This week, we said goodbye to an old friend – Scenic Route – and hello to a new one, the Cricut Gypsy. We also talked about some friends from “Down Under”, Buzz & Bloom.

This week’s show is embedded for listening at the start of this post, or is also now available for listening or download on the Paperclipping Newsbreak site, or at the links below:

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Scenic Route is owned by Jim and Sarah Milne, and based in Saratoga Springs, Utah.  Sarah Milne was a paper designer for Rusty Pickle before starting Scenic Route. A little over a year ago the six-year-old company was flying high in the scrapbooking world. According to the liquidation announcement, the company had its best month ever in August 2008. But the company says it was hard hit by the economic crash of Sept. 2008, which has lead to its liquidation:

Thanks to you, Scenic Route had growth year after year culminating in our best month ever in August 2008. Unfortunately, September 2008 brought economic hardships to our company, the scrapbook industry, and this nation.

Nicole Snow, who recently stopped writing the Salt Lake City Scrapbooking Examiner, came out of blogging retirement to tell the scrapbook world about Scenic Route’s closure:

I was suprised to see that their booth at the Scrapbook USA Expo this month had new paper lines available at a discount. Typically the Scenic Route booth has discounted stickers and chipboard, but their paper tends to remain a bit high-priced (at least by Expo standards).

Looking back further, it’s easy to see that as early as January of this year there were economic concerns at Scenic Route when they laid off well-known designer/instructor Layle Koncar, who was quickly snapped up by Basic Grey. Then in July, the company skipped exhibiting at CHA-Summer 2009 in Orlando, and did not release new product either. This was perhaps understandable given the birth of Sarah Milne’s new baby barely a month before CHA, but the timing couldn’t have been worse for an obviously wounded company.

Scenic Route is holding its liquidation sale on its web store for consumers, and they’ll also have booths at two Scrapbook Expos in California in October.

Layle Koncar moves to Basic Grey

Well-known scrapbooking designer/instructor Layle Koncar was let go from her position at Scenic Route in January due to economic concerns at that company. She announced this week on her blog that she will be starting a full-time position with Basic Grey on April 8th.

Creating Keepsakes revamps website; Sprague to move tutorials

CK Media rolled out an unannounced revamp of their scrapbooking and papercrafts websites today. The new site has a new social media-style community on it (existing alongside the old message board at the moment, at least). The new layout is heavy on banner ad space and has a more “web 2.0″ feel than their previous design.

Unfortunately it seems some popular content was lost in the move to the redesigned site. In response to complaints about her video tutorials from past issues no longer being on the CK site, Jessica Sprague has indicated on the message board at JessicaSprague.com that she is planning to move the tutorials to her personal site. Sprague, who has been a valued talent of CK Media in the area of digital and photography, indicated she was “very tired of the unreliability of the CK web site”. It has long been a common complaint about the site that bonus content links being advertised by the company’s magazines are not correct or active.

Renee Pearson’s book “delayed” by CK Media; Pearson plans new website

CK Media was scheduled to release the latest book from fabulous digital scrapbooking instructor Renee Pearson (recently let go from Digital Scrapbooking Magazine) this month. However, she revealed on her blog in late February that Digital Designs for Scrapbooking: Getting Started with Photoshop Elements was being “pulled from the publishing schedule” due to the financial situation at CK Media and that she did not expect it to ever be published.

There is some exciting news coming for Pearson’s fans, however. She is about to launch a new website at www.reneepearson.com on April 1st where she will be able to teach all of her popular digital scrapbooking classes. Visitors to the site now can take a look at a preview video and sign up for the mailing list so that they don’t miss anything when it actually launches.

New website is online home for Angie Lucas

Former Simple Scrapbooks Managing Editor Angie Lucas has launched a new website to be her online home now that she is no longer with the defunct magazine. Yeah, write is devoted to topics of “journaling, scrapbooking, and other -ing verbs” according to Angie.

I Remember When sold products by American Crafts, Bazzill, Creative Imaginations, Cosmo Cricket, Die Cuts With A View, Doodlebug Design, Dream Street, Fancy Pants Designs, Fiskars, Glue Dots, Karen Foster, My Minds Eye, Sassafrass Lass, Scenic Route, We R Memory Keepers, Xyron and Zoom Album, among others.

I Remember When was founded as an Oregon scrapbook store by owner Jennifer (Childs) Grant in 1997, and became a direct sales company in 1999. The company was bought by Xyron in July 2005. At the time of the acquisition by Xyron, I Remember When had a corps of more than 500 consultants. Founder Jennifer (Childs) Grant left the company last year to pursue new projects within the industry.