Our first lineof scrapbooking paper...and then some other somewhat unrelated topics

OK, so it has been a very long time since I've blogged...
But I have a darn good excuse...
I met someone!

I'm not entirely sure if we're officially defining ourselves as boyfriend/girlfriend yet, but I'm choosing the presumptuous route and calling him my boyfriend... because in all seriousness, I'm pretty sure that he won't be reading up on my scrapbooking endeavors. But anyway, about a month ago I started taking salsa-dancing classes... in hopes of jumpstarting my rather embarrassing social life (...or lack there of). And that's where I met Atul!!! Who I think is fantastic! ...And funny... and smart... and smoking hot...

And so... I'm going to go ahead and blame every bit of my slackness this past month on him. My mom does too. She calls me just about every day to yell at me about something that I forgot and to tell me to knock off the excessive amount of dating that I've been doing. :)

Anyway, Atul is on a three week long business trip right now... so I have time to catch up on blogging, our website, our next fabric line, etc. And when he gets back... I'll have to put my foot down with this "being attached at the hip thing" that we have going on right now.

So paper products... I have always been a big fan of them.

And this love began sometime in my early childhood... thanks to my mom who really encouraged my sister and I to explore our creative sides. As children, we were never short on construction paper, pipecleaners, an assortment of drawing materials, and scotch tape... (LOTS of scotch tape...) with which we created small huts, dressup clothes, Barbie accessories, food for our fisher-price kitchen, etc.

And this love for paper continued to grow through various art classes in both high school and then college.

...But it wasn't until I was going to grad school in Atlanta (for graphic design at the Portfolio Center) and taking a bookmaking class with one of my favorite teachers there, Anne Elser, that my love for paper turned into the beautiful obsession that it is today. And on that same sidenote... I had four or five great classes with Anne, who has quite a wide variety of specialties... hand-lettering, bookmaking, painting... (See below.)

And prior to her... I never really cared much for "hand-made" graphic design. I would generally opt for things made in the computer. But she has a way of opening her students up... and guiding them towards new ways of thinking... and designing. And with her, I learned that sometimes its the marks and subtle imperfections left behind by the artists... that are unavoidable when something is made by hand... that give a design its unique voice and character. It adds back in the human-element that is so often missing from designs that come directly from the computer. Anyway, this tangent is a bit unrelated to my scrapbooking blog post (as was the entire boyfriend intro that came at the beginning of this entry) but I was just on Facebook and saw that Anne had a post up about how Martha Stewart Weddings has asked for her calligraphy samples. How cool is that!!

Anyway... on to scrapbooking!!! We love it!

And we have recently come out with our first scrapbooking line, Hideaway, that we've designed for a craft company in the UK named Trimcraft. (See above.) It is available in three sizes that come in both glittered and non-glittered paper! Which is awesome!!!

This line is based off of our second fabric line... but it has really evolved quite a bit since then. The patterns themselves have become a little more simplified, the repeats are now much smaller, and the colors are more like muted sherberts than the swiss/alpine theme that we used in the original (fabric) version. And you can check out the final line below. (This is the cover that they sent over for our approval, so I'm not positive that this is what the final version looks like.) Anyway, we're quite pumped about this new venture and hope that there will be many future lines to follow!!

(And if anyone has some cool pictures of this line in action, please send them our way and we'll add them to our website gallery!)