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

Our travel day is getting closer and closer and with that comes another countdown special! This time it’s a bundle of three classics: True Stories, Pretty Paper Party, and Scrapbook Remix!

True Stories is all about scrapbook journaling. It covers 15 different strategies for telling your stories on your pages.

Pretty Paper Party is a love letter to paper and includes plenty of patterns and lots of layers. It’s a mix of PDF lessons with pages from a range of talented scrapbookers and videos from me sharing the tips while making pages.

Scrapbook Remix celebrates mixing collections and designs. It also includes contributions from special guests in the PDF files plus eight process videos to show how the pieces all come together.

All three of these classes come from my Garden Girl days and as such feature patterned papers and embellishments from collections and even companies that are no longer on the shelves, but all the ideas can certainly be translated to currently available supplies, or you might have an older stash and it’s absolutely okay to get those older papers out and craft with them now!

At normal price, this set of three classes would cost $58 USD, but for 24 hours only, you can pick up the set of three for just $30. Everything includes permanent access, so you don’t need to rush through them and can go in any order.

SORRY! This offer has expired!

If you have taken online classes with me before, you can sign into your account at http://www.shimelle.com/forum to see which classes you have taken. All of my classes include permanent access, so you can go back to anything you’ve taken even ten years ago and access all the PDFs and videos. (If you don’t remember your username and/or password, send me an email!)

If you’ve never taken an online class here, welcome! The countdown discounts will be a great time to create a line up of resources to walk you through many aspects of this craft! I don’t offer sales very often, and for the next week, the offers will change every 24 hours. But it’s important to know this is not an automatic, automated purchase. You’ll get a Paypal receipt email pretty much instantly, and then you’ll get an email from me with your login details once I’ve processed your registration. This is usually within 24 hours, and that should certainly be the case from now until next Thursday evening. If you do not hear from me within 48 hours, then something is going astray so please email me and let me know. Thank you!

Whether you’re new or not, if you choose to pay from your Paypal account and the email address you use on Paypal is not where you want me to send your class messages, please email me so I can update that for you. Be sure to include both email addresses in your note so I can link up your payment to the correct address for your class account. Thanks!

The third day of countdown discounts brings a class that’s ready to stop you just staring at your paper willing it to do something and ready to cut and stick things into place It’s Start with a Sketch, an online scrapbooking class with 15 sketches and 45 videos, so you can see three different ways each sketch can be interpreted. From there, you’ll be ready to look at every scrapbook page sketch in a new light!

Start with a Sketch is usually $30USD but for 24 hours only, it’s just $20.

Sorry! This offer has ended!

If you have taken online classes with me before, you can sign into your account at http://www.shimelle.com/forum to see which classes you have taken. All of my classes include permanent access, so you can go back to anything you’ve taken even ten years ago and access all the PDFs and videos. (If you don’t remember your username and/or password, send me an email!)

If you’ve never taken an online class here, welcome! The countdown discounts will be a great time to create a line up of resources to walk you through many aspects of this craft! I don’t offer sales very often, and for the next week, the offers will change every 24 hours. But it’s important to know this is not an automatic, automated purchase. You’ll get a Paypal receipt email pretty much instantly, and then you’ll get an email from me with your login details once I’ve processed your registration. This is usually within 24 hours, and that should certainly be the case from now until next Thursday evening. If you do not hear from me within 48 hours, then something is going astray so please email me and let me know. Thank you!

Whether you’re new or not, if you choose to pay from your Paypal account and the email address you use on Paypal is not where you want me to send your class messages, please email me so I can update that for you. Be sure to include both email addresses in your note so I can link up your payment to the correct address for your class account. Thanks!

The second countdown discount is ready now for the next 24 hours! It’s the Half and Half online scrapbooking class for half price – it’s usually $15 and today it’s just $7.50.

This class is all about page composition using two patterns or colours to make up the background – two equal halves of the page. Half and Half includes 12 full length videos, and a few shorter segments:
10 12×12 single page layouts, each broken down in its own extended video plus a simple summary PDF.
2 12×12 double page layouts, again each in their own video + summary sheet.
A selection of short videos that adapt some of the ideas to 4×6 and 3×4 cards to create coordinated pocket pages.

Sorry! This offer has ended!

If you have taken online classes with me before, you can sign into your account at http://www.shimelle.com/forum to see which classes you have taken. All of my classes include permanent access, so you can go back to anything you’ve taken even ten years ago and access all the PDFs and videos. (If you don’t remember your username and/or password, send me an email!)

If you’ve never taken an online class here, welcome! The countdown discounts will be a great time to create a line up of resources to walk you through many aspects of this craft! I don’t offer sales very often, and for the next week, the offers will change every 24 hours. But it’s important to know this is not an automatic, automated purchase. You’ll get a Paypal receipt email pretty much instantly, and then you’ll get an email from me with your login details once I’ve processed your registration. This is usually within 24 hours, and that should certainly be the case from now until next Thursday evening. If you do not hear from me within 48 hours, then something is going astray so please email me and let me know. Thank you!

Whether you’re new or not, if you choose to pay from your Paypal account and the email address you use on Paypal is not where you want me to send your class messages, please email me so I can update that for you. Be sure to include both email addresses in your note so I can link up your payment to the correct address for your class account. Thanks!

This time next week, I’ll be somewhere magical in a real ‘with my favourite people in my favourite place’ moment, and that means I’m going to miss three of my regular scrappy livestreams while I’m away. To countdown this last week till we’re finally on our way, I’m offering a different discount on existing online scrapbooking classes, so there will be no shortage of crafty video content for you to watch while I’m away! Each offer will be available for just 24 hours, and will change to something else in the evenings UK time.

Today’s special offer is a better-than-two-for-one discount on two classes that go way back but cover really useful and timeless design lessons. Hitchhiker’s Guide to Scrapbooking and Glitter Girl’s Scrapbook Survival Guide are usually $25 USD each, but for 24 hours you can purchase both together for just $20 total.

Sorry! This offer has closed!

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Scrapbooking includes 42 scrapbook pages – including both single and double layouts. The pages are divided into 5 chapters, and each chapter has an in-depth video. There are plenty of 4×6 photos, with a few other sizes thrown in here and there. The guide gave me the chance to take all the things I really love when I’m scrapping – starting points, paper combinations, sketches, 4×6 photos, layering – and combine them into a single project with everything in the same place.

Glitter Girl’s Scrapbook Survival Guide also includes 42 different layouts across 5 chapters, but has 10 videos. Glitter Girl’s YouTube series took a question from the scrappy community and answered it with a demonstration of building a new scrapbook page. The workshop format allows for a more in-depth response to five big questions of scrapbooking, from photos to papers and stickers to tools and onto developing confidence in your own personal style.

If you have taken online classes with me before, you can sign into your account at http://www.shimelle.com/forum to see which classes you have taken. All of my classes include permanent access, so you can go back to anything you’ve taken even ten years ago and access all the PDFs and videos. (If you don’t remember your username and/or password, send me an email!)

If you’ve never taken an online class here, welcome! The countdown discounts will be a great time to create a line up of resources to walk you through many aspects of this craft! I don’t offer sales very often, and for the next week, the offers will change every 24 hours. But it’s important to know this is not an automatic, automated purchase. You’ll get a Paypal receipt email pretty much instantly, and then you’ll get an email from me with your login details once I’ve processed your registration. This is usually within 24 hours, and that should certainly be the case from now until next Thursday evening. If you do not hear from me within 48 hours, then something is going astray so please email me and let me know. Thank you!

Whether you’re new or not, if you choose to pay from your Paypal account and the email address you use on Paypal is not where you want me to send your class messages, please email me so I can update that for you. Be sure to include both email addresses in your note so I can link up your payment to the correct address for your class account. Thanks!

Sorry! This offer has closed!
Both classes – usually $50 total, now $20 total for just 24 hours.

Today I’m delighted to share a beautiful project from newlywed Kirsty, who is out and about seeing the world on her honeymoon as we speak! Kirsty has been around this corner of the internet for many years and made beautiful Christmas journals and scrapbook pages in a variety of classes, and I have loved seeing her style evolve over the years. Always lovely and always filled with storytelling! I hope you enjoy Kirsty’s work too. -Shimelle

When I’m scrapbooking, I love taking inspiration from my favourite designers, and Shimelle’s layouts are always an absolute go-to. Even though, in some ways, our styles are quite different, I feel like our philosophies are very much in line, especially when it comes to sharing stories and journalling. And when it comes to layers!

Before making this page, I was looking at layouts I had saved on Instagram, and I was struck by the layouts by Shimelle that had been my favourites: I had mostly saved layouts with lots of layering, single photos and lots of beautiful clusters and confetti sprinkles that make Shimelle’s layouts so recognisable.

I scrapbook because I want to record and share my memories: big, rambling unedited memories where my story is often lifted straight from a journal entry with tangents and waffle and everything good thing. I like to think these digressions and meanderings are where my thoughts and feelings and personality lies. I almost always start with a story, pull some photos to match it and then pull supplies to complement the photo, and in making this page, my process was no different. I decided to document a day we spent hiking in Colombia, exploring the incredible palms in the Valle de Corcora. Travel scrapbooking is my absolute favourite; spending time with such wonderful memories is a real form of escapism and joy.

I had a few strands of inspiration to get me started: the first, as I mentioned, was my journaling which I pulled from my travel journal. I printed the photo which goes with the story of this day and then I cast my eye back over the layouts I’d saved to jump start my creative process.

This layout will sit in an album (or series of albums) I’m working on about our backpacking trip around the world. We spent seven months exploring and I kept a travel journal of all our experiences and took millions of pictures. As I document our adventures in a scrapbook, it’s lovely to have my story already written, and I’ve been pulling out my favourite moments and sections of my diary to drop into scrapbook layouts. As my journaling was all written in the moment, I can make pages about these experiences for a long time to come without worrying about forgetting the details which are important to me.

To give the album coherent and add a bit of flow, I’m doing each layout on a white cardstock background and including an envelope with my journaling somewhere on the page. With these elements already decided, I pulled a whole variety of 3×4 journaling cards in colours which complemented my photo – I don’t work by collection, instead preferring to go on colour and design. Mixing manufacturers can creat so many wonderful new colour palettes and vibes! I set to work shuffling the cards about and arranging them into a slightly messy stack behind my photo. I play around with them, adjusting angles, testing different colours against each other, framing my picture in different ways and once I have an arrangement I like, that’s what I stick together.

This is actually most of my page done: I included my envelope of journaling in my layering so that the story can be pulled out to be read, my photo is the top layer in my stack of cards and the white background is my frame for everything. Time for final details: a phase I really love!

I added my title and a few little clusters of embellishment to frame my design. I using travel themed stamps, so I made myself some little stamped tags, and I added some elements which I repeat on all my travel pages: a camera, a plane, our initials and a geotag. Having watched Shimelle for literally years, I have long since adopted her system of placing embellishment clusters and repeating elements to help your eye move around the page. It’s an absolute go-to technique for me! Finally, add enamel dots. There are few things in life which cannot be improved by added enamel dots. Enamel dots are life.

With the date and location added, that’s my page complete; I love getting travel pages into my album, adding more to the story and building up this beautiful record of our adventures. I have got plenty of extra photos from this day spent hiking in Colombia so my next aim will be to create a pocket page to sit alongside this one so that I can include all my favourite pictures from this experience.

If you’d like to give this idea a try, you can use any 3×4 cards you have, or even trip down bigger sheets of paper into 3×4 blocks. It can be really freeing to do this with a few papers and play around with different orders of patterns and colour in a stack of layers. As a handy tip, I’d suggested keeping your layers close together and any angles small. This helps to create a sense of detail and intricacy. Pulling patterns and colours which mimic textures and tones from your photos will ensure it all looks cohesive.

Kirsty Mansell lives in London and has been scrapbooking for the past 15 years. A maths teacher by day, she uses any school holiday she can to travel and explore the world. She loves to make the most of life, and is currently planning and crafting for her wedding alongside leading her Girlguiding unit, drinking tea and, of course, scrapbooking about her adventures. Story is at the heart of her layouts and she enjoys finding creative ways to include journaling on her pages, making the writing a key element of the design. Kirsty is never happier than when using layers and clustering little details to complete a layout in her signature style, and she shares all her work over on Instagram.

I almost don’t start talking about Christmas until November, but there’s one exception to that rule and it’s SUPPLIES FOR CHRISTMAS ALBUMS! Today I’m sharing suggestions for supplies if you’re following along with Journal your Christmas or going freestyle making your own Christmas album project. Please keep in mind this is not a list where you’re meant to get one of everything! Each section has notes to explain what you’ll need so you can adapt to your style. AND STAMP PRE-ORDERS ARE LIVE! For just one week, you can preorder your 2022 Journal your Christmas stamp set, so scroll to the bottom of this post to order that directly from me. All the other supplies linked are from Scrapbook.com and linked with affiliate links. Thanks!

Albums:
6×8 is my favourite size for this project, so all these suggestions are that size. Keep in mind you need a decently thick binder if you want to daily entries throughout December – think full album with smaller pages rather than mini book. It’s a classic rookie situation to get to the 15th of December and realise no more pages will fit in your binder. (It’s okay – then you just get a volume 2 and finish that way!) I ordered the pink velvet album earlier this year and earmarked it for this project, but they have since brought out the velvet in red and green so I might change my mind. But right now I am planning on the pink. Choose one album you like and enough page protectors in the styles you like. Some of them fold out which is new this year and I’m excited about that option for including more photos without having to make them all tiny.

Patterned Paper:
Here’s where we get into embracing your personal style! I love that lots of the brands do 6×8 paper pads for these collections now because it means you can mostly just work from a paper pad or two (or more) and not need to worry about cutting down lots of full sheets. Ask yourself if you prefer tradition red and green only colours or if you would like to add in more shades like pink, aqua, and turquoise. That will help you choose which patterned papers are best for you! You can also think about whether you prefer clean designs or things with a more collaged or textured feel. The Echo Park and Simple Stories collections here are cleaner; Vicki Boutin, Prima, and 49 & Market are more textured and painterly. If all of these seem too bright, take a look at the other options from Simple Stories – they have multiple collections but I liked Mix and A-Mingle way better than the others this year. Your personal style might suit the others better and that’s okay! You can still use the supplies the same way.

I’ve added some 12×12 sheets that are cut apart you might fancy even in a smaller album. If storage is an issue, just cut them down as soon as they arrive.

I also really love woodgrains and vellum in my Christmas album, so I’ve included five different woodgrain papers (might be a case of ignoring the other side and that’s absolutely fine) and some vellum options if you like those as well!

Embellishments:
I always find it easier to start with paper then move to the embellishments, so if you’ve chosen your papers already, then you can choose the embellishments that will work best. It can be as simple as adding the embellishments from the collection to match the papers you picked – so if you went for Santa Claus Lane papers, get the Santa Claus Lane stickers and die cuts.

Vicki Boutin’s sticker book is all cardstock stickers (no clear, no washi). Her puffy stickers include tiny numbers! Love that. The Simple Stories sticker book also includes a page of numbers and a page of letters. Make sure you include something for lettering that suits how you scrap: adding some letter stickers, assembling a stack of letter stickers from your stash, or adding a set of letter stamps.

And of course enamel dots! If these two sets sell out there are other options in similar colours, or you could get a whole pack or red and a whole pack of green from the single colour options by Altenew and Doodlebug.

Mixed Media:
If you like working with ink, stamps, and stencils, then this section is for you. These are the colours of ink I use most often in my Christmas journals, but if you have similar colours already in your stash you can stick with those! A red and two shades of green will get you very far in a Christmas style, then add pink, yellow, and aqua if you want to embrace that wider and less traditional colour palette. There are gold, silver, and white glitter options if you like a bit of Christmas sparkle. You can decide if you want all your sparkle to be one colour throughout or if you like a mix. Plus a variety of stencils and boopers and extra booperheads to keep you going!

AND OF COURSE, THIS YEAR’S STAMP SET!
This year’s stamps are a single sheet and they are $15 USD shipped to anywhere in the world. I ship these directly from my house here, so this is a separate purchase from anything linked above. This is a preorder and it will be live for one week only! If you definitely want a set, please place your order now. They will ship out to you as soon as they arrive here so they can arrive with you before we start December.

$15 USD includes worldwide shipping, and if you have any questions on that you can always email me.

Above all else, when you assemble your supplies for Christmas scrapping, remember to stay true to your style and your budget. It is great to use old stash you have on hand. It is also fun to get something new and use it straight away! I’ll help you use what you buy as long as you don’t go too overboard, okay? Awesome.

Thanks friends! See you in November to talk about Christmas more!

Thank you so much for your wonderful enthusiasm for the Use What You Buy concept and this first set of videos featuring stamp sets.

The next focus in this series will be stencils, and it will be available this weekend! Same format: four videos about the same length, around 22 minutes, each featuring a stencil originally featured in the Best of Both Worlds shopping lists, but easy to use with any stencils you may have purchased and not used enough yet to feel like it was a strong investment.

Again I’m trying to steer clear of big specialist tools and extras – best to be able to use your scraps of paper and the ink pad collection you already have, I think! So with the stencils, most of the ideas stick to Distress Oxide inks again. There is some use of acrylic paint and one option to use something thicker like texture paste/embossing paste/thick gesso/glaze, but I include thoughts on what to use for a similar effect if you don’t have those in your stash. You shouldn’t need to do any extra shopping, just use what you’ve already bought!

Just like the stamping class, it will be $5 to buy through September, and once we hit October, it will be $10. So you can sign up right now for $5 and you’ll receive access automatically when it’s live next weekend! (Class pass holders – you do not need to do anything. The class will be added to your account as soon as it’s live.) OR if you missed the stamp class, you can pick up the bundle for $15 (same price – you just don’t need to check out twice) so use the second button for that!

$5 September price for Stencil Focus

$15 Stamp and Stencil bundle

I scrapbook most days and generally scrap about the lives and adventures of my partner, my two best friends who I live with and me. But in January 2022, something very special happened – we adopted THREE dogs! They’d lived together their whole lives and were looking for a forever home. They’re quite old and best buddies. So, Mick, Tom and I decided to go for it and they’re now home with us. Chris, my partner loves to visit regularly – and the pooches love us all so much and have settled incredibly well.

So I now have a whole new topic to scrap – the dogs! We’ve nicknamed them “The 3 Pawmigos” and they really are best of friends. I wanted to create a layout that documented their new adventure and a page all about adopting them so I knew I’d want a lot of journaling and three photos – one of each.

I decided to go with a superb Shimelle design – the half and half! But I wanted to do it a bit different and so I chose my two papers and then adhered them to white Cardstock but on the left, I only adhered the top, bottom and left side, leaving the middle free of adhesive. I then went about layering a ton of florals from Shimelle’s brilliant Never Grow Up from top to bottom in the middle – being careful to only put adhesive on the left sides so it stuck to my left side paper but not the right side.

Once complete, I was left with a big 6×12” pocket, easy access and ready to hold my journaling! I used two sheets from Shimelle’s Journaling Pads for my main journaling – two full pages – one documents them all individually and their characters and the other the tale of bringing them home from Cardiff, South Wales to Manchester, North of England.

To make it easy to pull out the journaling, I added a stitched tag from Shimelle’s Go Now Go collection – the perfect addition! Then I went about about matting my photos – each 3×4” and used some rainbow lined paper from the same journaling pads. I used foam tape around three sides of each photo to lift them off the page.

This then allowed even more journaling in the form of three more tags from Go Now Go and a hello from each dog! I also added a cute mini puffy sticker on each tag from Shimelle’s Box of Crayons!

That left me with one quarter of my half and half grid design layout and I knew I wanted a title incorporating multiple words and the awesome travel board letters from Go Now Go. So I decided to use it as an embellishment area, starting with a stencilled sun burst (which I then proceeded to cover most of up, as we do!) and clustered lots of pieces from various collections and added my title – Departing for Manchester.

This layout was so much fun to create and was really important for me to document – those initial characteristics of our new furbaby’s and how they got here to their new home. I also wanted this layout to be a celebration of my love for Shimelle collections. Because I started scrapbooking only a relatively short time ago, I missed a lot of Shimelle’s collections but I hunted high and low to build up my huge box! Creating this layout, I used pieces (some more than others) from the following Shimelle collections: Never Grow Up, Field Trip, Go Now Go, Glitter Girl, Box of Crayons & Little By Little.

Hi Scrappy Friends! I’m Adam, aka ScrappyAdam in the scrapbooking world! I’ve been scrapbooking almost three years now and it all started with an awesome Disney trip in 2019. Since then, scrapbooking has white literally consumed my life and is firmly a passion, a hobby – and now a job and I couldn’t be happier. It quickly become a hobby to search for all the scrappy goodies and I quickly built up a good stash of goodies – including a huge box dedicated to the wonderful Shimelle! Since then, I’ve started my YouTube channel and quickly passed the first one thousand milestone and my passion for scrapping and the community remains so very much! I own Dotty About Flair, a small UK Based business selling ‘flair’ for the scrapbooking and crafty people out there. I’m also the face behind The Cut Hut, an exciting new venture for 2022 with Paige Evans and myself, bringing pre cut cut files from Paige to the UK and Europe! You can find me on Instagram and YouTube.