scrapologie

October is coming soon!

September Guest Designer - Stephanie Vetne

We have a special treat for you! We're so honored to share the work of the talented Stephanie Vetne with you! Steph took on our September South Pacific kit, and her projects are just extraordinary! I love Steph's delicate, graceful style and her engaging photography that showcases her beautiful family. I also love the darling ornaments she made with the glitter flowers. Steph, a scrapologie design team finalist, is also a designer for Therm-o-Web. She's an attorney by training and just started her own photography business, but it's clear from her layouts that her most cherished roles involve her family!  We'd like to thank Steph for her beautiful work with the September kit!

Here's Steph's bio:

I have been fortunate enough be published numerous times by Creating Keepsakes, Memory Makers, CARDS Magazine, Paper Trends, and others this year. I have lots of fun stuff coming out in an idea book next year, too.  I am on Therm O Web's design team and love designing for them. Working with them at CHA this summer was a blast. In the last few months, I have also opened up my own photography business and am really having a ball with that ( www.stephanievetnephotography.com) - my focus is on natural light photography and families and children. I am learning more and more every day and am just totally enjoying the ride!

scrapologie's vintage halloween kit

You wouldn't believe
On All Hallow Eve
What lots of fun we can make,
With apples to bob,
And nuts on the hob,
And a ring-and-thimble cake.
~Carolyn Wells

Pixie, kobold, elf, and sprite,
All are on their rounds tonight;
In the wan moon's silver ray,
Thrives their helter-skelter play.
~Joel Benton


It’s almost autumn…The weather is getting colder
and the leaves are contemplating the season’s dress…
they’ll soon don gowns of crimson, gold, plum and moss,
in honor of earth’s elaborate celebration of autumnal
glory. And with the changing leaves and weather, thoughts
of Halloween come to mind. I long for a vintage Halloween,
where rosy cheeked children surround a table laden with
tempting goodies and crepe paper decorations, where
grinning jack-o-lanterns frolic with witches and black cats
in elaborate Halloween postcards; and where bobbing for
apples, fortune-telling and trick-or-treating were much
anticipated events.

Halloween has always been a magical time for me. As a
child of course, like most children, I was completely
enamored of any holiday where I could obtain a generous
haul of candy from everyone I knew... and people I didn't
know(!) ---- and for FREE. The person who invented
Halloween, in the mind of a child, is nothing short of a hero.
And despite the fact that we had frugal parents, we were
loved and encouraged, and thus rich in imagination,
conjuring up all sorts of costumes from gypsies to pirates to
cackling witches. What better holiday than Halloween to
set a child’s imagination afire with dreams of transforming
themselves – if only for an evening, into an enchanting
princess, a rootin’ tootin’ cowboy, a terrifying monster or
a cackling witch. Halloween is the one time of year where
even adults are encouraged to masquerade in costume to
their heart’s content. So perhaps that is what I really love
about Halloween – the excitement of creative energy in
the air, the fun of imagining yourself as someone or
something else for a whole day, and the permission to
return to childish desires long past.

It is in the spirit of this wonderful season that we bring you
scrapologie’s vintage Halloween kit. This kit is perfect for
all your Halloween memories – vintage or modern.
Whatever your traditions may be at this time of year –
visiting a corn maze, attending a football game, enjoying
a fall hayride or an autumn walk in the woods, going to a
pumpkin patch, carving your pumpkin, or decorating for
Autumn, you’ll find ways to incorporate the memories
of these activities with your creations from the products
in this beautiful papercrafting kit.

The scrapologie vintage Halloween kit features fifteen
delightful papers with a vintagey feel, from Junkitz’s
Whimsical Halloween by Teresa Collins, Rusty Pickle’s
Boo Collection and Daisy D’s Gypsy Harvest. The papers
are rich in autumnal color and vintage Halloween images.
We’ve selected EIGHT sheets of premium Bazzill cardstock
in scrumptious autumn colors to coordinate with your kit:
yam, copper, cream puff, beetle black, olive, candy apple,
espresso and wild pansy. You’ll also find endearing images
of Halloweens past from the charming products from Crafty
Secrets. A sheet of homespun cotton printed with colorful
vintage Halloween images pairs wonderfully with Halloween
Time Cuts, also from Craft Secrets. You’ll also receive a full
sheet of six diecut reproduction vintage Halloween Postcards.
In addition, we’ve included Making Memories’ new Cheeky
Shimmer Stickers in glittering black – reminiscent of a clear,
cool and starry black night when the air is rife with magic
and the only light is the diffuse glow from the golden
harvest moon. Halloween themed paper tags, a papier
mache cone and a papier mache circle pick give you
numerous opportunities for quick and beautiful vintage
looking projects – try your hand at the Halloween candy
cone and picks that we made. The cones look gorgeous
hanging from a tree and filled with candy, or make witch
hats out of them and use them as place settings at your
Halloween gathering. We’ve also included lots of lovely
trim – a full package of Heidi Swapp Grunge ribbon in
the colors of fall – moss, pumpkin, antique white, java
and camel colored ribbons and trim. Plus we’ve given
you even more of the ribbon you love from May Arts
in a beautiful palette of orange, black, purple and silver.
We’ve even included a yard of silver or black and silver
tinsel trim and silver pipe cleaners. Last but not least,
you’ll love the Halloween Flat Clips from Making Memories.
They’re like miniature paper clips with shapes cut into the
metal and they coordinate beautifully with our vintage
Halloween kit.

We’ve also designed two supplements to coordinate with
your vintage Halloween kit. You do not have to purchase
the kit to purchase the supplement. And again, you do not
have to be a subscriber to purchase either this kit or
supplements.

Masquerade contains Glitter Chipboard Letters in silver
from Teresa Collins and Junkitz, Heidi Swapp Chipboard
letters in pumpkin, and a darling wooden file folder album
from Crafty Secrets (be sure to check out our project
using this album). Plus, we’ve included lots of ribbon –
enough to fill a paper treat sack!

Black Magick contains the Teresa Collins Glitterz Chipboard,
Heidi Swapp Chipboard Alphas in Pumpkin, and the
GORGEOUS new Twinkle Type letters in silver from K-ology.
You have to see these to realize how gorgeous they are in
person; they have the look of vintage german glass glitter.
String the letters on a length of ribbon to spell out “Happy
Halloween” and hang the banner across your mantel for
a gorgeous vintage feel.

Celebrate the beauty and majesty of autumn and the
enchantment and magic of Halloween, with scrapologie’s
vintage Halloween papercrafting kit.

Bam Pop!

We just received the debut collection of Bam Pop papers from talented designer Jennifer Harrison! Have you seen these yet? They are utterly darling. They have an almost Seuss-like quality to them and are so whimsical and fun - I can't wait to break into these papers! The collection packs include five sheets of patterned paper and one sheet of 12" x 12" diecut frames, priced at $6.25. They're in the store now: Bam Pop at scrapologie

A few peeks at vintage halloween...

We hope to post the Vintage Halloween kit tomorrow, but it may end up being Saturday. It will go on sale the same time we post the kit photos. In the meantime, here's a few fun projects I've enjoyed doing with the halloween kit! The little paper mache cones are covered in kit paper and trimmed with a bit of tinsel and silver pipe cleaner, all of which are included in the kit. They are great as ornaments or decor and you can also fill them up with candy or stuff them with crinkle fetti as I've done here, and hang them on a tree as party favors if you entertain for Halloween. The cat book is actually a wooden file folder book - there are just a handful of these and they will be sold as supplements, so if you want one then snag it quickly! I found the darling paper mache picks and those too work beautifully stuck into a big bowl of candy to greet your trick or treaters on halloween night. We've included the circle paper mache picks in each kit. Lots of fun stuff, but it's not all shown here --- this is just a peek! Hope to have it up tomorrow but if we do, it will be late in the day....

 

Celebrity Guest Designer - Caroline Lau

This month, we have two guest designers who will be featured here at scrapologie. The first one, Caroline Lau, is our celebrity guest designer this month. Caroline, along with her sister Deborah Liu, is one of the brilliant founders of Maya Road, and she has done some amazing work with the scrapologie September kit! I am so excited to show you her work, but I also want to tell you a bit about Caroline, who I had the pleasure of meeting at CHA in July. I've said before that I love Maya Road and their cutting edge products, but I am also greatly inspired by Caroline as a person. I was floored by how approachable she is, how down to earth and friendly she is, and how humble she is though she has so many reasons to be anything but! It's evident that she is passionate about and dedicated to her company and it shows in the innovativeness and quality of Maya Road products. Caroline and Deborah became new mothers shortly before having to debut new product at CHA. Caroline traveled with her infant son Noah and husband David to CHA to present her products and promote her company and despite the rigors of pregnancy and new motherhood, still managed to debut a wonderful array of new product at CHA that she and her sister Deborah designed. No easy feat. She is just a wonderful, inspiring person and I am honored to have her share her work with us. We asked Caroline to tell us a bit about herself, and here are her own words:

My sister, Deb and I started our company about 3 years ago after visiting a LSS and we saw products in the store that were being sold. We thought we could do better products with more innovative packaging and offer it to the consumer for a better price. At our first show in CHA Dallas (Jan 2004), we weren't quite sure what we were getting into b/c we went to the show with a total of 100 catalogs showcasing our 40 products. After the first hour of the show, we had handed out all the catalogs and were scrambling as to what to do! And that was how Maya Road was born.

As for life before Maya Road  - it seems like eons ago! I was a Chemical Engineer by training. I worked 8 years in various jobs from an Engineer to a Supply Chain Planner to a Purchasing Manager before I quit my job to run MR full time in January 2005.  I haven't looked back since.

I am also now a new mom and that in itself brings challenges! My sweet baby (Noah) is now almost 4 months old! It has been very interesting in having him and also trying to handle MR all at once. But I now cannot imagine life without him. 

What I like about the scrapbooking industry - that it welcomes and celebrates the fact of having a family. For example, Noah came with us to CHA summer and that was totally cool - in another industry, that would be frowned upon. What I don't like about the industry - I get overwhelmed by the 3x a year trade shows and the expectation that there are new releases every 4 months. That is a lot of work. And for the other things that I see and might not like, we hope that we can do a paradigm shift on the things we don't like. 

My favorite Maya Road products right at this moment are the rubons - 9 sheets, 1 tin, 1000+ images  (which will be out in about 1-2 weeks). I love that you get over 1000 images - I have done 10 LOs using 2 sheets of the rubons and I STILL have images left!

We are  looking forward to seeing the new offering from Maya Road at Memory Trends and in the meantime, we are so pleased to share with you Caroline's work with the scrapologie September kit; I especially LOVE the pen bouquets she made with the glitter chipboard flowers:

Handbags and Hepburn

I do love a good deal, but I also love extremely beautiful and well-made things, especially if they are one-of-a-kind. If you love purses and bags, you'll want to check out the bags at 1154 Lill Studios

They've got a huge selection of stylish purses, clutches, and shoulder bags that you can purchase premade or have custom designed, from an amazing array of fabrics. The prices range anywhere from $25-150. And they have new fall fabrics to choose from.

And I am wondering if anyone saw the new ad for The Gap featuring Audrey Hepburn in her black capris dancing to AC DC's Back in Black? The ad has caused some controversy, as there are those who consider that using Audrey Hepburn's image in a Gap ad is crass commercialism. As for me, it won't make me buy or reject Gap clothing either way, but it does make me recall what a brilliant, beautiful and inspiring woman Audrey Hepburn was - inside and out. She was the complete embodiment of feminine charm, grace and beauty and I have to say I love seeing her face and her graceful form in the window of a store that caters to young women.

Some general stuff you need to know, and a peek at October!

I posted this on the scrapologie message boards yesterday but wanted to make sure everyone sees it, so you may eventually get this in an email in addition to reading it there and on the blog here.

We shipped a ton of kits yesterday, and I am finishing up the last leg of all the kit and store purchases that were made through the store. I still have several kits that have not been purchased that are marked for subscribers, so if you haven't yet purchased yours through the store, we will try to invoice you. I hope all subscribers know that you CAN purchase your kit through the store, you don't have to wait for me to invoice you - but we'll get to you shortly if you haven't paid yet. Hopefully this is the last month we will have to do this!

Subsequently, we *do* have a handful of kits available but I am not sure how many, and won't know for certain until shipping is completed and we've heard from all our subscribers. We'll make every attempt to email and invoice you, but if you haven't paid for your kit and we don't hear from you by Monday (or if you haven't made prior arrangement with me to manually charge your credit card), then we will start placing unclaimed kits with non-subscribers who have requested them.

Starting next month, our shopping cart will be able to capture credit card information and automatically charge you for your kit every month. It's still being worked on but we hope to have it in place for October. At some point in the next couple of weeks we will ask subscribers to enter their information in the store to enable this.

For this month only, you may either purchase your kit through the store (click on the SHOPPING link and then on KITS at the top of the list, then again on the box labeled KITS and it will give you a three month or six month subscriber purchase option). Or you can pay the paypal invoice you will receive from me if we haven't heard from you.

Moving forward from October, I think I can handle invoicing a *limited* number of people on paypal directly, but I will say here that I'd really prefer for everyone who can, to go with the autocharge system, and I will tell you why. We decided to go this route mostly to save time. It takes quite a bit of time as things currently stand, to figure out who has paid, who hasn't paid, to manually invoice the people that haven't paid and try to figure out if they want the kit or not, and process the shipments of the ones who have paid, and that doesn't even address all the emails we get from customers with special requests. (Not that emails or special requests are a problem - but just to give you an idea of what slows the process down). And then there was the fiasco we had with the new shopping cart this month - figuring out the errors, processing refunds and invoicing for monies owed!) By going to the autocharge system, it will just enable me to be faster and more efficient. It frustrates me that it takes me 2-3 weeks to get everyone paid and shipped because it leaves precious little time for me to plan for the next month's debut (not to mention ordering for the following months), and to boot, it's just not what I want in terms of turnaround time between when the order is placed and when you receive your kit.

As a result, we are also going to be much stricter from hereon out about skipped kits and when you notify us of your intent to skip. Once the charges go through for the given month, there will be no skips honored. We haven't figured out the whole piece but most likely we will run the charges probably a day or two after the kit debuts. I believe that the site is being built so that you will have a skip button to notify us of your intent to skip a kit, and once you use up your allotted skips, you won't be able to use the skip button again until you've fulfilled the terms of your subscription.

Also, we are probably going to start everyone anew in January at month 1, because in January, everyone will be at the same pricing, which is not the case now (our oldest customers are at a discounted rate). So what that means is that even if you have a six month sub now, all active subscriptions will expire at the end of December and be renewed as a month 1 in January.

So having said that, I will agree to invoice a small number of people, and will continue to do so, providing that they respond in a timely manner to the invoices sent, and there will be a cut-off, beyond which everyone else will be required to get set up on the autocharge system.

These changes are being made in hopes that we can ultimately provide better service to the customer base as a whole. I hope to blog a bit about the process of how a scrapologie kit comes together so you can understand what goes on behind the scenes. It's certainly something we enjoy but we need to get more efficient at this, to serve you better and to save me time and sanity! Hope you have a wonderful Friday, and if you are still kitless, you won't be for much longer!

And now, for those of you wanting a peek at October...the October kit is called Signet and Scribe. It's going to be sort of a writing themed kit. The theme is journaling, writing, documenting, anything we can do to document the unexamined and re-examined pieces of our lives. The Signet idea comes from the a very wonderful something that has been ordered as a supplement, but also, more figuratively, the idea of putting your "seal" on something, the idea of placing your "mark" upon the world by leaving a written and visual record.

So here's a peek at a lovely little goodie that is going to be in the October kit supplements; they're adhesive labels for journaling, doodling, stamping, framing a small photo - they're lovely! Looking forward to sharing more with you soon!

Happy Sunday!

I'm still knee deep in shipping. But I wanted to pop in quickly to share a fun product... I came across this the other day while at Office Max, and being a scrapbooker, of course I am always looking for new things to incorporate for journaling. These seem to fit the bill perfectly. If you're not too worried about the acid-free issue that is. They're sortable index cards with post-it adhesive on the back from 3M; they have them in some fun colors, and different sizes. And you can get yourself a free sample too! Have a great Sunday! 

coming soon - scrapologie halloween!

Just a quick post to let you know that our scrapologie vintage halloween kit is coming soon - the last of the product is winding its way to us - so look for it in the next two to three weeks!

(Brush credits on this artwork are from: Vered, Obsidian Dawn, Misguided Buddha, 500ML, Miss M and possibly some other sources - if you see your brush on this piece and are not credited, please contact me so that I may credit you properly. I've downloaded plenty but am still trying to figure out how to identify and organize them properly!)

Some other exciting news!! We've just put in the store some brand new brushes from Keisha Campbell and Sara Winnick - take a look here:

Keisha Campbell Digital Brushes

Sara Winnick Digital Brushes

Take a look at these - SO BEAUTIFUL!! I love the Japanese Garden brushes from Sara (so perfect with the September kit!!) and the flower brushes (two sets) from Keisha are just plain gorgeous too! Keisha's lace, envy and lavish brush sets are also now available. Gorgeous goodness, all around.