Happy Tuesday, everyone, and welcome to another installment of Back to the Future- an ongoing blog feature where I take a hot new scrapbooking collection and combine it with supplies from the archives of gone-but-not-forgotten favorites.

This time around I'm still working with supplies from my last Two Peas order, purchased with the small amount of credit that I receive each month as a Garden Girl (I'm into full disclosure and all that. :) ). Those items included the chipboard and cut apart sheets from the four new mid-release collections by My Mind's Eye, and you can see them all pictured here. I've also put together a shopping list of exactly what was in that order, should you care to browse it over at Two Peas.

Today's layout uses the Oxford Lane colorway from the Kate & Co collection and was totally inspired by this sketch at Elle's Studio. Hey, I'll take any chance I can to include lots of white space!

I'll get to the exact papers that I selected to go with the My Mind's Eye items in just a bit, but I thought I'd go ahead and share the layout now instead of making you scroll through lots of photos to see it. The photo is a random shot from Star Wars Celebration VI, and I was actually shocked to be able to find products to (sort of) match the crazy carpet in the Orange County Convention Center!

I changed things up just a bit when choosing embellishments for this page and included some other new items, too. I recently purchased the May exclusive tag kit from Elle's Studio and absolutely love it, and since the greens were such a good match for Oxford Lane I ran with it. Plus, since the layout is for an Elle's challenge I thought it would only be polite to use some of their stuff. :)

If you missed my last post, my goal with my last Two Peas order was to purchase only a few favorite embellishments from the new collections and then combine them with older papers and items from my stash to get the look of the new line without having to buy the entire thing. Just like last time, I pulled out my Cropper Hoppers of patterned paper (I keep them sorted by color) and chose a few sheets from each color family to match the look of the collection. I didn't go for a perfect match, just whatever caught my eye as I was flipping through the papers, and I selected all of the patterns shown below in under ten minutes.

I started with the blues- Studio Calico Elementary "Atmosphere," American Crafts Chap "Dave," My Mind's Eye Stella and Ruby (180 sheet rebranded paper pad from Michaels), Studio Calico State Fair "Pie Contest."

Then I moved on to the aqua/teals. And if you're wondering what in space I was thinking choosing that print from October Afternoon's Rocket Age collection, I definitely had the Star Wars layout above in mind! Elle's Studio Exclusive Vellum Paper, Unknown, Lily Bee Happily Lost "Good Book," October Afternoon Rocket Age "Deep Space Probe."

You don't see a lot of the Kelly Green color from Oxford Lane in scrapbooking supplies, so these papers sort of picked themselves out for me! Doodlebug Petite Prints "Limeade Daisy-Stripe," October Afternoon Modern Homemaker "Canning Jar," Studio Calico State Fair "Midway," DCWV Spring Fling Stack, Studio Calico Autumn Press "Scarf."

I definitely stuck with sunny, warm yellows for this collection. Lily Bee Happily Lost "Sun Soaked," DCWV's Lemon Flower Stack, Studio Calico Abroad "Locals," Cosmo Cricket Upcycle "Re: Love."

And the last batch of papers is from my "multicolored" paper files, where I found prints with mixes of green, yellow, and even some aqua. Studio Calico Countryside "Grove," DCWV Spring Fling Stack, Studio Calico State Fair "Choose Your Weight," DCWV's Lemon Flower Stack.

Like last time, I stuck to pulling only papers and left the embellishments in their color drawers to be selected later. And, since I ended up using just the non-floral chipboards for this page, I'm definitely going to have to come back and do a more girly one at some point. I'll be keeping these papers filed together with the chipboard sheets for a while, and hopefully my new "kit" will inspire more layouts to use up these older papers soon!

back to the future | just the embellishments, please!

Yes, I really am here with another installment of Back to the Future! It's been a long time since the last one, and if you're a new reader (welcome, and thank you!), this is a relatively new blog segment for me where I take a hot new scrapbooking collection and combine it with supplies from the archives of gone-but-not-forgotten favorites.

I also apparently like to see how many times I can use the word "new" in a single paragraph.

The last round found me taking an entire new collection and using it with an entire old collection, but this time I'm shaking things up a little bit. After my last guest appearance on The Paperclipping Roundtable, I received lots of comments from people who were intrigued by my "just buying the embellishments" strategy for shopping for supplies. The theory is that I have lots and lots of paper, and I tend to be a B-side scrapper, anyway, as I found out while sorting my patterned papers by color last month, so I should be able to find ample basic prints in my scrap room such as dots, stripes, damasks, and grids, to coordinate with key embellishments from new collections. The idea is to buy just a few pieces- chipboard, journaling cards, tags, etc.- that carry the "feel" of a collection and then fill in the blanks from stash.

And, because I know I've been posting a lot of non-layout stuff lately (though I do love writing tutorials and sharing quick tips and tricks!), I promise that there is indeed a layout hidden in this photo-heavy post. In fact, here's a little peek at what you'll be seeing later!

I've been trying to use my stash more this year and scale the shopping way back. It took me a bit to get into the groove of letting most of my new supplies come from my monthly design team kits at Citrus Twist, but I'm happy to finally be there and loving having the chance to finally get to some of those older pretties that are in my scrap room.

I do also get a small amount of credit from Two Peas each month, and that's where the new supplies in this post came from. I challenged myself to use that credit to get the items that most conveyed the look of the four new My Mind's Eye mid-release collections by ordering just the chipboard and cut apart sheets (I chop them up and use them like embellishments) from each and filling in the rest with my stash. I can't disclose just how much credit I get, but before that credit was applied my order was just over $26 after my 10% loyalty discount (which I'm sure I won't have much longer since I'm shopping way less than I did last year). I also pay shipping on orders when I use my Garden Girl credit. So, there you go- full disclosure. :)

My box contained chipboard and journaling card papers for both of the Kate & Company colorways...

...along with the chipboard and two cut apart sheets for each of Rhonna Farrer's new Find Your Wings and Fly collection colorways.

It actually feels like quite a good amount of stuff for $26, especially when each of those chipboard sheets contains 50+ pieces. One 12x12 chipboard set will embellish a lot of layouts!

I decided to go with the Up and Away portion of Find Your Wings and Fly (the items in the photos above) for this installment of Back to the Future, and I spent about 10 minutes looking through my Cropper Hoppers of color-sorted papers for sheets to match. I didn't look for "perfect" matches, just whatever caught my eye as I flipped through the stack.

There were tons of pinks that would have worked, but I stopped myself after the first four sheets that I found. The papers are from the following collections, left to right: Lily Bee's Victoria Park, Daydream by October Afternoon, DCWV's Spring Fling Stack, and Upcycle by Cosmo Cricket.

The teals were fun to go through, too! I found four papers here...well, three papers and one transparency. :) Lily Bee Memorandum, American Crafts The Classics, October Afternoon Detours, Hambly Screen Prints.

There were small hints of a yellow-green and a red-orange color in the patterns, so I chose just a couple of papers representing each those colors, too. I think the first page is from a MAMBI pad from Michaels a few years ago, then from left to right there's a sheet from the Project Life Olive Edition paper, Studio Calico State Fair, and the My Mind's Eye Lost and Found 180 sheet paper pad from Hobby Lobby.

I also went through my "multi-color" stack (which is not as big as you might think!) and pulled out a couple of sheets that worked. From Lily Bee Memorandum and the My Mind's Eye Lost and Found 180 sheet paper pad.

Last, I dove into my neutral papers and picked out a few for backgrounds and layers. Lawn Fawn's Bright Side collection, Stella and Rose by MME (from the rebranded Recollections paper pad at Michaels), Chatterbox Woods Fern, Dear Lizzy Neapolitan, Echo Park This & That, MME Lost and Found (again), Studio Calico, and a sheet of Amy Tangerine (the original collection) stitched paper that I've been hoarding for a while.

Obviously all of these papers won't get used on one layout, but I'll be keeping them together with the Find Your Wings and Fly chipboard and cut-apart sheet as a "kit" of sorts. I kept things simple and didn't pull out any embellishments (besides the chipboard I'd purchased) to go with these. I already store my embellishments, journaling cards, and washi tapes by color and will be able to find a match for these papers easily enough as I'm working on a page. Besides, it's easier to store the flat stuff all together in a Cropper Hopper and let the lumpy items stay in their drawers.

And here's the layout made with this cobbled-together kit!

I started with my two photos, the really big floral chipboard piece from Find Your Wings and Fly, and the gold doily, then just started adding strips and bits from there until I was happy with it. Looking at it now that text print background might be just a bit too busy, but it just fit so well with the theme of the page that I wanted to use it. May was totally geeked out to meet the founder and owner of French General at CHA, so I made sure to use several of the French General embellishments by Jolee's on the page, too.

The gold glitter Thickers from the Maggie Holmes collection are the only other "new" item I used on the page, and the one pack I have is getting so close to the end that I counted it as stashbusting, anyway. I totally had to cut some letters apart to make the "a" and "r"!

I'm planning on making similar kits and layouts with the other three embellishment sets that I purchased and will be sharing them here when get to them. I'm not sure when that will be, but this little exercise has helped me realize just how far a small set of new supplies can go, and I'm excited to dive back in and try the next one!

back to the future : sweetly smitten + snippets {video + layout}

I'm back today with the final installment of this round of Back to the Future, a blog segment where a hot new scrapbooking collection is combined with supplies from the archives of gone-but-not-forgotten favorites. This week's adventure has taken us from using the clean, modern, graphic Snippets collection by Studio Calico to the soft, vintage style of Sweetly Smitten by Sassafras. The tones of these two lines are definitely on different ends of the spectrum, so how well will they work together? Let's find out!

Supplies:

InLinkz.com

It's not completely obvious just from looking at Snippets and Sweetly Smitten that they work together, but their common color palette allows them to pair up, especially with the right layout subject to tie them together. To me the combination of clean, vintage, and bright brought to mind our trip to Aruba a couple of years ago, and if you've ever been to the Caribbean you'll know what I mean. There's something old-world-meets-modern about the whole place, with a mix of salt-worn buildings next to sparkling new resorts and everything painted in bright colors or covered in tropical flowers.

Like yesterday's page, the style of this layout is outside my norm- bigger pieces of paper and a bigger photo block- and like yesterday it's because I based the page on a sketch by Shimelle Laine. Her sketch is designed to show off a paper you don't want to hide, but in my case I just wanted to make sure I used a lot of that ombre aqua dot paper. I switched things around from the original sketch to make them work for me by rotating the photo block to vertical, splitting the line that runs across the top third of the page to run through both the top and bottom thirds, and moving the journaling up a bit.

I also added a second page to this layout to house a few last random photos I had from the one day that we spent some time wandering around Oranjestad while we were in Aruba. It's my favorite method of making two-page layouts- one side is creative and pretty, and the other side is a divided page protector that I've just thrown photos and a bit of embellishment into.

After I finished this page, I realized that I've already scrapped a couple of the photos before, and oddly enough on that layout (that I made almost a year ago) I chose to use bigger page elements, too, in the form of some lovely journaling cards from Lily Bee. It honestly doesn't bother me to have photos scrapped twice, and this page tells a different part of the story, anyway, so into the Aruba album it goes!

I filmed a video of this layout going together, too, and it includes both the regular and pocket page side of things.








That wraps things up for this particular installment of Back to the Future! If you have any requests for lines old or new that you'd like to see featured, please leave me a comment. If I have it in my stash, I'll do my best to work with it as this feature continues throughout 2013!

back to the future : sassafras sweetly smitten {video + layout}

Yesterday's Back to the Future post introduced the Studio Calico Snippets collection (which I know is technically present and not future since it's available now, but I'm choosing to ignore how the analogy completely falls apart there...), and today I'm going back into the archives of my scrap room to choose a collection to use along with it. I probably won't always stick to a single collection when it comes to the "past" part of this series, but I just love Sweetly Smitten by Sassafras (so much, in fact, that I bought it all up when it came out and then never used it, out of fear of "messing it up!") that I wanted to play with it all on its own. Today you'll see a layout using just this vintage Sassafras collection, and then tomorrow we'll take a look at combining the old and new!

Supplies:

InLinkz.com

This layout is based on a sketch at Life Paper Scrapbook, but as you'll see in the video (which is slightly longer than my normal ones) that didn't make this page any faster to put together! I love how it got me out of my box, though, as the circles on the page are a bit of a departure for me.


Those circles also gave me a chance to play with Laina Lamb's fab Pie Chart dies again, and I used them to mix a bit of geeky with the soft florals- perfect for a layout about the day Darren brought home a discarded test tube rack and some old lab glass for me! I'd actually been looking for one to use as a flower vase for a while (after seeing it on someone else's blog, which is how all of these things seem to start), and I was thrilled when he walked through the door with it one afternoon!

Sweetly Smitten and Snippets might not be the most obvious collections to combine, but in tomorrow's layout I'm going to do just that- see you then!