About Melissa Stinson

Melissa Stinson has been a dedicated scrapbooker for 13 years, and she is also an avid photographer. Her scrapbook design work includes her current role as a design team member for Pink Paislee, Bella Blvd, Sweet Peach Crop Shop, and Scrapbook Circle. She's also one of the featured bloggers in the Memory Makers book, Scrapbook Workshop. Melissa lives with her husband in Alabama, where she works as a software engineer when she isn't busy scrapbooking. If you'd like to learn more about Melissa, you can visit her blog, The Scrappy Jedi.

Trends | Return of the Hexagons

March 29, 2012 by Melissa Stinson 5 Comments

Long ago at a CHA far, far away…

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t that long ago or even quite that far away, but there was no denying that at CHA Winter 2012, the hexagons were back! I’m not quite ready to call this trend a staple yet – it’ll take at least one more show to tell – but scrapbooking manufacturers of all styles have certainly embraced this shape and put their own spin on it. If you want to see examples from last summer’s show be sure to check out my Trend Watch article on Hexagons, Honeycombs, and Lattices from last October, but right now I want to take a look at some photos from the CHA Winter 2012 show floor and look at just what this trend had to offer this time around.

I have to admit that the Jenni Bowlin booth was one of the last places I would have expected to see hexagons at CHA Winter 2012, but she totally surprised me by putting her own signature (and lovely!) vintage spin on the shape. The hexagon paper (from the Magpie collection) and Quilted Stickers shown below are perfect examples of how a company can be trendy and still stay true to their roots.

From Trend to Staple | Decorative Tape and Baker’s Twine

March 21, 2012 by Melissa Stinson 9 Comments

Trends have come and gone ever since the advent of modern scrapbooking, but sometimes a trend sticks around long enough to move out of the fad stage and become a staple. We’ve seen it happen with many supplies and motifs over the years (clouds, woodgrain, and bling are just a few examples). Thinking back to what I saw at CHA Winter 2012, it’s apparent two more once trendy supplies have firmly cemented their staplehood: baker’s twine and decorative or washi tape. These two items were found in many, many booths on the CHA Winter 2012 show floor and will be plentiful this season on store shelves.

You know an item has become a staple when We R Memory Keepers adds it to their lineup of basic embellishments. This season both tape and twine join the ranks of brads and other staple items on We R’s rainbow wall of embellishments.

Trends | Coral

March 14, 2012 by Melissa Stinson 12 Comments

Coral was without a doubt one of the hottest color trends on the show floor at CHA Winter 2012. Existing somewhere between the 2011 Pantone color of the year, Honeysuckle, and Pantone’s 2012 pick of Tangerine Tango, shades of coral run the gamut from vibrant pinks to sultry oranges. A quick Google Image search for “coral color” turned up this spectrum of shades, showing just a few of coral’s many faces.

With versatility like this, it’s no wonder that coral made an appearance in one form or another in almost every paper manufacturer’s booth on the CHA show floor. In fact, the color was so popular that I had to narrow down the list of collections to feature here to those that prominently used coral in their color scheme. In reality, there were many more lines that I could have shared that used coral as an accent color, but the range of images and styles shown here should give you a pretty good taste of what’s to come (and is in some cases already available!) from the new crop of collections.

Die Cuts with a View (also known as DCWV) made the color the focus of one of their newest paper stacks. Coral Couture pairs both the orange and pink versions of coral with aqua and yellow to create a sophisticated color palette. The addition of large floral and butterfly motifs give the line a vintage feel. For more on this line, you can visit my blog here, where I spotlight this new paper stack, and May Flaum also took it for a test drive in a post on her blog.

CHA Winter 2012 | Martha Stewart ClayCraft Clay by EK Success

February 3, 2012 by Melissa Stinson 7 Comments

EK Success demonstrated Martha Stewart’s ClayCraft air-drying clay at CHA Winter 2012. The video below shows how the clay can be easily molded or sculpted.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: CHA, News Tagged With: CHA Winter 2012, Martha Stewart Crafts

CHA Winter 2012 | Stamp 2 Cut by Tim Holtz for Sizzix eclips

February 2, 2012 by Melissa Stinson 6 Comments

Anything with the name Tim Holtz attached to it is sure to create buzz on the CHA show floor, and the Stamp 2 Cut system for the Sizzix eclips is a perfect example of that phenomenon. The Stamp 2 Cut system consists of a set of cartridges and clear overlays for the Sizzix eclips digital cutting system that gives stampers the ability to create very detailed die cuts of images that are created using Tim Holtz’s popular Stamper’s Anonymous stamps.

Tammy Tutterow demonstrated the Stamp 2 Cut system for me in this exclusive Scrapbook Update video: [Read more...]

Filed Under: CHA, News Tagged With: CHA Winter 2012, eclips, Sizzix, Tim Holtz