New Contributing Artist!

Hi all, it's Pam here again. Before I announce our newest contributing artist, we must say good bye to Sara. We will miss her posts and contributions!

I am excited to announce Karen Anderson as our newest contributing artist. She was a guest artist a couple of times and now we are lucky enough to have her on the team!! As you may have seen before, her blog is packed with lots of great ideas. You can see it here. I know she will have some fabulous ideas to share and I look forward to working with her :) Let's get to know her better!

Hi I am Karen Anderson and am so very excited to join the amazing team here at Ideas for Scrapbookers.  I have been featured here a couple of times as a guest over the past few years and was blown away to be invited to become a regular contributor, thank you so much for making me feel so welcome!!

I suppose I should let you know a little about me, I live in the sunny south-east of the UK, about 5 minutes away from the beach with my husband Dave, son Jack and our two cats Molly and Lily.  I also have two gorgeous step-children; Jack and Melissa (yes, we have two Jacks in the family which can get confusing!!).

I am really fortunate that scrapbooking is my full-time job and I have never been happier.  I run Total Papercrafts, an online scrapbook supplies store which give me the opportunity to indulge my real passion which is teaching classes.   I teach every week which is wonderful as it gets me away from the computer and meeting amazing people, crafters are some of the most generous and fun people I have ever had the good fortune to teach.  If I'm not teaching or designing then I'll be working on my blog or creating YouTube videos demonstrating techniques.

I have always been creative and over the years I have loved knitting, dressmaking, cross stitch and dabbling in art.  I was introduced to scrapbooking over 10 years ago by sister in Canada who thought it might be something I’d be interested in.  Little did she know what she started when she sent me that 12x12 album with a couple of pages featuring our two children! 

My scrapbook style is busy and a bit eclectic, I like a lot of layers and techniques on my pages.  I cross over techniques from other crafts into my scrapbooking so you’ll often find a card making idea, stitching technique or a mixed media concept added to my pages – often all on the same layout!  I love the idea of clean and simple pages but white space scares me if I’m honest! I love to fill my designs with patterned paper, colour and embellishments, it just makes me happy.  I also love to create mini albums and projects with my usual technique-heavy style. 

I was asked to showcase two of my favourite scrapbook pages or projects so I thought I’d share one of each! 

The first is this single page layout featuring photos of my beautiful sister Nikki (the same one who introduced me to scrapbooking!!).  I think this highlights a lot of the elements that you’ll find in my designs – fussy cutting, layering, stamping, punching, handmade embellishments and inking.  One of the reasons I love this layout so much is that despite all of the busy elements of the page, the photos are still the main focus and your eye is drawn to them first – plus it’s a page for my sister which makes it extra special to me.

My second favourite project is this Configurations box which I altered to become a ‘book’ of things that are important to me and my family.  For example, there’s a toy car for my car-crazy hubby, a saying about turning off the lights which is a constant issue in our house and film strip & tickets for our love of movie nights.  Every little niche holds something meaningful, it might not be literal (I don’t play bingo for example) but for these reasons this is really special to me.  This was a lot of work but the process was as enjoyable as the finished project, its almost sad to finish things like this at times don’t you think?

Anyway, I hope you got to learn a little about me and understand a bit more about my style.  I am really looking forward to sharing more of my projects and ideas with everyone here at Ideas for Scrapbookers and seeing how you take these and make them your own.  I have a feeling its going to be very exciting!!

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Thanks for joining the team, Karen!!We are lucky to have you!

Here is an updated list of the amazing IFS Contributors!!
Cathy Dippolito
Dolores Schaeffer
Nancy Keslin 
Cindy deRosier
Marlene Murphy
Lesley Walker
Gael Spence
Anupama Choudary
Ina Bela
Karen Anderson