A Beautiful Mess Subscriptions: Messy Box and Happy Mail (May 2015)

If you are a blogger or someone who reads blogs, especially in the DIY/ arts and crafts/ decor community, you have probably heard of A Beautiful Mess. 

I discovered ABM, run by two sisters: Elsie and Emma, when I joined Bloglovin and their blog was one that was recommended to me after I put in my interests. As lovely as their blog is, and they as bloggers, what really drew me in was their Instagram. Girl, talk about a strong Instagram game! Everything is bright and colourful and every time I scroll past a picture on my feed, you just know it's an ABM picture. I actually bought one of their books off Amazon on photography. I'm slowly making my way through it but as you'd expect, it' beautiful and bright and colourful and I just feel so happy while reading it and hopefully learning more to improve my own photography and Instagram game.

At the end of February I saw someone post a picture of an art print, and saw in the tags that it was by ABM. After following the link trail I ended up on the page of ABM's blog where they host their subscription box sales. They were advertising pre-orders for March Happy Mail as well as their new subscription service: Messy Box. Disappointed that I wouldn't get the print I saw, that had originally caught my eye from what ended up being from the February Happy Mail, I decided I would sign up for future ones, as well as the new Messy Box. After joining, I was surprised by an email saying the February Happy Mail was on its way! 

I have always toyed with the idea of joining Ipsy or Birchbox as well as looking into other subscription services. I love the concept of it coming to your door every month with surprises... it's like a year round Christmas stocking. However, I could never justify one of the beauty subscription services as someone who rarely wears makeup and has very (angry) particular skin issues. It was a good idea in theory, but just not justifiable. I had also been stumbling upon other subscription boxes with more variety than simply beauty products such as Brimbles Box and My Little Box, but as they are European services they either wouldn't ship to Canada or shipping fees would just make the whole ordeal not worth it. 

Enter A Beautiful Mess' Happy Mail and Messy Box.

Happy Mail is an envelope full of greeting cards. All of the contents are designed by ABM and made specifically for Happy Mail. From what I received, each box contains some traditional cards with artwork and either blank or cute messages inside as well as envelopes in complementary colours, a couple post cards (some with and some without envelopes) an art print (usually my favourite part!) and some bonus items like stickers, cut outs or fun notepads. Many of the products included will have foil detailing, which changes from month to month to provide a theme (gold, silver holographic, and rose gold so far) but not all products will be the same "monthly" foil colour, which provides a nice variety. Happy Mail costs $15.00 USD a month if you sign on for a year, $18.00 USD if you sign on for six months and $24.00 USD if you go month to month.  For more information about Happy Mail, and to subscribe, you can go HERE.

Messy Box is ABM's scrapbooking subscription box. They do have their own album set called "Messy Book" which I didn't discover until after I had purchased enough Project Life items to stock an aisle at my local Michaels. You don't need a particular album or scrapbooking system for Messy Box, but they do size the products to fit with their own album and pocket pages, which makes sense from a business standpoint. As someone who would use them for Project Life as well as just random art/ paper projects, I have not found this as any sort of drawback. Each kit generally contains a few pages of scrapbook paper, some journalling cards in three sizes (which have been consistent for the three boxes I have received), as well as other scrapbooking odds and ends that have changed from month to month. Some of these include: decorative stickers, lettering stickers, stamps, small cut out shapes, transparencies, and paper tags. I love that they stay consistent with some things like the paper and journalling cards, but switch the other things up. The boxes seem to have monthly themes, like patterns that repeat on the paper and journalling cards or consistent colouring themes. Messy Box costs $19.99 USD per box for a twelve month subscription, $21.99 USD for a six month subscription and $24.99 USD to purchase the boxes individually. For further information on Messy Box, and to subscribe, you can check out THIS link.

For general information on the subscription services provided by A Beautiful Mess, THIS PAGE has a great introduction.

Just a side note, but as I am from Canada I am an "international" customer (even though it is quicker for me to drive to the US/ Canada boarder than it is for me to get to my school, but that's beside the point) and as such, have to pay a little extra for shipping as well as the conversion rate. Since I order both of the subscription boxes, they do come together so I receive them at the same time so I don't have to pay twice for shipping. I signed on for the year long subscription for both and the total I pay per month works out to be about $50 CAD. So yes, it's a bit more than someone in Washington who lives forty minutes away from me and pays $36 of their currency, but until the Canadian dollar sorts itself out or some awesome Canadian subscription box services start popping up, I'm okay to swallow the extra cost for cute, unique art supplies.

I am in no way affiliated with A Beautiful Mess (although they did regram from my Instagram once and I died a little bit from intense excitement) and am not receiving any compensation for writing this post or for the unboxing video below. They do not have any affiliate program for the subscription services at this time (although this would be one of my major suggestions, it would be a huge draw!) so I am just writing this to get the word out about something I have been super excited about for the first few months of 2015!    

Here's my unboxing video for my May 2015 Happy Mail and Messy Box!

Thanks so much for reading/ watching! I can't wait to see, and hopefully share with you the June boxes! Let me know if you've tried these out and what you thought. Have you tried other subscriptions? I'd love to hear from you!

Have a great day, wherever you are!

Adrianna

Happy Mothers Day

Five years ago I made this video as a Mothers Day present for my mom. I have always been hesitant to share something so personal on the internet, despite my love for making videos. In the summer of 2009 I spent countless hours uploading (over 300 hours of) our home videos from our 90s camcorder to my computer and then started to make videos from them. 

Thank you to Taylor Swift for writing and singing this song that rang so true to my childhood. I am sending all my love to you and your family, especially her mom, wishing her all the health and happiness possible especially on her day tomorrow :)

The following video is uploaded purely for your enjoyment and is not monetized - absolutely no copyright infringement is intended… please don’t throw me in jail.

And lastly, Happy Mothers Day to my mom, you (if you are a mom!), yours, or whoever else you consider a maternal figure :)

Thanks for watching!

Adrianna.

Make a Paper Chain/ Christopher the Christmas Tree

I don't know where to start this one so I'll play it safe:

Hello! How's it going? That's good. Me, I'm doing well. 

In October I took a couple days over to fly out (in a horrible sketchy plane) and be a bridesmaid in my best friend's wedding. I have four 'best friends' but this particular one has been around for many years, she and her twin sister have been my 'besties' since we were ten, and friends since we were seven. You can see a precious before and after type picture on my Instagram by clicking HERE.

Anyway, as wedding favours she had little baby pine trees and a very cute pinterest-y display. I snuck this picture while picking up empty pop cans and beer cups. Sober bridesmaiding at its best.

Now this may seem like a complete 180 degree topic change but I promise it's related: My favourite Christmas movie growing up was Christopher the Christmas tree. I know that it's not on many lists, but it just always got me. You can watch the whole thing on YouTube HERE. The premise is very ugly duckling-esque but without spoiling the ending... Christopher was a baby Christmas tree who was never taken into anyone a home to be their family tree because he was so small and "ugly". So I took my little baby pine tree and names it Christopher. He sat in a mug for three months until I finally made him a home.

You would be surprised how hard it was to find a basic clay pot that wasn't enormous or teeny. I found this guy and his base at Michaels for under $5 (with a coupon of course). 

Now I have a pretty realistic view when I have ideas of how things are gonna turn out. I picture something in my head and know it's going to be 30% not as nice. So when I decided I was going to turn this clay pot aka Christopher's future home into a kate spade esque room decor masterpiece, I knew there was going to be a learning curve of sorts. After like six coats of white paint, some gold I borrowed from my moms ancient paint stash and a monogram stencil curtesy of markandgraham.com and my Silhouette Cameo, I was done and you can see the result at the top of this post...

30% people. I know it's not perfect but for my first attempt of stencilling I'm pretty pleased. Not perfect, but hey, it's... authentic.

Now to complete the look I figured Christopher needed some decorating... And conveniently a WTJ page came to mind. To see how Christopher's lovely garland came to be you can check out my latest Wreck This Journal series video.

Not perfect, but cute tight? 

Thanks for reading (and watching)!

Adrianna.

Wreck This Journal: The Good, The Bad, & The Wrecked.

Whether it be the flip-through of my completed journal on YouTube (which now has half of a million views, THANK YOU!!!), the one I wrecked in one day, the individual pages on my Instagram or something in between... chances are you stumbled upon me and my little home on the internet because of Keri Smith's bestselling book: Wreck This Journal.

I have come to the not-so-recent conclusion that much of my social media following is due to my Wreck This Journal (with the exception of tumblr where 85% of my followers are there because of either the Digimon fandom or because at one point it was cool to have a banner for your blog and I was one of the weirdos who made them for fun). I am more than okay with this because it's something I adore (Wreck This Journal.. although Digimon too haha) and I'm very proud of the pages (and the completed journal) that I have done!

I have posted on here about individual pages I've done that I wanted to add a bit of a story behind either the idea or the process behind the finished page that goes up on Instagram, YouTube, or Tumblr   with just a couple hashtags and a sentence long description... but for this post I just wanted to do a bit of an all-encompassing post kind of answering the who/what/where/when/why... or something like that.

The first (and probably best) link I'm going to throw at you is the link to my WTJ page on my Tumblr blog. I use it as kind of a command centre for my Wreck This Journaling as I have been less than consistent when it comes to the way I post my pages. For my first journal I started out scanning the finished pages and posting them as I finished, the quality gets continuously better as you go from 2012 to 2014. The links to my current journal aren't finished yet, but it has the playlist of all my WTJ videos as well as a FAQ.

http://ehdreeahnah.tumblr.com/journal 

If you're new to the whole world of WTJ, this is the first WTJ video I made:

It gives a bit of an intro as well as a look at my completed WTJ before it was, well... complete.

The other video I would like to include is my completed Wreck This Journal. Now if watching a flip-through video isn't your style you can also scroll through the pages on my Tumblr with the links on the journal page OR just click here because I like short cuts too

• pages sorted by page number/ order given in the book
• pages in the order I completed them (a couple of pages from my current wtj are at the end)
• pages in order from most to least recent (a couple of pages from my current journal are here also)

And for those of you who would like to sit back, relax, grab a cup of (insert your beverage of choice here) and press play on a video here it is:

Now a lot of people have felt it necessary to point out the shakiness of my voice/ how I sound like I am going to cry and as a tiny disclaimer: I talk about it HERE if you would like to know more, but I assure you I am not overly emotional in any way in the video haha. 

So that pretty much covers my first WTJ (if you don't count the DIY one I did in 2009 haha). Shortly after that I started a new one, which is what you see in my WTJ series on YouTube. Since my tumblr is run mostly on queued/ reblogged posts I don't post pages on there much anymore (I'll have to fix that soon!) but whenever I finish a page now, it goes on my Instagram! I do try to make videos for the majority of the pages I do but sometimes it just doesn't happen... so if you would like to stay in the loop with my completed pages, the best way to do so is to check them out on there!

Instagram is also where I've been posting better quality pictures of pages from my original WTJ (#tbt anyone?) as well as other Keri Smith book pages, such as Mess, This is Not a Book and Pocket Scavenger. I also have the Wreck This Journal Everywhere and a few of the lesser known books that don't come in the box sets. I'll try and get them all sorted and linked on the "control centre" page, but for now, Instagram is their home. 

Something I noticed people commented on quite a bit was how I failed to "wreck" my journal and it was moreso a scrapbook/ art book/ quote book. To be quite honest that was always my intention and it was the reason I purchased a WTJ. I love making things and being creative and making collages/ homages to things and words that move me and have affected my life and WTJ provided a medium for me to do that in a compact way that didn't impinge on my dwindling wall space. I try to address it over and over but people keep telling me how I am "wrong" in my wrecking. I did use a spare WTJ to try completely wrecking with reckless abandon and you can watch that HERE but at the end of the day it's my journal. Whatever Ms. Smith's intentions were or weren't, four pages into the journal it states:

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Carry this with you everywhere you go.

2. Follow the instructions on every page.

3. Order is not important.

4. Instructions are open to interpretation.

5. Experiment (work against your better judgement).

My journal is my interpretation of each prompt. I follow each prompt and I experiment. Yes, it ends up being a little artsy-fartsy but that is cathartic for me. That is how I relax and unwind and I rip pages and I mess up and I deal with it in often very creative ways. I create and I destroy and then usually cover up said destruction creatively.

That being said, if you own or intend to purchase a Wreck This Journal it then becomes YOURS. You can do the journal as destructively or creatively as you want! Don't let anyone influence you on what you want to do, it's YOUR book and I hope you have so much fun with it! :D

Before ending this post I just want to thank EVERYONE who helped me with my WTJ: whether it be my brother who walked my journal with me in the snow and filmed the majority of my wreck-this-journal-in-one-day video, my boyfriend who helped me make my first WTJ series video in Cuba as well as being insanely supportive of me, Erica for being the friend who did something destructive to that page (I didn't look), and to you for reading this post, liking my pictures on Instagram and watching my videos on YouTube (and not minding this ridiculous run-on sentence). You have made this online experience so fun and exciting and rewarding and I am so, insanely grateful. Also shoutout to Keri Smith for making these books. I couldn't have done it without her, literally.

Thanks again!

Adrianna.

January 2015 Room Tour & New Room?!

I've always been in love with bedrooms. There's no way to say it that isn't ridiculously weird. Whenever I would go to friends houses in elementary and high school, I was always interested to see what their rooms were like. I think you can tell a lot more about someone by the space they spend most of their time in than, for instance, how they present themselves at school.
I was always fascinated by teenagers bedrooms in tv shows... All the posters and decor that just didn't translate into the room I had. I wasn't allowed to hang posters except for the kitten one I got from the book fair in grade three. My mom is a chronic redecorater. When we were growing up, a room got redone at least once a year. Usually with a theme.

My two brothers and I shuffled rooms around a few times.

I started with the biggest room. I think it was just a plain white room with mother goose wallpaper. When my brother was born we each got room makeovers, his being Winnie the Pooh themed and mine Minnie Mouse. I still have that bedspread in my bunk in our trailer. Here are a couple screen captures from a home video circa 1995.







When my second brother was born I was evicted so they could share the bigger room which was, as well as the majority of our childhood, dinosaur themed. I was about eight at this point and very fittingly had an obnoxiously girly flower room.

At the tail end of my time in that room my brothers and I filmed a house tour. Yes, a house tour in 2002 (maybe 2003?) before YouTube even existed. (What an obnoxious hipster I am). I filmed it with my dad's video camera, I had my own cassette tape for all the plays we made and filmed, while my middle brother (who is now 21) hosted the tour. Our quirk was that in every room my youngest brother would be "a statue" in some kind of pose that worked with the room, it was the best way to involve the baby of the family... who is now eighteen! You can view my room's segment of the tour in the following video:

In grade seven I was moved downstairs into what was once my moms craft room so the boys could have their own spaces. My youngest brother kept the dinosaur room and theme while the other one who was (unhealthily) obsessed with bows and arrows and fashioning them out of whatever possible got a Native American themed room. Now I don't know if this is politically correct but a teepee canopy and wall art that I got off of a Magic School Bus art program was pretty cool. This was the start of my moody I don't care about anything phase so I kept the decor my mom already had going in her craft room and stuck with the animal print.  But, as this was the peak of my sarcastic, moody, writing everything all the time phase: I actually wrote a room tour. Yup. That actually happened. It's from 2005 (or at least thats what Google days is when Incomplete from the Backstreet Boys came out). So, I'm just going to warn everyone: I was quite obnoxious.

            How many times can one song play in a day? That new Backstreet Boy song is driving me crazy; frankly…. The song itself is a bit Incomplete. Finally it ended, jeez took long enough. Now another weird song is on about some guy who heard some gossip about his ex who some lady sent out to her boyfriend of sixteen years. Seriously the singers of our time are seriously low on ideas.
 There’s nothing like sitting down to my computer at 10:17 at night writing some pointless thing that will just be sitting in some folder within a folder within a folder in my computer for the next two years until I decided to delete it. I’ve been listening to the same radio station for the past seven years and sometimes I wonder why. My room is a tannish color and an animal print border going all the way around with a black bookshelf, bedspread, beanbag chair, and calculator; it’s animal print… the room… not the calculator.

(continued)

1. I'm very sorry that you had to read that. 2. I'm very impressed if you read all that and do not blame you if you couldn't. 3. Again, so very sorry.

This was in between my two picture taking phases: post film and pre digital so I don't have many pictures unless you count weird webcam selfies. I apologize for the poor quality but these are screen captures from one of our plays: a Titanic remake. Also, the girl in the picture isn't a family member so her face has been blurred for privacy :)
What the heck was that at the end? WELL to go completely full circle I am officially moving into my mom's craft room. Now instead of getting down-graded to a craft room closet in the basement I am lucky enough to get one of the biggest rooms in our house. With my brother moved out my mom wanted to shuffle things around and down-size her craft room as she doesn't use a lot of the stuff and therefore the space.





You can kind of see some carry over between the rooms now!
Then, when I was in grade nine we moved to a new house. I was turning sixteen and had been given the okay to do whatever I wanted with my space, something that was not allowed in the old house unless it was attached with sticky tack. I could post about 1000 pictures of the different variations of my lime green bedroom but in 2011 I filmed a room tour. I did this video for a tumblr video challenge and the post can be found HERE :)

In early 2013 I decided I needed a change and wanted to purge my life (and therefore my room) of people that weren't in it anymore so I took down most of my pictures. I started envisioning completely changing my room, and took a shot in the dark and asked my youngest brother to switch rooms with him. I ended up giving him money to seal the deal haha but in April 2013 I was completely settled in my new room. Being in that room started to bring new things, including my new YouTube channel and doing a lot of social media. The following video is my new room tour that I filmed today!

So stay turned for ANOTHER room tour! ;) I am really excited about the opportunity to have a completely new space for a completely new year! My biggest goal is to get organized and accomplish as many of my goals (no matter how small) and I'm looking forward to have such an amazing area to do everything! Thanks so much for reading this super long post and I hope you've enjoyed the ride of my bedrooms through the years!
Adrianna.

Cover This Page With White Things

If you follow me on Instagram you would have seen this picture (although with a hardcore filter over top haha) three weeks ago. This is another Wreck This Journal page that you can see me "wrecking" in the first episode of my Wreck This Journal YouTube series, and you can watch that quick video HERE if you wish. 

The sand and shells on this page are from the beach in Cuba (insert stereotypical "take me back" throwback Thursday Instagram picture) in April of this year. Yes, April. The sand and shells have been sitting in a Ziploc bag on my desk for almost seven months. That, my friends, is procrastination at its finest. Even worse, ninety percent of my motivation for this page was to get the bag off my desk because it wasn't pretty and I would forget about it if I put it anywhere else. Yeah, I know.

So first, I covered the page in a mix of Mod Podge and regular school glue. Mostly because I'm running out of Mod Podge. Mostly because I spilled it. Moving on.

I was worried about how the sand would cover and if it would congeal to the glue and harden in a less attractive greyish blob. For my friend's birthday in July I made her birthday card with some of this sand and it was a nightmare to work with. If you are planning to deal with fine, white sand and glue I recommend covering the entire space you want covered in sand with the glue, putting it on a surface like a drop sheet or a piece of cardboard and dumping all the sand on top so it is completely covered in a thick later. After it dries, dump off the access and "spot treat" any areas that didn't get properly covered. It was easier with this page as it didn't require precise angles and corners and I was covering the majority of it anyway with the shells.

Next, the shells. I started with just using school glue but that was not happening so I pulled out the ol' glue gun. I like glue guns because they are quick and effective but because of them I have very little feeling in the pads of my fingers after burning myself and ripping layers of skin and glue off. Nice, huh?

My least favourite thing about glue guns are the glue threads. You can't see them too much on the picture but they were everywhere. It was like a hairy little animal. I pulled most of them off but they in turn removed patches of sand and even some of the shells. The shells were hard to attach as it had to be a ring of hot glue around the very thin curvature of each shell. I started having the shells very close together but gradually fading down into a shoreline ombre effect. 

My journal now officially doesn't close because of this page and that is an important milestone of Wreck This Journaling. 

I take this way too seriously. 

Thanks so much for reading! If you would like more information about my previous journal, this current one or WTJ in general, please check out my tumblr Journal page, which is a super cool hub of WTJ information. 

Thanks again!

Adrianna.

Crack The Spine // Leave This Page Blank on Purpose

For anyone who has done a Wreck This Journal, the page that asks you to crack the spine of the book creates the first real obstacle. It goes against every instinct of a book lover to purposely bend the spine of the book, but at the same time it's the first page you are presented with after the table of contents and "page numbering" page. It attempts to kill the perfectionist in you right away by this simple but meaningful task.

That being said, cracking the spine is actually the first thing I did in this journal. I actually did in in April and it is part of Episode 1 of my WTJ Series on YouTube.


The page included on the same DPS (double page spread... Yearbook lingo holla) instructs the wrecker to leave that page blank on purpose. This is reminiscent from a page that used to be included in all our provincial exams that said "THIS PAGE IS INTENTIONALLY  BLANK" which made us laugh at the black text on the "blank" page. Anyway, the challenge there is do you actually leave it blank or do something with some degree of devil-may-care-ness? If you scroll through the Wreck This Journal tag on tumblr its filled with various "no" memes plastered on this page. In my completed journal I decided to change it up and placed a sticker that said "beautiful" over blank, and left that page... well, beautiful.

This time around I went a similar route but made both pages go together. One of the movies we watched way too often as kids was the animated movie Babes in Toyland. The villain is Barnaby, who, like most villains in Christmas movies, wants to stop Christmas. Although, unlike the Grinch he is a bit more determined and enlists the goblins (who are absolutely terrifying if you go back and watch) to help. Again on the same track as animated villains, Barnaby also has an epic villain theme song. And of course, it's catchy as heck. You can check it out here!

So after watching that little gem, you'll get my inspiration for this page! Now my journal is as crooked as Barnaby, and I know I didn't follow the instruction to leave that page blank... but I guess maybe I'm morally askew too!

Thanks for reading!
Adrianna.