scrapologie

new studio girls and a vintage halloween

I have to tell you how excited I am to be adding two powerhouse artists to our fabulous team of designers at scrapologie - Michelle Wood and Ashley Calder. If you are not familiar with the work of Ashley and Michelle, you soon will be - they both have unique and distinctive styles and are both so talented and amazing. Ashley is one of the Autumn Leaves Freestyle girls and was very recently featured in Legacy Magazine. Michelle designs for Prima and My Mind's Eye. Both are just extraordinarily talented and I am so thrilled that they are joining us!

Another thing I am excited about is the vintage halloween kit we have in the works. It features papers from Junkitz, Daisy D's and Rusty Pickle. If you're anything like me,  (meaning a lover of all things vintage) - you're going to love this kit....

here's a peek at the papers:

We're getting a makeover!

I think I can finally share now that the site is going to be getting a makeover - a brand new look, starting with our logo. The logo is already ready to go on our business cards - the one in the pic here is the one I carried around at CHA (it's part of the badge I made for myself to wear). (I added the Grecian face and the rest of the decorative elements). We're very excited about the new site, the new logo and the new look - we hope to have it all rolled out in the next month or so.

Another September Sneakie!

I am going to have to take a month off from kits more often, lol!  I'm getting all sorts of creative time in for a change! I just had to share this with you.

For those of you who haven't heard of artist Anna Corba, you *must* get to know her work. She's such an amazing artist, and her work with dress forms inspired me to try my hand at them as well. She has gorgeous altered dress forms for sale, among other beautiful pieces, on her site at www.annacorba.com. She was also recently featured in the July/August issue of Somerset Studios magazine, a publication I used to look at from time to time but which is now becoming a favorite of mine. It was through Anna's work that I came across wire dress forms as an art form for papercrafting. I love the texture and shape that these dress forms give to art projects. I was able to take one of the Urban Lily papers from the september kit and create a ruffled apron skirt for my dress form. All it required was cutting a piece of paper, accordion folding it, then folding the "mountain folds" back into the "valley folds", securing those with a dot of glue and stitching a piece of ribbon at the top and voila, an instant ruffled skirt.

I used lots of vintage finds for trim - the vintage daisy trim, the vintage pale blue seam binding ribbon and the antique turquoise button. Though I don't seem to get much time to anymore, I used to love to visit flea markets and estate sales to pick up trims and buttons for mere pennies. I love integrating these beautiful things from a time past into my work. They have a softness and elegance that you simply can't get from brand spanking new ribbon, no matter how pretty it is!

The printed paper ruffle at the bottom of the skirt is simply a page torn from an old dictionary that I cut into a ruffled shape with pinking shears. Many of the things you see in this project will be included in a kit supplement, the Foofala scalloped fabric flower behind the stamped image (you could substitute a vintage or new photo for the stamped image), the Heidi Grace heart pin, the doodlebug paper posy, the vintage Melissa Frances buttons, the seven gypsies rub-ons, the Heidi Grace paper flower brad, and of course, the wire forms, all of which will be sold in one of the supplements for September.

Home from CHA!

We got in quite late last night, so I am bushed!

Lots and lots of goodies are coming your way... we've decided on Scenic Route Capetown for October, Basic Grey's Gypsy for November and American Crafts for December.

Can't wait to show you all the goodies that will be coming your way in upcoming kits!

We met so many amazing people. I loved meeting Sara and Gabby from my design team, of course, and I was so starstruck by all the scrapping celebrities present! We got to meet Caroline Lau with Maya Road (a total sweetheart), Lance at Rusty Pickle, Leah Fung with BHG, Renee Camacho, Jenn Bertsch and Rhonna Farrer of Autumn Leaves (just as cute as can be!), Kelly Purkey with Paper Salon, Debbie Crouse with Seven Gypsies, Amy Howe of Basic Grey, Suzanne Quillen with her famous and delicious cookies (thanks Suzanne!), Layle Koncar and Sharly Balcaen with Scenic Route, we even *saw* Ali E and Erin Lincoln from afar but didn't get a chance to go say hi - we definitely will next time! CHA itself was just amazing. If you've never been and you ever have the opportunity to go, it's something you should do atleast once in your lifetime! It was amazing to be surrounded by so much creativity and talent!

The manufacturer displays were wonderful. The Seven Gypsies booth was stunning. I mean jaw-dropping, mind-blowing inspiration.

I also got to ogle lots of beautiful french imported ribbons from Beaux Regards. There are so many wonderful new things coming out. How do the manufacturers keep up the pace every six months? I don't know how they do it but I am glad they do.

I'll post pics here in a day or so. In the meantime, going to go do a couple loads of laundry and get the house in order! Loved it, but am so glad to be home!

CHA Prepping and Preening

So excited to be going to our first CHA, ever! So tomorrow, I am off to get my hair done, have my aesthetician appointment and search for real comfy shoes!! (This ranks second in anticipation only to my wedding day, lol!) Seriously though, there are lots of amazing products we've seen that I am anxious to eye up close and personal and get ordered for kits. And I am looking forward, even better, to meeting some really cool people! So excited that I will get to meet my designers Sara, Angi and Gabby!

I also sat down for the first time to take a peek at the floor plan. And it's huge. What are the odds that I will be able to lose weight just walking the convention floor?! Still, it's all good - some booths we'll definitely be visiting - American Crafts, Heidi Swapp, Seven Gypsies, Maya Road, Autumn Leaves, Basic Grey and Fontwerks, among others!

If you're there and see me, please come up and say hi! I won't recognize everyone - I am really bad at recognizing people, but I myself am easy enough to recognize. I think there are very few scrapbookers of Indian ethnicity (I'm out to change that hopefully!)and even fewer who are retailers, lol! So if you see me, come say hi, I promise I won't bite!

We'll be taking the laptop so will try to get some decent pics and update here periodically if we can! CHA, here we come!

An EARLY September peek!

I just couldn't wait to play with some of the goodies from the Sept kit and just wanted to share. My mind's been racing with ideas and I don't have enough time to execute them! We will be done with shipping by Monday, but I needed to take a break for an hour or so for some creative time.

I am very happy with how this came out, we could do this as a mini-project kit, I am still thinking about it, but basically, we took a small hinged-lid picnic basket, I papered it with one of the seven gypsies papers, and then trimmed out the rest with ribbons, buttons, flowers and tags. We used seven gypsies rubons on the rim of the basket. This would be beautiful as a gift, you could fill it with cookies, small soaps or toiletries, candies, or you could use it as a unique handbasket/purse. I really love how it turned out and thought you all would like to see. We have so many beautiful things in store for you in the September kit, so stay tuned!

Friday!

So glad we're at the end of the week. We are *nearly* finished with shipping, I should be done, I think, with shipping all paid-for kits by tomorrow. So if you haven't gotten yours yet, don't panic just yet -- we have whole stacks of boxes sitting inside by my front door waiting for the postman. They'll be there soon!

I'd like to do a post soon about how kits come together.... there's so much involved and I would love to share with you the extent of things we have to do to bring a kit together - once the kits have all shipped and we are back from CHA, I plan to blog a bit more. We have lots of things in store. I will mention that the entire site, not just the shopping, cart, are going to undergo a redesign. I am very excited about it and we have quite a few things in the works. We hope to debut the new look and site in mid to late August but it *may* be earlier, (or later!) depending on how things go with our web designers.

For those of you who are mourning the lack of an August kit, we will be debuting the second scrapologie vintage line kit, very soon, in about a week to two. The kits are on their way to our featured designers and as soon as the girls get done with their projects, we'll put it up. It's PACKED. Lots of wonderful goodies and just a beautiful, vintage styled kit with earthy, subdued colors.

On another note, I took some time to step out last weekend for a date with Bobby (we hadn't been out on a real date night in ages, and we went to go see Pirates. If you haven't been yet to see Pirates of the Caribbean, try and catch it this weekend. Johnny Depp is amazing as ever and I loved every swashbuckling second of it.

Have a fantastic weekend!

Growing pains...

I realized I needed to get back in gear and start blogging again! There aren't enough hours in the day to do everything that needs to get done.

I am still in the midst of shipping July kits out, we have a little over 50% shipped. It's very frustrating to me that I can't get the shipping down to one week and try as I might I just can't do it yet, until we get even more help. Thanks to all of you for being so patient about your kits and orders. I promise they will all get shipped before we leave for CHA next week.

We have also had a number of email requests for subscriptions and it also frustrates me that I can't offer subscriptions to everyone who wants one, when they want one. Kits have to be ordered about two months in advance and so we have to be able to plan when we are going to grow, and to grow very carefully, especially since we are still looking for help with regard to shipping. There is also a real concern about not being able to get product in the quantity we need for a kit, and that makes me hesitate to grow the business the way I'd like to as well. So thanks to all of you for understanding that, and if we have placed your name on the waiting list, I hope you won't have to wait for too long. We do plan to add subscriptions once again in the fourth quarter of this year, and will offer them on a routine basis as we receive non-renewals or cancellations from existing members. But we want to continue to be able to offer decent customer service and I fear that taking on too many more subscriptions will prevent me from servicing customers the way I would like to.

On another note, I will tell you that the September kit is coming together beautifully (we are skipping August). The September kit will feature papers from Seven Gypsies' Pacific and Reef Collections, with some other papers from Urban Lily, Heidi Grace and EK Success mixed in. Should be a gorgeous kit. We also plan to order some fantastic new product for you at CHA for October. We'll give you a full account when we get back!