Though I’m sure New Year was only three days ago, it appears to be February, and that means we’ve just finished our first full month of the 2014 inspiration and education programme at Two Peas. I love working with the Garden Girl team and this year’s programme has been so inspiring for me to create new content. But it is different to what we were doing in 2013, and we know change is difficult, even with the random little things in life, so I wanted to bring everything the team has done this month together in one review post. Fair warning: it turns out that a full month of content makes for one epically long post. But this includes all of Glitter Girl’s videos and layouts this month, plus a look at all the team projects and links to each of those to see more. I hope you find it useful!
Image sources, clockwise from top left: 101 woonideen, Studio 404 (includes links to different lettering artists), Melanie DeFazio, House and Hold, Avotakka, Sparrow & Co via DesignSponge, Rosellen Ralmond, GaliaAlena.
One new thing for the team this year is a monthly mood board chosen by our fearless leader, Kristina. The January mood board was certainly wintry, and that might have something to do with the exceptionally snowy winter hitting Two Peas HQ while there has been just gallons of rain here in London. (To be fair, London can’t cope with a couple inches of snow once a year, so who knows what would happen in a true snowmageddon reality. The capital might just crumble while Scotland laughs at our southern failings.)
Image sources, clockwise from top left: Sandra Kleist, Michael Alberstat for House and Home, Antique and Vintage Woods, Oksana Nazarchuk, Noel Shiveley, Saartje Knits, Sasha Hollaway.
We’ve had monthly topics to guide our page topics for the five or so years I’ve been a Garden Girl (this month’s theme was family) but the mood board is a new concept for the full team. Last year, four Garden Girls worked with a mood board they created each week for the In the Mood to Scrap video series, but this time there is one board for all of us to work with for the full month. I looked at the mood board in two parts: first gathering textures from the photos, like natural woodgrains and knitted patterns.
The second part was the colour scheme. For most of my pages this month, I worked with aqua and brown, accenting with other colours from the board, but once I even switched it up for aqua and pink. I’m pretty sure it’s not really possible for me to make it through an entire month without some aqua and pink together!
With this mood board in mind, we then have four weekly themes that structure the month, with videos every Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Glitter Girl is still on Wednesdays and there’s a new series from Jen Gallacher on Fridays called Make it Meaningful. Glitter Girl’s format has changed just a little this year: after two full years of taking her weekly topics from the message boards, the topics were getting a bit thin on the ground and there were some more detailed scrapbooking dilemmas she felt the need to solve. But not to panic: the overall premise of saving the world one crafty dilemma at a time still stands, and she still has the Adhesive Avenger on hand to help too. He’s useful like that. Glitter Girl still reads the message boards and the comments in the gallery and on YouTube, and she still keeps an eye on the problems posted, but the new format is just enough of a change to keep things exciting behind the camera, and I hope you enjoy her adventures throughout 2014.
How do these four weekly themes work then?
Throughout the first theme of the month, we embraced the ‘inspired’ concept: telling our stories through art and design. This is the week that saw the most literal translations from the mood board, although we took inspiration from that throughout the whole month. Each of us working on a project for this first week picked up on a different artistic element we could share, so Inspired week is great for giving yourself a creative kick, and might be your favourite week on the schedule if you prefer the artsier side to scrapbooking.
Wilna Furstenberg kicked off our programme for the year with two videos: one on how to make the cover for this beautiful minibook in textured winter whites, and one for the interior pages with large black and white photos and beautifully layered embellishments. (Find both videos by scrolling down the page here.) Celine Navarro selected woodgrains and navy blues for this page on her love of winter days. Jen Kinkade dressed up basic tags with watercolours and turned her hand to script writing with this project. Paige Evans took inspiration from homespun quilts and shared her paper quilting techniques with a tutorial video. And Jen Gallacher started her brand new weekly video series, Make it Meaningful, with the challenge to create your own family crest to display on a scrapbook page or frame in your home.
Glitter Girl’s contribution to this Inspired week came in two parts: first, a look at how I translate a digital mood board to a selection of physical scrapbook supplies I can put to use on several pages. The supplies you see selected at the beginning of this video appear throughout my projects in January, and now I just have a few items left on my tray, so it was a pretty good approximation of what I would need for a month of Glitter Girl projects. The camera angle is different for this part of the video because I really wanted to show you this process in as close to my own viewpoint as possible. I don’t look at all my supplies from overhead all the time. When I’m pulling together inspiration, I constantly walk around my desk and look at things from a literal different angle to see what catches my eye. It’s one of the most invigorating parts of the creative process for me, and I hope sharing that look at how it works for me might be helpful. (I say ‘invigorating’ and yet the narration really emphasises out easily I get out of breath right now. Please forgive me – I’m having a terrible time taking care of my voice this winter, so all of my January videos seem to bounce between being out of breath and being completely hoarse. Thank goodness I don’t make a living as an opera singer!) My biggest inspiration when putting together this physical mood board was to mix two colour families: the warm, dark neutrals of the woodgrains and the icy, cool tones of the aqua shades.
I think in future months I might film this same process and just share it here on the blog and my own YouTube channel, as it wouldn’t necessarily add value to Glitter Girl’s lessons to repeat the same process every month, but some of you might be interested in seeing how each month’s mood board works for me. Thoughts? Let me know if that is something you would care to see on screen each month or if once was enough for it to all make sense.
The second part of the video is the creation of this Christmassy scrapbook page from start to finish. Interestingly, Celine and I chose a few things in common – even the picture of putting our feet up on a cold day! And yet there is quite a bit of difference between the two layouts. I find that sort of thing really interesting – what happens when multiple people start from the same inspiration piece. That big bokeh photo of the Christmas tree really makes me happy when I see this page. I need to remember to do that more often!
So all of that made up Glitter Girl Adventure 102: Inspired Colour Curation.
During the second week of the month, we take on the Storytellers challenge: using tools to tell our story. That doesn’t necessarily mean tools like punches and die-cutters. It refers to anything that is a building block as we make our pages. That makes a little more sense with a week of examples.
Lisa Dickinson started the week with a video on mixing words and graphics to create an ‘In Review’ page to tell the story of the year just finished. Nancy Damiano and Stephanie Bryan both created layouts in their own style inspired by the look of infographics: Nancy mixing journaling cards and textures and Stephanie working in layers of hexagons. Jill Sprott shared a video on using timelines for your journaling, and Jen’s next episode of Make it Meaningful focused on page ideas for offering advice to a loved one. Lots of tools and not one of them a punch of a die-cutter! Although those kind of tools make come up from time to time as well, what we really aim for with Storytellers week is a way to help you realise all the tricks in your arsenal, so you can continue to be creative with the way you tell your stories on paper, be it through the design, the journaling, or the photography.
Glitter Girl focused on group photos this week, like that annual challenge of getting a picture of the entire extended family in front of the Christmas tree using the self-timer. It always includes plenty of outtakes in my world, and sometimes those outtakes have some of my favourite moments and the truest facial expressions, so they can be just as scrapworthy as the final winning shot. The first part of this episode shares a few pages that feature self-timer photos over the years and some thoughts on this subject.
The second part of this episode shares this page from start to finish, putting some definite reality into my Christmas pages to tell the whole story for years to come. (Place your bets now on how many years until my nephew gets really cross with me for keeping that top photo. But I think he’s adorable there, of course!)
That Storytellers focus makes up Glitter Girl Adventure 103: Family Photo Faux Pas.
Our third week is dedicated to Moments: the stories we just have to scrapbook. I love this sort of topic – those times when you are thinking through the journaling or the page design as soon as you take the photo because the moment is so fabulous, you never want to forget a single detail. This is the electricity of scrapbooking to me. It literally makes the muscles in my upper arms tense up and my hands go into some sort of post-cheerleader spirit fingers mode, just itching to print that picture and get cutting, pasting, and writing.
We started the week with a video from Nancy Damiano, which at first glance is about a trip to a tree farm, but when reading Nancy’s words on the page, it is very much more. Beautiful pages from Lisa Dickinson and Jen Kinkade showcase two very different styles of capturing winter moments on a scrapbook page. Laura Craigie contributed the next video, with ideas for turning a standard school portrait into a real time capsule of a child. Jen’s Make it Meaningful episode took its inspiration from the moments you capture relationships on camera. Celine Navarro rolled the clock back with an older moment, scrapbooking a childhood memory.
Paige Evans shared how she balances the typical moments in her family adventures with her detailed scrapbooking style, and Stephanie Bryan shared our first Project Life spread of the year, capturing a few weeks of moments in her life.
Glitter Girl took on a pretty big moment for this week’s layout. I braved scrapbooking the day I found out I was pregnant. I have to say this was one of the more intimidating episodes to upload! But it one of the most gratifying pages I’ve ever made, and I’m really happy I took the time to tell this story of a day turned from so very bad to so very good. If this episode helps even just one person out there feel a little like that, then it’s worth the trepidation of sharing quite so much!
This layout tells the story of one day across two pages, with one full 12×12 page and one pocket page. The pocket page conceals even more journaling, with one part of the story I didn’t want to be obvious to everyone who looks at the page. It’s hidden simply with two journaling cards and bit of hidden washi tape. The use of several journaling cards really helped me tell this story, because I would naturally feel compelled to change the topic when moving to the new card, rather than going on a bit too long on the negatives before I turned a corner to get to the happier part of the day.
All that makes up Glitter Girl Adventure 104: Tear-Free Tell All.
Our fourth week of the month is called Capture. In this week, we focus on everyday stories, like scrapbooking chronologically and approaches like Project Life. If you’re doing an everyday documentation project like Project Life or something similar in 2014, this last week of the month is there to boost your productivity and help you end the month with at least some of your stories in the album!
Celine started the week with a fab video sharing how she catches up on a week of Project Life in under thirty minutes. Mel Blackburn and Laura Craigie both shared traditional pages capturing everyday moments with their family. Stephanie Bryan’s first Garden Girl video shows how she creates interactive scrapbook pages. Jen’s Make it Meaningful episode shares a minibook to make for a loved one. Laura also shared a second page documenting some more serious thoughts as she aims to catch the smallest details of her son’s first year.
Two more Project Life pages round off the Capture week: Stephanie shares how she works with a page and a half when that’s the best match for her photos, and Mel Blackburn shares a double page from a week of travel without relying on travel-themed products to complete the look, opting to get more from her favourite supplies.
Glitter Girl’s latest adventure is another with one standard 12×12 and one pocketed page, this time with 3×3 square pockets. This whole idea of being ‘caught up’ isn’t really something that has kicked in for me in the years I’ve been scrapping. Sometimes I want to scrapbook something straight away, and other times I like to go back and tell a story from the past with some distance, which I find adds to how I tell the story. I’m glad there are no scrapbook police to show up on my doorstep and arrest me for not worrying about or ever wanting to be caught up with my scrapping. Nothing would frighten me more than being out of stories to tell!
While many scrappers use divided page protectors to scrapbook by the week or month, there is certainly no reason to be limited to that. In this case, the pockets showcase a full year of memories, divided so each row is one season. These are all photos that I wanted to include in my album for 2013, but were really quite minor and didn’t warrant a full page on their own. But together, they tell the story of all those simple things I am happy to have back in our little world since we moved back to the place that feels like home.
That’s Glitter Girl Adventure 105: Seasons and Schedules.
That brought our January to a close and we’ll start with a new mood board for February tomorrow, heading back to that inspired topic for the first week and so on. January included seventeen videos and a total of thirty projects, so that might explain why it took a bit longer than the average blog post to wrap it all up here. I hope something here catches your eye and wish you a very creative February!
The Garden Girls are the design team at Two Peas in a Bucket. You can always find our latest projects in the designer garden, including both layouts and videos. Any time you purchase a product by adding it to your bucket directly from the shopping list below a project, you support that designer’s work, and we thank you for that! We know that it’s not always possible to support your favourite designers with purchases, and we also appreciate when you take the time to leave a comment, like, or thumbs up a project or video. The 2014 Garden Girls are Amy Tan, Celine Navarro, Jennifer Gallacher, Jennifer Kinkade, Jill Sprott, Kristina Nicolai-White, Laura Craigie, Lisa Dickinson, Melanie Blackburn, Nancy Damiano, Paige Evans, Shimelle Laine, Stephanie Bryan, and Wilna Furstenberg. Two Peas also has its own blog and YouTube channel where you can subscribe for regular updates in this year’s inspiration and education programme.