Help? How do I fill this thing?

When we first introduced the tag wallets, tag books and minis, the first question was.. what is it? How is it used? But it's so tiny! How do you add photos to this? To give you all a better idea, I played around with one of the albums I made... to show you how you can add your photos to them.

This is super basic, nothing fancy, very simple.

The pictures used here, may NOT be used elsewhere.
PS: This is a photoshopped demo, sorry for the edits!

Paper Hunt Magic, Task One and Tag Wallets!

Soooo. I've spent the last couple of days resting out my fatique by taking cold and flu medicine and sleeping like no tomorrow. I feel much better Alhamdulillah! And feel a little refreshed and energized. So with that thought, I'd like to share what was the product of our Tag Wallet Class :)

We kicked off a little late, but that didn't stop the creative thoughts at all. I had two students, Anne and Iqra who had been looking forward to the Tag Wallets for the longest time I had actually suggested the Tag Wallet Module to Iqra as she was new to working with surfaces and took a while on decisions. Figured we'd start with something a little easier and small... She had ten seconds to make her decisions while with me. :)

Anyhow, my requirement for the class was, bring embellishments.. any and whichever you have along with a 12x12 piece of paper. These guys had lovely chart paper with them, but given class had already started late, I didn't want them to waste time on measurements and trimming. I came up to the studio. Pulled out two random sheets of paper and came down to class with them.

I handed Anne the green one and Iqra the pink. Without further delay, we began our folds for the tag wallet, working out the creases and importance of scoring. These guys managed to perfectly within a few minutes. That wasn't the hard part at all. :)

I feel I put the two of them with a couple of challenges, despite the Keepsake being super easy to do:

• they had no idea I was going to give them random colors to work on their project
• they had to make do with embellishments they found in their stash
• nothing was newly bought, nothing was exclusively purchased for the project, ie in terms of color
• again, because of time constraints, I just handed them my box of scraps... they had to pick out shades and tones of colors that matched their theme. 
• There were only two punches these young ladies worked with, the scallop and ornate.
• The tags were cut out by hand by tracing out a template off one of mine

Both began working on their tag wallets. They wanted to distress, to make their tags. I had shown them my engagement Tag Wallet... to have an idea of all the crazy and fun things you can do to make your work stand out. In the process, these are the things they came up with. I think they did a fab job. The only say I had in their projects was to make them think a little about placement or contrast. The rest was their call. They learned how to make little ribbon flowers to embellish their projects with, since the embellishments were limited. Iqra pulled out aces from her stash which was by luck, a compilation of pinks and beads and girly things. Anne had some lovely vintage buttons and trinkets in her stash.. which went great for her Tag Wallet. :)

It's amazing what these two did with their scrap pieces of paper and assigned colors. It worked out better because both of them had voiced out their fright of colors and how picking the right ones was always hard. Going into monochrome narrowed down decision making. Picking the right pink or the right green to go with the tag wallet was also important. Well done, you two!

I hope you're less afraid of colors and your own creativity. You can do wonders when you put your mind to things :) It was a two hour class, which carried on for almost 4. They didn't want to eat, they didn't want to take a break.. They just wanted to craft and create. :) Which is the way to go! 

Happy Birthday Iqra :) hope your birthday was one of the best experiences ever ;)

I keep getting queries on classes and tutorials... and while the last two weeks have been class-ilicious, I suppose I can do another round after Eid inshaAllah. *given I am in town*

MONOCHROME PAPER HUNT PROJECT

TASK ONE

Now for the Paper Hunt. If you'd like to join my next class over at the blog, here's what you need to do.

You're going to create a scrap file. Which will have bits and bobbles of paper, card stock and left over invites, tissue paper, etc.. This can comprise of a4 paper, chart paper scraps, wrappings, left over gift wrap paper, textured paper, other materials (leather, canvas, fabric)

You're going to sort them by color.. you can do the rainbow, with reds, blues, yellows, greens, etc.. you can also separate your blacks and greys and browns, and take them into whites, off whites, ivory and creams.

This is similar to the scrap paper stash I had sorted last week. :) You're organizing what you have to make building your projects easier!

Once that's done. You're going to bring out your stash of embellishments. Pins, stones, studs, rhinestones, glitter, laces, buttons, keys, ribbon etc. Could be left over charms from an old bracelet, beads... pretty much anything you want to stick on to your project :)

You can sort these by color too. :)

Once you've completed task one. Leave a comment below, so we can start task two! with a link to your stash. Snap a photo, upload it to your Facebook profile, make it public. You can leave the link with the comment, so we can see what you came up with :)

I'm posting a link to my scrap paper project here:

http://firefly-girl.blogspot.com/2012/07/scrap-paper-scissors.html

Scrap, Paper, Scissors

Every one of us who crafts has that stash of paper snippits that are too pretty to throw away, and you think that, oh, I'm going to just use these in my next mini, or the next tagbook could use some of that.. I'll just store it for later.

......

what happens though, you end up storing it in like a million different places, and every time you sit to do some work, you don't know what to do with all this paper... Paper you've spent money on, paper that is in great shape to use for next time, paper that is getting dents and creases sitting in a pile here, there, on the desk, on the corner shelf, in that box, sticking out of that file, and waiting under that heap of other embellishment stuff you'll be using very 'soon'.

So given, I've been on a studio revamp yet again, I thought I'd start with rearranging these 'scrap' pieces of paper. I had my 12x12 stacker shelf made a few months ago, so those papers, and the slightly larger scraps sit in there neatly. It's the little pieces here and there that drive me crazy.

Since I shifted some stuff to Hong Kong, I had a couple of these storage boxes that were empty. The poor lid is going to have to rot out some where for a while, but I managed to organize those scraps. Been meaning to do this for a really long time, but the last time I tried it, I didn't use boxboard dividers, and everything just looked really messy.

I tried it again today and it worked. Alhamdulillah! I've sorted the papers by color... and then have a few extra slots of themes like vintage, baby, birthday and 'pattern'. These I've kept separately because these I have a regular use of, and it makes more sense to store everything together here. :) I also stored my birthday themed and baby themed stickers and what not in here too since the box is a great size... so it holds up most of the a5 sizes and standard packaged contents :)

Just a little how to on organizing your bits and pieces. :)

PS: I did the dividers with a Tim Holtz Die. :) Was planning on labeling them properly with color tabs and all, got lazy. Just markered it out :)

How I did it was super easy. I snipped down the papers, just enough so they didn't look super messy. I cropped them in areas I knew I couldn't use anymore. ie dents, punched out shapes, ink splatter, etc... and this helped fit them in the box as well.

If you don't have a pretty box lying about, get a shoe box, and pretty it up with some gift wrap or leftover scrap booking paper :)

I sorted the papers by color to be divided by Kraft. I cut down to the size of the box. An A4 sheet of Kraft paper does the trick when you use the cutter down the middle. Super simple.  If you want to pretty up the dividers, you can. I just wanted to get my room to look tidy and had some work to finish up.. do didn't bother with it. :P

Have fun :)