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

Layering pretty paper is my all at once my oasis of calm and my jump of excitement. There seems to be something about the more years of scrapbooking I rack up, the more layers of paper end up on my pages. This autumn marks twenty years of making pages for my own albums so we are getting to a fair number of layers now. I’m not delighted with a page until there’s layer on layer on layer… and all the rest.

If you love paper layering or wish paper layering happened easily for you, then I know you’ll enjoy the new class I have coming up oh so soon now: Layer on Layer on Layer… It’s a six week class with thirty layouts shared from start to finish in thirty videos, each also accompanied by a PDF with still pictures and summary notes to recap the video lessons. We’ll look at layering with colour, with specific products, with sketches, with inky techniques, with extra photos or lengthy journaling. Most importantly, we’ll look at how layering works with your style. It is never my goal for you to create carbon copies of my layouts in my classes. Instead, I aim to give you ideas you can adapt and personalise so you create pages you love.

Class starts Monday the 2nd of July and finishes Friday the 10th of August, 2018. Though this is the time frame when the class materials are posted, there is absolutely no pressure to work within that time frame. There is no such thing as ‘falling behind’ in my classes. Everything includes permanent access to the materials and you’re encouraged to work at your own pace.

Class videos can be watched via streaming online video or be saved to your own device to watch offline. You’ll receive an email each time a new video is available, with the PDF file attached and a link that takes you to the private class form to watch the video. It’s also the place where you can chat with other class participants, share photos of what you make, and ask any questions. I’m also available by email, and should your questions come after the end of the live run of Layer on Layer on Layer… just email me and I’ll help in any way I can.

If you purchased an annual pass for all my classes in 2018, do not pay for this class separately, of course! You don’t need to do anything and will automatically receive access to the class forum when it opens next week. (The forum always opens just a bit before class starts.)

If you know you’d like to sign up, you have a few options:
The annual pass for 2018 is still available and would also include Clear the Desk, a new class that ran earlier this year, which you could work through at any time that suited.
The early bird price of $30 or £23 if you sign up this weekend – before the end of Monday the 25th of June. Early bird pricing has ended, but you can sign up any time for $35 or £27.

Choose whichever currency you prefer – US dollars or UK pounds. Please realise class registrations are processed by an actual person (me!) rather than anything automatic. By signing up, you are confirming you’re happy to receive emails for this class. I confirm I never share or sell class emails and I don’t email you for things other than the class. Okay, time to sign up now!

$35 US Dollars

£27 British Pounds

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to send me an email. See you in class so soon!

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With all the fun of Creativation just finished, thousands of beautiful new papers, stamps, and embellishments are on their way to shops and then to your hands. But if I’m honest, I still have a few things from last year’s new releases sitting on my shelf, just sitting and looking pretty. It’s time for them to do something! And the time is now, so they can have their moment of glory on a beautiful new scrapbook page before brand new products arrive and eclipse my older favourites.

Clear the Desk is a short online class to help with just this. Through a series of eight videos, we’ll gather our supplies and create new pages with a focus on using patterned paper, stamps, and embellishments. (If you are not a stamper, you can opt for more stickers and other embellishments; likewise you can stamp more and use fewer premade items if that’s your style.) The example layouts feature a variety of photos sizes, including mini prints, 4×6 prints, and A4 enlargements. Most of the examples are 12×12 single page layouts but there is one two page spread and one pocket page as well.

You are welcome to use any supplies you have to hand and the aim is to not do any shopping for this class – that way you’ll be making room to welcome your new supplies! If you are a kit club subscriber, you’re welcome to use one or more kits to follow along. If you buy all your supplies individually, the very first video will walk you through the gathering stage of this process so you can choose what you want to move from your stash into your albums!

Class begins Tuesday the 20th of February 2018 and runs two weeks until the 6th of March. You can, however, sign up at any time to access the class materials. If you would like to participate at the same time as others, then join in now for the live run!

Clear the Desk is just £10 or $15, but for the first time I’m also offering a year-long class membership should you wish to automatically join in all the classes I teach throughout 2018. The 2018 class pass is £100 or $150, which is less than the total of all my new classes for the coming year. Should you not already be signed up for the annual classes Learn Something New and Journal your Christmas, these would also be included for further savings, but they are not including in that total of ‘new’ classes – just an extra bonus if you haven’t already sign up for those. I realise the annual class pass is not the right option for everyone and I will always offer every class individually, but I’ve had some of you request this option for several years and it seems the best time to give it a try! This offer will only be available until the end of February 2018, and then will close and classes will be available individually. If it helps with your decision, classes on the schedule for this year include layering, choosing colour combinations, journaling, page composition, and photography. Some classes are longer and more in-depth and others are a shorter two week format like Clear the Desk.

No matter how you sign up for any of my classes, you have permanent access to all the class materials. There are no deadlines and you can work on any schedule that suits you.

Do be careful to choose the option you want, of course!

Access to all shimelle.com classes for the whole of 2018: £100 or $150.

Or sign up for just Clear the Desk on its own: £10 or $15.

I’ll talk more about Clear the Desk between now and the 20th, when we get started, and of course you can email me any time with any questions and I’ll help in any way I can!

Have a great day and see what’s still sitting on your desk! I hope to see you in class soon.

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It doesn’t matter how often you create pages or how many years you’ve been scrapbooking, certain events are just extra special. It might be a wedding album or a baby album or a special travel adventure, but these special times bring up all the emotions for scrapbookers: so excited to scrapbook these photos; so nervous about getting it just right.

Of course, that’s exactly what happened when I came back from very special holiday to Disney World last October. So, so excited and absolutely bursting with stories and in love with so many photos. I wanted to get all the feelings from my heart and all the moments from my head and get them on paper in a way that captured it all with exactly the right… everything. Which is maybe just a little, tiny bit intimidating. Where on earth could I start?

But I caught my breath, approached things with a balance of practicality, order, and creative spontaneity, and recorded the entire thing from start to finish to share with you. It’s my most magical scrapbook ever.

In this class, you’ll receive colour PDFs with all the layouts in my scrapbook, sketches for those layouts and some variations thereof, and notes on design, journaling, and photography. And then there are the videos. More videos than I’ve ever assembled for a class! That includes a video on photo and printing organisation, album planning, then all the process videos for every layout in the class. Even if you have no interest in ever scrapbooking a theme park trip in your entire life, you’ll have a library of more than forty brand new page videos that are only available in this class. The layouts include single pages, double pages, and pocket pages. There are small photos, 4×6 photos, and large photos. There are pages with one photo and pages with many photos. I use a varied range of supplies throughout the album and share different techniques so every single page and video has its own unique focus. (I agree, forty pages of the same supplies would be pretty uninspiring viewing, and not nearly as fun for me to make either!)

In case you are a Disney fan and are planning a trip in the future, the class materials also include my top tips that I call ‘Disney for Scrapbookers’, including how and where to get super scrappable photos, where I fuel my Disney inspiration when I’m thousands of miles from the parks, and quick habits for during your trip that can make the process of making your album later all that more magical and enjoyable.

My album includes pages from our travel to Florida, the four main Disney parks (Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Hollywood Studios, and Animal Kingdom), the two main Universal Parks (largely the Wizarding World of Harry Potter but also a few other snippets like Dr Seuss and Jurassic Park), and our hotel (we stayed at Port Orleans Riverside), covering about twelve days with lots of detail. But nothing in the class is so specific that you need to have the same experience and memories. Everything is based on tailoring the inspiration to what will suit you, and that may be a theme park trip that becomes a theme park album like mine, or it could be another type of holiday or intimidating event to scrapbook, or you could use the inspiration from each page for completely unrelated photos you’re scrapping in a variety of albums. There’s no wrong way to participate!

All my classes include permanent access to the class materials and access to a private message board to chat and share what you’ve made.

Class starts Wednesday the 16th of August and runs through the end of September, but there is absolutely no need to keep to that specific schedule. The materials can (and should!) be viewed at your own pace and you can return to them at any time. You can choose your preferred currency: $30 US dollars or £23 British pounds. If neither of those is your home currency, you can check exchange rates at XE and use either button. It will automatically convert to your own currency and you do not need to do anything special. You can pay by credit or debit card or from a Paypal account.

Although the class does not begin until the 16th, when your class registration is processed (within 24 hours of payment), you’ll find a resource in the classroom to keep you entertained while you wait: there is a section with all the Disney and Harry Potter related videos I’ve published in the past, including not just the few from this trip but also many pages from previous trips to Disneyland in California and the Warner Brothers Harry Potter Studio Tour.

(For those who also do Learn Something New each September, the two will overlap. While I wouldn’t overlap two classes featuring full size pages, I keep Learn Something New very small and true to its original aim of no more than ten minutes per day, so in this case the schedule feels fine.)

If you have any questions at any time, don’t hesitate to send me an email.

I can’t wait to see you in class. Or should I say see ya real soon!

Comment [97]

Happy Valentine’s Day! To celebrate, I have a little something sweet for you. Sign up for any shimelle.com online class today, and you’ll receive a $5 credit to use toward a new class any time in 2017. There is one coming up very soon, actually! But you have all year to use the credit, and classes available are as low as $8.

Find all the available online scrapbooking classes right here!

I hope your day is lovely!

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After six exciting scrapbooking challenges over the weekend (those remain open, by the way) I’m thrilled to share with you a new class for November. In working on this project, I’ve broken down design into smaller thoughts than I have previously, and I’ve actually discovered so many little reasons I do particular things that I’d never really thought about consciously. In contrast to The 20 Project, in creating the pages for this class I really took my time and consider all the decisions I make along the way. What makes a page too busy or too bare to my eye? Why do I feel compelled to add dimension somewhere on the page? What role does texture play when choosing my embellishments? What makes me include a variety of shades of one colour rather than keeping everything an absolutely exact match? And from that comes this new class: Design Decisions.

Class starts Wednesday, the 9th of November and ends Friday, the 25th of November. All shimelle.com classes include permanent access to the materials so there is no rush to complete everything in that time.

Design Decisions includes fifteen extended-length process videos with a focus on the choices we make in designing scrapbook pages. For example, both you and I might start by deciding to make a page with Halloween photos, but from there our decisions have many things to consider: how many photos do we want to include? What size will we print them? What mood do we want to convey? How can we achieve that mood through colour, products, and placement on the page? The videos answer these questions and share design decisions that work for balanced, attractive, and meaningful pages with a variety of techniques.

But Design Decisions is not just videos: each video is accompanied by a full-colour PDF file that gives you a desk reference to the particular decisions made that day. The PDFs include large, printable page sketches, design notes, and photos of the pages shown in the videos as well as additional scrapbook pages that employ relevant design principles. All the videos are my own pages, but a few of my favourite scrappers have also contributed pages to the PDFs to share how the design decisions work in a variety of scrapping styles.

Design Decisions is $25 US dollars. To see what that may be in your local currency, check XE.

Email Address for Class:

If you’re new to classes here, it works like this: sign up at any time on this page. Within 24 hours, you’ll receive an email with your login name and password to access the class on our private forum. From the 9th of November to the 25th, you’ll receive emails with the class materials, which are also posted on the forum so you can choose which method is easiest for you. The forum is also a place to chat with other participants and share any pages you make. If you’ve taken classes here before, the class will be added to your existing account. If you sign up after the 25th of November, you won’t receive daily emails but will have full access to all the class materials to work through at your own pace.

Any other questions, feel free to get in touch by email or in the comments. I’d love to see you in class!

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Sometimes I love a project that focuses on one specific story for several weeks. And other times I feel like my list of things I want to do is so long and unconnected, I might as well be chopping it up and putting it in a hat. I’ve often thought about that in my head, but this is really the first time I decided I would really and truly make it work in a literal sense. It’s called The 20 Project.

20 items on my scrapping to-do list.
20 new scrapbook pages.
20 videos, each 20 minutes long.
And you’re welcome to join me for the full adventure – it’s $20.

When I chopped up my to-do list to go into the hat, it included things like
…using a kit I purchased but have let sit on my shelf ever since it arrived.
…whittling down a day of 100+ photos to a feasible number that still tells the story in full.
…sorting out an overflow of paper scraps into quick and easy page kits.
…stamping enough to get past my ‘I maybe bought too many stamps’ guilt.
…becoming happier about using portrait and landscape shots on the same page.
…scrapping with a colour wheel to get more interesting combinations from my stash.
…making a dent in my collection of Project Life cards.
…switching up my title techniques to have a bit more variety without completely changing my style.
…and twelve other everyday scrapbooking dilemmas that sometimes leave us all stumped at our desk when we wish we were actually sticking bits of pretty paper to other bits of pretty paper.

This class is primarily video based, but each video is accompanied by a short PDF with photos of the finished layout and a few brief notes, so it’s easy to remember the key elements covered without having to watch the full twenty minutes again.

The pages created cover a variety of topics, including baby and toddler photos but also travel (both people and scenery), home and neighbourhood (cooking, collections, parks and gardens), wedding, hobbies, and everyday life documentation. Some pages include supplies from my own collections with American Crafts, while others do not and use a range of brands across the scrapbooking and stamping industries. You do not need to use the same supplies to follow along with the challenges and techniques. Most of the pages are single-page 12×12 in format, but there are a few double pages either as two 12×12s or as one 12×12 and one pocket page.

The photos shown here are indicative of my scrapping style but are not the twenty pages created for The 20 Project. I’m excited to share all-new material with you in class!

The 20 Project starts on Wednesday, 3 August 2016. You may join at any time, including after the class has finished, but signing up before the third will give you the full live experience of receiving class materials by email and joining in the conversations on the private classroom forum as we go through the twenty days of materials. The final video will be sent on Friday, 26 August. (There are no videos on Sundays or the first Saturday.)

You can sign up now and pay by credit or debit card or from your Paypal balance (you do not need a Paypal account to join in). It’s $20 in US Dollars, and xe lets you see that amount in your currency if you need to check. You’ll receive a welcome message within 24 hours, and if you don’t, please do not hesitate to email me. If the email address on your Paypal account is not the one you want to use for receiving class materials, please let me know either by email or leaving a ‘note to seller’ when you check out.

Any other questions, just let me know! And look forward to a short video on YouTube this week that shares the style of this project. I’d love for you to join me in making August crafty and productive!

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A brand new online class starts Monday – The Scrapbook Process! It’s never too late to join in, but this weekend would be a great time to sign up if you want the full live class experience, of course.

You can find the full written details about the class here, and the video above gives that information in a bit more conversational style!

To sign up in US Dollars:

Email Address for Class:

To sign up in UK Pounds:

Email Address for Class:

In other announcement type news: we’re just one week away from National Scrapbooking Day! Next weekend, there will be a full schedule of challenges here to keep you inspired! Challenges will remain open for the full week and following weekend, so you’ll have about ten days to participate if you like! Hope to see you then too.

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It’s (almost) finally time for an all new class here. It’s been a while since I’ve developed a big workshop with daily emails and all new content and a specific direction. I’m excited, and I really hope you’ll find it worth the wait!

My favourite classes all come from a key personal experience in my own crafting. Journal your Christmas came from keeping my own diary one year, Cover to Cover came from my frustration at stacks of layouts and no order and no easy way to show someone what scrapbooking could really be. Both of those experiences completely changed the way I worked going forward, and I’ve had more changes in the past year as I got my head round this craft again. The changes all came in my process, and most importantly realising that one single process is not the way I work best on every project.

I kept coming back to this word, process, and it wasn’t lost on me that a film of a scrapbook page being made from start to finish is now commonly known as a process video. We tend to think of a process video as just one layout being created, and like I talked about so much in Cover to Cover, one layout at a time is not where I find the greatest value in this craft. I love the book in scrapbook. I needed a way to go beyond the page at a time of a process video and share how each of those layouts is just one small part of my process of creating a bigger and more valuable project. That’s where this class comes into fruition.

The Scrapbook Process is an online class that begins Monday the 2nd of May 2016 and runs through to the end of the month. It includes 22 videos, each accompanied by a PDF, emailed directly to you Monday to Friday, plus a weekly review sheet for weekends to help you put the ideas into practice with your own scrapping, no matter the style or subjects you scrap. The class also includes a private forum to chat and share your work with other participants, and you’re welcome to email me at any time to discuss anything you’d rather not take to the full group. Like all shimelle.com classes, this course comes with permanent access, which is something I take very seriously and I’m happy to discuss with you if you have any questions about what that means here. I’ve been teaching online for twelve years now and all of those classes have archives available to the participants. Work at any pace and return at any time, so if the schedule of materials throughout May doesn’t suit you, you can make it work with a better time on your calendar.

In those twenty-two videos, I’ll take you through three specific albums in depth, including creating new pages (one and two page layouts are both covered) as well as other relevant topics dealing with printing photos, selecting supplies, and writing your stories. One is a plain old family chronological album with no specific theme and the other two albums have a narrower focus, but I promise you do not need to have an album with a similar topic to apply the ideas to whatever themes you want to document. Each of the three albums has a different process, each with its pros and cons, each with its way of being just right for a given situation. You may find one process is the best for how you work or you may find it useful to flit from one to the other. Both options are worthwhile! Along the way, we will talk extensively about making it your process, and that means that everything is just how it works best for you, from choosing what to scrap to creating the embellishments on your page. This is definitely not a ‘now do this just like me’ class and more a class for picking, choosing, and adapting to find things that not only work for you right now but invigorate your process and leave you wanting to push everything else aside and scrap!

There are no specific supplies needed for this course, and it’s quite likely you’ll want to use supplies you already have on hand.

I’ll share a bit more about The Scrapbook Process throughout April as we near the first day of class, but I think that’s enough food for thought for now. The class is $30 US dollars or £20 UK pounds, and if neither of those is your currency you can click on either option and it will automatically convert to your currency. XE gives currency exchange rates if you want to see what that works out to in numbers that make sense in other countries.

To sign up in US Dollars:

Email Address for Class:

To sign up in UK Pounds:

Email Address for Class:

Thank you so much for the tremendous response to the early bird offer. I had hoped to open the forum today but today we have been finding a remedy for a technical hiccup that was preventing some participants from accessing their classes. First thing Tuesday, I will verify that everything is indeed working and open the forum! Don’t worry, there are no class materials until the 2nd of May, so it’s just for friendly chat between now and then.

Happy scrapping!

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