Our first birthday!

Dear Paper Lovers,

A sweet little garden shindig to celebrate 

One year of Pretty Paper and 17 years of Design:

We would like to give you a look at our online event held on the 22nd of April 2017. The venue for this event was our online Facebook "Ivytree Studio Friends" group. 

We only recently started this group and we are already close to 500 members.

Thanks to all our "Friends" here, this group is growing steadily. 

We hope that it brings you loads of inspiration and encouragement!

Now for some images on the Garden Shindig:

The artist & her Tikva original artwork

  

Tikva - Hebrew word meaning "Hope"

 Best friends, real life sisters, soulmates, partners.

We are blessed that God forms the foundation of all we do and all we

will still do. He is the reason behind it, the Cornerstone and CEO of our business, 

but most of all He is our Savior, our Healer, our Provider and Source. 

We depend on Him and we inquire from Him all we need to know.

His Spirit guides us and we are nothing without HIM!

Thank you Jesus, for a sister, a friend and the Love You give us.

You inspire everything we do. You own the copyright of us and the work of our hands.

To God be the glory & praise!

 What is a party without a hat!

Without this man, we would also not be where we are! Henry, you are our hero
and God uses you everyday to bless us! We love you!

We had a lovely time in our pretty garden with our family who stands by us

everyday, supports us in all we do. We had a photo-shoot that included them, but we 

want to add those photos to a layout before we share it. 

The Online event:

A little warmer challenge to get the ladies started:

They had 10 minutes to make a quick tag with anything they had as long as it had

Ivytree Elements in it. 

Tag entries:

The challenges:

Our April challenge was a cupcake paper box with a topper of your choice. We created a template with step by step instructions, gave you some inspirational examples of what you could do and a free video tutorial. 

The Prize: An original artwork from Surita Brink, called "Tikva" (Hebrew name meaning 'Hope')

 Here are some entries to our cupcake challenge

 and also some yummyness from our DT attending the event:

Attendee entries: 

(Note the typo on the "Back to School" cupcake to the right. If you can't spell school, you need to go "back to school" :) Thank you Charlotte for sharing our typo so boldly. We were joking about it during the event that even after proofreading again and again, little typos can slip through. Designing these collections are very detailed work but every designer and typesetter will tell you that typos are part of the process. Mistakes are something we all need to embrace in ourselves, that striving for perfection cannot be reached in this life and that we all learn through making mistakes. As a teacher I always train my students not to fear making mistakes and embracing them. It is a tool God uses to enforce life lessons and to keep us humble. None of us have arrived, right. You can always correct and reprint. It is not the end of the world as you know it. It happens to the best of us, so just smile and wave)

SKETCH 1: FLORA FLOURISH

For the online live event we provided these sketches free in the Party Paper Packs and delivered it to all the attendees in advance of the event. The sketches are still available

in the store to be purchased separately. They include templates for all the pieces. 

Flora Flourish Sketch with printable templates

(We provided a full video tutorial on this sketch)

DT INSPIRATION:

Attendee Entries:

SKETCH 2: LOLLIPOP PARADE 

Lollipop Parade Sketch with printable templates

(This sketch was part of the live videos we shared on the day still available in our

Ivytree Studio Friends group on Facebook. Would love for you to join us there!

Our Attendee entries: 

Work in progress

Final product by Charlotte Smeda

SKETCH 3: BUTTERFLY WREATH

Butterfly wreath sketch with printable templates

This was the final sketch we provided and we also did a live walk through during the event.

Our DT's work:

  

Attendee entries:

Charlotte's final layout! We just love it!

CHALLENGE WINNERS:

Tikva went home with Christelle Hartzer! Congrats Christelle on
winning the April  Cupcake challenge. We hope she brings you joy!

Let's round off:

This was a first time for us, but we learned alot and enjoyed every minute.

We had around 30 ladies attending and a core group that had the courage to actually 

take part in the challenges. We hope next time more ladies will venture out of their

comfort zones to join in the fun by sharing their work.

It can be a scary thing to put yourself out there, but we want you to know you are 

always welcome and appreciated. 

No paper-snobs or art critics here. We believe that everybody is created uniquely by God and therefore your thumbprint is unique and what you have to offer is special. 

Memory keeping and scrapbooking and paper-crafting is for EVERYONE! Not just the rich and famous. Creativity does not belong to any one person either, but creativity ultimately originates with God, the Creator of everything. God is the only One that can create something out of nothing. We humans need "stuff" to create with so we all source our creativity and ideas from the world around us. Einstein said: "The secret to creativity is not to reveal your sources."  

We believe that if you don't honor God as the Source to your creative ideas, you cannot claim 

copyright either. He holds it, not you. 

We also believe that when you just duplicate what others are doing, your are missing out on 

the richness of creativity God can offer you. You are missing out on personal growth and surprising yourself with new ideas when you just blindly follow or copy others. You also cannot truly add value to any situation if you just duplicate another person's work. 

So, share your love for paper freely, but remember never to compare yourself with 

what others are doing. Their journey is different from yours and so is your progress.

Always measure what you do with where YOU started out. You will always be amazed.

Never give up and keep on creating!

Strive for new ideas and originality. That is how we add value to the world around us.

This was our basic program:

Jam packed with lots for you to do. So, we hope next time even more ladies

join in. 

 We loved the inter-activeness of this process. The ladies shared their spaces and what their desks looked like during the event. 

 Next time we would like to see all of your faces!!

Lisa-Marie

Charlotte Smeda

Surita Brink

Bernadette Groenewald

Llynne Matthews

Nicola Meyer - No-Make-up selfie! Beautiful!

Da Ivytree Party Girls

Thank you everyone who joined us on the day and for all your support 

throughout our first year. We look forward to the coming one and to 

many more pretty paper collections. 

To top the cake with all of this, we are taking orders for our brand new

Happy Day collection!

This collection is to celebrate our Paper Brand, Ivytree Elements' very first birthday. Yipee!!

To celebrate this first birthday, we decided to use the colours of our Branding in this brand new collection.

Happy Day lends itself to layouts about birthdays, happy events, little girl moments, boy moments with two pretty pinks, turquoise and green, a little golden orange and a lovely chocolaty brown. Any layout really can be fit into these colours and patterns with a local feel.

As usual, we have a pretty bouquet of floras and a cute cut page for you to make your own 3D layered pretty blooms.

All your favourite elements and cute cut pages with Pretty Pocket cards, tiny text, alfas, tags, flags and so much more can once again be found in this collection.

For the card makers we also have two lovely card square pages.

PRE-ORDERS OPEN:

17 MAY 2017

PRE-ORDERS CLOSE:

25 MAY 2017

Don't miss out! Order today!

Read about it in our store news here.

Order yours today here.

In our next post: Read about Sharon Keanly and our Fly High Digital bundel.