Back to School with Shimelle Laine

Today we have a charming retro page from Shimelle Laine featuring an exceedingly clever and whimsical use of the Be Our Guest "Home Sweet Home" patterned paper. (and after you peruse this page, if you would like to see more of Shimelle's scraptastic work with JBS head on over to her blog for another page complete with video tutorial and giveaway - giveaway ends 8/21 at midnight UK time!).

Shimelle writes, "I love living in a big city and the great London area has a population between 7 and 10 million, depending on where you draw the lines in suburbia. But there was no difficulty drawing the line in the small town where I grew up, and every morning the school bus passed the 'Welcome to...' sign with the population labelled as 2002 for many years... something I remember because we use to debate which two residents would be the 2 in 2002! So in such a small town, I went to a very small school. Everyone there knew everyone else, and although the town has since grown, everyone who lived there during my school years can tell you all about the teachers, the students and the four-page local newspaper. This photo is so very unattractive but it makes me laugh and remember the days in this particular class - 7th grade science. The girl to the right may kill me for scrapbooking this image as she's a scrapbooker too! But we sat at the same table for science and according to my wobbly script on the back of the photo, I was trying to convince my classmates not to use a flash on the camera, lest we get in trouble with Mr. Vopat. Also, I had just *part* of my hair permed. Serious dawn-of-the-nineties-mall-hair. I have to laugh otherwise I'll cry!"

And here is a little background information about her process, "I had been a bit stumped with the house print on this paper from the Be our Guest collection at first until I looked at it as a school house rather than just a country house. My elementary school wasn't much bigger than that! I hoped to scrapbook something about that, but neither my shoebox of old pictures nor the internet was very helpful with that! So this photo was the next best option and I love how you can see the look of a standard classroom from the simple background in the picture.

The blue ledger paper is one of my favourites from JBS ever - I use it all the time and it works so well as a background. I think I have made four layouts with this page as the background and they all look very different, so it's definitely versatile. To dress it up, I added a frame of malted milk paint and three layered embellishments, each with a a label, a punched circle and a star. I had tried to include the years of my middle school (5th to 8th grade) in the punched circles but the 5 ended up off the page. Close enough, I suppose! I love finding funny little ways for numbers or letters to have significance when selectively cut from a patterned paper."

Supplies:

Be Our Guest papers (blue ledger, house scene - it works as a school house, right?)

Haven labels (from the accent sheet)

Red/Black ruler paper

Mini chalkboard letter stickers

Large letter stickers in two colours (red/black and red/white)

Red star stickers

Blue adhesive pearls

JB for Ranger paint dabber (painted on with a brush) in malted milk