Glitter really can get everywhere. Because it sticks to everything and is so prone to escape, I prefer to use it with lots and lots of glue. Some pre-made glitter items hold onto their glitter well, but most of them do not, so after I’ve made something with them, they go directly into a page protector and work surfaces and hands are washed immediately.

That still doesn’t keep me from finding stray glitter on my face as I’m washing up for bed.

That stuff is tenacious.

Let’s look at some uses for glitter. Shall we start off with some pre-made glitter items?

This paper from DCWV has a layer of glitter around the pre-printed design. For the most part the glitter doesn’t come off. However that’s not the case with all glitter papers, and most glittered alphabet stickers (like the ones below) are horribly prone to shedding glitter.

Stickles has got to be my favorite way to add glitter to a page or card. Look how well it adds just a bit of shine to the blue stamp on this page.

Stickles is a glitter glue, but not just any glitter glue. It generally doesn’t clump up, and the fine glitter is easily added to tiny spaces. Distress Stickles is a little bit less friendly, in that the larger chunks of glitter will cause lumps when you’re applying it. You can see the difference between the types of Stickles below, with the white distress glitter on the cloud, and the regular blue glitter to create raindrops.

If I’m going to use loose glitter, I prefer to use it with a dimensional adhesive. I want the glitter to stay where I put it! Dimensional glue will work on just about anything, from Tim Holtz fragments to cardstock.

Using dimensional glue and glitter on scrapbook pages can be fun, especially if you go a little (or in this case a lot) overboard. Covering the entire bottom of a page to make a beach certainly does use up a lot of glitter, which was the goal.

Sometimes you don’t need glue at all though. This is a shaker card, and the shaker is sealed up enough that there’s no worries of glitter escaping.

What are some of your favorite ways to use glitter? If you have any favorite glitter products, share them below!

These are some of my favorites. (Amazon affiliate links)

Stickles
American Crafts POW glitter paper

One last sample for you from May’s musical LOAD. This prompt for this page was to use a large portrait or self-portrait on a page a la the album cover fro Duran Duran’s Rio. You remember that, right?

While looking through the pictures on hand that are larger, I came across this drawing that my father made of me after he was diagnosed with cancer.

This doesn’t really look anything like me, but I still love it, because my father made it for me because I asked him to. It’s one of the last things I have from him before he died.

The drawing had been sitting in a photo box, where no one could see it, and now, since it’s on a page, it’s somewhere where my family will find it, and know why it’s important.

In the end, isn’t that what’s scrapbooking all about? Sharing photos and memorabilia that tell stories that are worth remembering?

One of the prompts for this month’s LOAD was to scraplift (aka cover a la the music industry) a page from the Flickr gallery where we are all sharing the pages we make this month.

I loved this page by Kelly McCord. Go ahead, click the link and take a look at it. We’ll still be here when you get back.

That page inspired this one:

Some of the thought process for you:

Rather than start with a solid color of cardstock as the base, this was built on patterned paper. Pink and blue are the dominant colors, rather than earth tones, since this is a new baby oriented page, and not about animals or nature as the original was.

I started out planning on re-creating the hexagon/triangle strip, but the triangles I made were just too big for the page. Instead of trimming them all down, I went with a single strip of triangles. Since the background is white based, the photo mats/framing are solid colored cardstock to create more contrast.

There’s stamping underneath the paint, and mist splatters and more stamping on top of it as well. The washi tape adds a little more stability to the triangle strip. A few bits of wood veneer and fabric based embellishments add some softness and dimension to the page.

It works pretty well, don’t you think? I think I may be in love with this page. Or maybe not. Maybe I just needed to get out of my scrapbook rut.

In the spirit of “every time you’re putting words and pictures together, and sharing them with the world, you’re scrapbooking,” there’s a new-ish product out that makes that statement even more true.

I’ve been seeing ads in my Facebook feed for My Social Book, which claims to take all your posts and pictures and turn them into a book that you will treasure forever.

For kicks, I decided to give them a try, and see what kind of quality product they produce.

To start off with, they will need access to your Facebook feed in order to create your book. If you’re not comfortable with that, this is not going to work for you.

After you grant them access to your feed, they ask you to choose types of data to include, from photos to links to comments, as well as the date range for the book. My Social Book then generates a mock up with a few pages in it, so you can see how it will turn out. (I’m trying to recall all the bits and pieces from memory. I’m sure I’m forgetting something, but it really is an easy process.)

If you like what you see, you can then order it.

I placed my order on April 16th, and was told to expect the book between April 28th and May 7th. On the 21st, I received a shipping notice, and it arrived the week of the 27th from the USPS. (I can’t remember which day exactly! Sorry!)

Shall we take a look at it?

This is the soft cover version, because I did not want to spend more money on a hardcover. It’s Ikea catalog/ typical magazine type quality. Thinner paper than I was expecting, and the photo quality was only okay. The photo and paper quality on something printed from a photo service like Shutterfly is much better, with thicker paper, and better resolution photo printing.
So not perfect so far, but acceptable. Now on to the interior.

This is what a typical page looks like, with status updates and photos. The little blue circles next to each post contain the number of people who have liked or commented on a particular status. The paper is thin, and the photo quality issues continue throughout the book. It’s not that they’re bad, they just aren’t the quality that someone who loves photography would be satisfied with.

A weird thing that happened repeatedly was on statuses from other people that I had commented on or been tagged in frequently did not include the name of the person who posted the original status. Most times you can figure out who posted the original status, but not always, which makes its value in the book questionable.

Another issue concerned photos that were cropped for the monthly headers. I didn’t see a place on the ordering site where you could adjust photo crops, so as you can see, the headers had some weird compositions.

The last issue I had with the book was with the post on the right in this image. I was tagged on a giveaway post, and tagged some friends as well, and they printed the whole post with comments. This was about 18 pages of the book. Crazy, right? I didn’t see anything where you could pick and choose specific posts to include or exclude, where you could avoid having something like this show up in your book.

So it sounds like there were a lot of issues with the book, right? Like I don’t like it? Well that’s just not true. I actually loved it.

There are a few reasons I loved it. First of all, getting it done was quick and easy. It wasn’t very expensive, as far as on demand printing goes. This was 182 pages, covering the time period from January 1, 2014 to April 16, 2015. You can change the date range to include as much or as little as you want. The regular price was $59.90, but I went through one of their ads on Facebook, and got it at 30% less, and free shipping as well.

They delivered the product well within their estimated delivery time. I like it when companies do what they say they’re going to do, when they say they’re going to do it, don’t you?

Most of all I love it because it’s a walk down memory lane. It reminds me of conversations funny and sincere, and friends far and near. I use Facebook partly as a notebook, to capture the things my family says or does that are so completely them. It was great to be reminded of some of the ridiculous things my family has said or done in the past year+.

Will I use this service again? Probably. I think I’ll be going back to see what they dredge up from the data banks of time.  I’ve been on Facebook since January of 2009. There’s bound to be a lot more memories hidden there, and it would be good to get them into the light of day again.

Let me know if you decide to check My Social Book out for yourself. I’d love to hear your opinions on it.