Use it up May and meet guest designer

So it's now the 5th month of the year. How on earth did that happen? Wasn't it Christmas just last week?
May is a super busy month here, with allll the birthdays, but the most important thing is International Scrapbooking Weekend! A whole weekend with tons of challenges, prizes, classes and fun!
With that in mind, we picked a super easy 'Use it up' challenge this month, Die cuts! These can be bought, hand cut, machine cut, anything! I don’t know about you but besides patterned paper I think this is what I need to use up the most.

To help with using up your die cuts, we've picked this sketch to further challenge you. We thought it was very adaptable and had lots of embellishments options to use up bits.

If that wasn't enough inspiration for you, we also have our guest designer post! This month is the very talented, but very quiet Jessie Grey. :) Jess and I have been friends for years after meeting on UKS, we still meet up for scrappy weekends once a year and she always amazes me with her layouts using lots of patterned paper and die cuts. Mine always look chaotic but hers blend so well together.

Here shes used lots of frames, die cuts to fill the frames and the perfect tea cup paper for the photo!
I also love how shes chosen to scrap something so simple, her cute little windowsill display, showing not all layouts need to be about huge events, and day to day is just as important and worth remembering. :) 

So that's Jessies style! I'm sure you'll agree its beautiful, but lets find out more about the girl herself. :)

Hi I’m Jess, I’m a Resource Planning analyst for a building society originally from Lincolnshire but now living in sunny Bradford. I got into scrapbooking 10yrs ago after watching a QVC show with my mum who is a card maker, and thought that would be a good way of documenting an upcoming climb for Snowdon for my other half’s 30th birthday. Little did I know it would spiral out of control and now I scrapbook about anything from my day to day life, to holidays, and my gorgeous nieces. Do I have a style? I don’t think I have but I’m sure others would say I have. I tend to go for patterned paper backgrounds and struggle with plain card stock backgrounds as it feels like something is missing to me but I’m getting better. I’m not one for sewing so if you see any on my layouts I can guarantee it’s faux stitching, and I’m not the greatest fussy cutter but I’m getting better.

I get my inspiration mainly from Pinterest and have boards for layouts I’d like to scraplift or take elements from, plus sketches I love a sketch! I also get inspiration from Instagram and screen cap layouts I like the look of for the future. I also subscribe to Quirky Kits and get inspiration from their challenges and the lovely ladies in the group. YouTube is also great for the mojo and I enjoy watching Inkie Quill, Sarah Swann, Becky Bitting and loads of others on my subscription list.

Wow that was an epic post! I hope this has given you some inspiration to use up some die cuts or just to scrap. If you make anything feel free to share it with us over on Facebook, or on Instagram @scrapbookstashbustinguk and we hope to see you back on Saturday for the start of our INSD celebrations!