Day 1 – June 28, 2025
Your Exclusive Swag Bag
With products, classes, Instagram, Pinterest and beyond at your fingertips, there is no shortage of scrapbooking ideas. What is often lacking though is system for making good use of all this creativity alongside your memories!
Your exclusive ‘swag bag’ for the 2025 Open House includes a sampling of Simple Scrapper tools that our members use to make clear, intentional choices for their next scrapbook page. Ready to dive in?
Step 1 - Take a Break with SPARK Magazine
With 111 issues and counting, our member magazine is the centerpiece of how we leverage inspiration for action. SPARK is an ad-free, 85+ page digital publication published six times a year, with the option to purchase a print copy.
Action Step: Select one topic (i.e. a story idea) from inside this issue for a layout you want to make. Think about what photos you might choose.
Step 2 - Choose a Design Starting Point
We do our best to make sure everything we provide works well for both paper and digital scrapbookers. That’s why one of our largest libraries contains more than 780 scrapbook page sketches with companion layered PSD files for each!
Action Step: Choose one of our sample sketches or templates, a layout to ‘scraplift,’ or other design starting point for your page.
Bonus - Personal Design Cheatsheet
If you have a little extra time to explore, this optional bonus workbook from our Design, Your Way mini class helps you take a bird’s eye view of how you design your scrapbook pages. We have 8 mini classes (called The Pop-Up Workshops) and 8 full-sized workshops inside of the membership.
Step 3 - List What You Know and Need
Every scrapbooker has their own recipe for making a layout. If choosing a topic and sketch doesn’t provide quite enough clarity, use our Project Planning worksheet from The Finishing Project workshop to get all your ideas down on paper.
Action Step: Set a timer for 10 minutes and complete the planning worksheet with focused energy. Start with what you know so far and then add in what you need to make your page. Try not to overthink it!
Step 4 - Share with Fellow Scrapbookers
The first step towards reaching a goal is saying it out loud. Inside our community we do this via personal ‘Journey Plans’ that are updated every month and as needed. Putting your plan into words, even just as a list, also helps you be sure it makes sense!
Action Step: Leave a comment below sharing your layout plan and when you plan to start working on it.
7 Comments
Submit a Comment
This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.
I’m really inspired by Tracey Fox’s ‘Jingle Cruise’ layout on page 76 to tell my own story of a recent adventure. I love her use of color and I want to parallel that for my daughter’s volleyball team colors. I have a lot of memorabilia and photos, so I will choose sketch #741 as my foundation. My steps are:
1. Choose patterned papers and create foundation.
2. Loosely arrange memorabilia as supplemental layers.
3. Choose and print seven photos. (Collage if have more?)
4. Make journaling tags and bigger card. (Type and print?)
5. Find embellishments that coordinate.
6. Finish assembly.
Hi, I may have this wrong but I was looking for the open House and thought it was something that was live on zoom. Am I missing something? Sorry I have come in late today on this….
Nope, not late! We’ve tried to make the Open House a blend of self-paced and live activities to accommodate schedules and time zones. Today’s activity is to check out this page, your event ‘swag bag,’ as you have done. Tomorrow there will be a video and an optional Zoom crop you can attend. On Monday we’ll have a livestream where you can chat. Then on Tuesday there will be another optional Zoom crop, plus maybe some additional surprises. 😉
I plan to make a layout of one of my favorite childhood memories. As I do not have a photo, I was inspired by the single-photo layouts. My plan to bring this to life:
1. Have AI draw a sketch embodying my memory.
2. Start with a light blue cardstock base page
3. Use white and brown cardstock to double-mount the sketch.
4. Draw clouds on white cardstock and cut out. Write my title on clouds with fine-tipped black marker pen.
5. Use punch to create several butterflies out of different pastel colors of cardstock.
6. Type journaling on white cardstock and mat it on paper to coordinate with sketch.
7. Locate musical note stickers
8. Arrange everything on base until I like the way it looks.
9. Adhere everything.
What a clever application of AI to fill in a gap in your process. Thanks so much for sharing.
I love the color combination of Breon Randon’s Sarcoidosis layout – I don’t use these colors often, so I’m hoping to work this into my next round of planning (I’ve got my next 6 layouts already planned).
Yay, I can’t wait to see what you create. That is definitely a fun one. It may have inspired a nail polish purchase I made too!