of the newly reorganized company to the creditors whose debts were canceled. Alternatively, the business can be sold as a going concern with the net proceeds of the sale distributed to creditors…

If you’re interested in reading further, marketwatch.com’s full story is here…or if your curiosity about Creative Memories is peaked, their (US) website is here.

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Welcome to the new scrapbooking blog here at The Scrap Witch! Although Scrap Witch remains first and foremost a scrapbooking community dedicated to its many wonderful members, I’m very excited about this new addition to the site.

And what can you expect from the blog? Content with a focus on scrapbooking ideas, techniques and inspiration to get your scrapbooking projects completed quickly and efficiently.

Blog Inspiration

When I was a very new scrapper and before scrapbooking had taken off online, I knew a lady called Julie. She and I attended the same monthly workshops. Along with a dear friend of hers, the three of us often sat together and scrapped. Each month, Julie would come back with finished albums to show us (in stark contrast to myself who usually had to scratch around to find the solitary half-finished page I’d starting doing at the last workshop!)

I began to observe how Julie worked…to discover her secret. The answer was surprisingly simple – she was a sponge. She literally absorbed every idea she saw and used it in some way. If she bought or borrowed a magazine, she went through each page methodly and used each layout idea in some way. Sometimes a colour scheme, sometimes the placement of page elements or sometimes a single embellishment idea.

I’ve long since lost contact with Julie (sadly), but I remember her methods very well. There’s not a shade of doubt in my mind that she has long since caught up on her stash of photos. She still inspires me today…and this blog.

(Thanks Julie…wherever you are.)

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