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

Scrapbooking Giveaway Day [88]

2012-05-11T19:40:18Z

This weekend, one commenter will receive a brown ‘dreamer’ camera strap.

This strap is both functional and stylish and is available stateside from Photojojo or overseas from Uranium99, a toy camera seller on eBay.

To enter, just leave a comment on this post describing your favourite photograph.

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!

Congratulations to Shanon (and friend), who win a class pass to Cover to cover.

Shannon, please email me (shimelle at gmail dot com) with yours and your chosen friends email addresses.

There’s a new giveaway every Friday night, so check back next week for another chance to win just by leaving a comment.

10 Things :: May 2012 [21]

2012-05-10T22:10:42Z

Oh hi there. The rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated… Okay, perhaps not that, but no, I certainly didn’t mean to leave you hanging for so long with nary an update to read. I could bore you with why, but I have this minor aim in life to not bore you, so I’ll skip that.

Instead, I’ll proclaim that I’m back and I’m going to stay on top of this, starting right now. Starting with getting this 10 Things on the Tenth post live right in the nick of time for this time zone (my apologies to all of those to my East who have already declared it tomorrow, but hey – bonus to those of you in Hawaii who haven’t even had lunch yet!) With this big gap in reading material in mind, why don’t I share the most obvious list of ten things: ten things I should have blogged here in the last two weeks.

1. How ridiculously quick and easy it is to make a happy and cute birthday card with the Sketchbook collection designed by the lovely Amy Tangerine.

2. Probably most importantly, the PRIZE WINNERS from the online scrapbooking weekend!! These will go live right here just shortly (Friday morning) and the gift certificates are being sent by email this Friday, the 11th of May. Thank you so much for your fabulous participation in all that fun. Next time I’m going to make it a goal to not fall over and stop blogging as soon as it’s over. Cool?

3. For the third year running, I popped over to Germany to scrapbook with the lovely ladies who gather for the Crop on the Rhine. I think this year was my favourite yet! I taught one scrapbooking workshop with three layouts and one more craft-based workshop with an old book that hides a secret inside its pages. And because it is Germany, I ate a ridiculous amount of chocolate wafer biscuits (seriously, even the bargain bags are like tiny bites of Kit-Kat taken to an artisan level) and refuse to make any apologies for eating multiple potato dishes at the same meal because frankly there is little in the world that could stop me from trying something as simply wonderful as potatoes cooked in a new or different way. Hmmm… have you ever noticed that pretty much every 10 Things list comes back to food? I know by now you’ve realised that I take in way more food tourism when I travel than national monuments. Priorities, I tell you. Anyway: Crop on the Rhine is amazing and sincere thanks to Barbara, Heike, Andrea, Conny and everyone who attends and makes this happen. Even special thanks to Ingo, the hotel manager who has come to embrace the special kind of fabulous that a hotel entirely booked by scrapbookers really can be.

4. I went to Germany on the train, as it is more sensible with class kits and also because I just like it more than flying. (Anyone else?) And I got to take The Boy along with me this year as a bit of a treat, so then we headed to Amsterdam for a few days before we came back to the UK. This was actually our first little holiday since we came back from our big trip just over a year ago now. We’ve each done a few journeys here and there for work or family things, but we hadn’t had a good opportunity to actually go somewhere new. This was new! Neither of us had been there, which is always fun. And what was extra super-duper fun was that essentially, this trip was on the house. A few months back I won an amazing prize from Hotwire by telling the story of how I once saved money on travel by sleeping on a pool raft in someone’s broom cupboard. A much easier way to save money while travelling is to use Hotwire – they offer cut-rate hotel rooms by not telling you the name of the hotel until after you’ve made the booking (you get to know its neighbourhood and amenities, just not the exact hotel). So anyway, I should both thank them and write a full post about this adventure since they were kind enough to send us to the mystery hotel of our choice for free! (It turned out to be a very recently built Crowne Plaza, for the hotel curious. Definite win.)

5. We rolled into Amsterdam on the eve of a national holiday. More like THE national holiday. We had no idea. The entire city was on the streets and clad in orange and holding an annual city-wide secondhand sale. Seriously fabulous timing.

6. I came home from Amsterdam, went to work on a super-secret Olympic project and immediately got crazy-sick, despite having gone the entire winter without a sniffle. But between ‘super-secret’ and ‘ugh I’m sick’, I don’t really think there is anything there to blog, so really this number six is a total cheat.

6. Glitter Girl has been out and about you know. There are three adventures I need to blog! In Adventure 17, she tries a variety ideas with the new DIY Thickers range from American Crafts, in Adventure 18, she talks about travel papers and makes a layout in under ten minutes, and in Adventure 19, she talks about what she puts in page kits, both big and small. All of those links have the project photos, videos and full shopping lists so you can catch up with her crazy pink-nailed scrapping antics. Whomever she might be.

7. It was National (or International) Scrapbooking Day. Such a day exists. We had an almighty fun weekend at Two Peas and I haven’t seen so many people on the message board there in years! I absolutely loved it. They even let mild-mannered little me share an extra special video for the weekend, which you can find here. When I say ‘they let me’, I basically mean that because it is ridiculously long. It is forty entire minutes of me scrapbooking. I kid you not. So you might want to schedule it in… but at least I’ve warned you up front.

8. Before Amsterdam and crazysick and supersecret and Scrapbooking Day, I took a giant stack of pictures and notes for the Week in the Life project with Ali Edwards. I’ve done this project almost every year since 2006, but I usually do a week in July. Spring was different and it was a good change! I’ve ordered my prints for that this week and have a few projects to finish first before I can work on that in scrapbook form, but I’m looking forward to it!

9. I should have shared some starting points or something, huh? Here’s one for today then. Made with the current kit from JBS Mercantile.

10. My new class Cover to Cover started this week. It is making my heart very happy. I’ve had some of my favourite discussions about scrapbooking ever, and I love that with this class lots of people are emailing me to talk about different solutions, already! (The forum is buzzy too.) Anyway, if you were thinking about it or you forgot, it’s not too late to join! Sign up and pull up a chair so we can scrap away!

And there are a few more things after that, but I promise I am officially behind but quickly catching up so thanks for not giving up on my little corner of the internet! (Extra thanks for those of you who blogged your 10 Things today even though I was absent until the last minute. I do plan to continue this series and you have ever right to twack me over the head with a teaspoon next month if the post isn’t up first thing in the morning! Thanks for your patience.)

Scrapbooking Giveaway Day [262]

2012-05-04T22:23:31Z

This weekend, one commenter will win a class pass for themselves and a friend to the latest class here at Shimelle.com Cover to cover
Cover to Cover starts on the seventh of May and runs for four weeks, finishing on the third of June.
It includes 25 full-colour PDF prompts sent to participants by email, so you can read straight from your inbox.
It includes an entire series of videos made just for this class so you can see all the concepts in action, including plenty of example albums but also the process of going from a stack of layouts (or um… many stacks!) to a collection of books that showcase your work in the best way for you.
There is a private message board to ask questions and share with other participants, we’ll gather for a live chat session and I’ll be available for questions and answers throughout in case you want a second opinion on what will work best for the way you scrapbook.

To enter, just leave a comment on this post telling us how you usually plan your scrapbook albums.

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!

We have two winners to announce this week. Firstly, congratulations to Angela who wins a place on the Sassy Scrapping with Shannon class over at twopeasinabucket

Secondly, congratulations to Dalreen, who wins a gorgeous camera strap from Bluebird Chic.

Dalreen, 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.

Gardeners' Digest :: Scrapbooking News from the Garden Girls (April 2012) [134]

2012-04-22T14:00:00Z

If you just found your way here courtesy of the lovely Miss Wendy Sue, then greetings! Today is Gardeners’ Digest day, our monthly round-up of things from the Garden Girls.

Up first, a little look at a layout I’ve been discussing with the Hitchhikers on their message board!

This project from Shannon Tidwell has really been inspiring me lately with its use of stamps, bright colours and all that glitter. She shares her steps for this process in this video from the Memory Keeping Mondays series.

You can find further details on this project here and more of Shannon’s work on her blog, in her page gallery or in her brand new workshop.

This month, my order was made from just a few manufacturers because I liked quite a bit in each collection. These five items are on their way to me now… die-cut and transparency set from BasicGrey’s What’s Up collection, Hib Fab patterned paper from BasicGrey’s PB&J collection, this crazy-bold yellow chevron overlay from Hambly Screen Prints, map-print Thickers and wooden hearts and arrows, both by Studio Calico.

But how about something you can win? Today you can win Shannon Tidwell’s brand new workshop Sassy Scrapbooking by leaving a comment on this post, sharing one thing from the entire world that has inspired you in some way over the last month. Easy! Entries close next Thursday night and the winner will be posted on Friday.

Your next stop is Lisa Truesdell, so get hopping over to the world of Gluestick Girl!

Gardeners’ Digest is a monthly update from the Garden Girls, the design team at Two Peas in a Bucket. To keep up with the Garden Girls throughout the month, check out the garden gallery, find us on Twitter or subscribe to all our blogs with just a couple clicks.

Current scrapbooking challenges and prizes [26]

2012-04-22T09:52:56Z

This time last week we were full steam ahead with scrapbooking challenges and discussions… and today those challenges draw to a close. It’s not too late to share your work for a chance at a prize! How about a round-up of all your options and some answers to the prizes on offer? Why certainly!

There are sixteen scrapbooking challenges. For each, create a page following the challenge and upload it to your blog or a page gallery, then share a link with the list at the end of the post. Each of the link share buttons reminds you how long is remaining to enter. If you miss the deadline, you can still share your work via the comments, but you won’t be eligible for a prize.

Speaking of prizes, for each of these sixteen challenges, one winner will be randomly selected to win a prize pack of a $10 gift certificate to Two Peas in a Bucket and a class pass to your choice of Learn Something New, Love your Pictures, Love your Pages or True Stories. Each person can only win once – in the event of a duplicate drawing, we will draw another name for that prize.

Here are the sixteen scrapbooking challenges:
Challenge 01 …scraplift a page by Jaime Warren
Challenge 02 …mixing papers
Challenge 03 …mixing styles
Challenge 04 …choose your own colour adventure
Challenge 05 …inspiration points from Wilna Furstenberg
Challenge 06 …from one to another with Relly Annett-Baker
Challenge 07 …put it in a pocket
Challenge 08 …stamp just once
Challenge 09 …take your pick
Challenge 10 …something bold with Jill Sprott
Challenge 11 …two patterns
Challenge 12 …one photo twice, with Amy Heller
Challenge 13 …scrap with a free printable from Little Musings
Challenge 14 …four sections with Jen Gallacher
Challenge 15 …scrap some rubbish photos
Challenge 16 …use your scraps with Amy Tan

And there are plenty of discussion topics. From all the comments left on these posts, two will be drawn at random to win a prize box of goodies courtesy of Two Peas in a Bucket. Just join in the discussion to enter – what could be easier than talking about scrapbooking, right?

How do you store your Thickers and letter stickers?
Where do you find inspiration?
How do you use washi tape in your crafting projects?
How do you deal with imperfect digital photos?
How did you discover scrapbooking?
How do you store scrap papers and off-cuts?
How do you make a scrapbooking page kit
How do you typically create a page?
How do you sort and organise your scrapbooking paper?
Where do you scrapbook?

And then we have one very special Grand Prize to bring it all to a close. From all the submitted layouts and all the comments in those discussions and all the pins of those challenges or discussions… all of those are going into the hat and one winner will be chosen at random. That grand prize winner will receive a fabulous workshop pack from Two Peas: you’ll get access to The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Scrapbooking, The Scrapbook Stamper’s Workshop, Collect and Create and the brand new workshop Sassy Scrapbooking. That’s a $100 value, twenty videos, twenty chapters of scrapbooking ideas and nearly two hundred exclusive scrapbook pages. And all four workshops include permanent access and a self-paced format, so there’s absolutely no rush and you can dip in and out of all the workshops as you like.

Thanks so much for all your participation in the event so far! If you have time to scrapbook or chat or pin today, it’s not too late to join in. Happy crafting!

xlovesx