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

Smush Something Colourful Onto This Page

A lot of people wonder why I'm doing another Wreck This Journal (you can see my completed one HERE), especially my friends and family whom I begged for fruit stickers and watched me with pure judgement as I carried around the book doing things that made them question my sanity. As my first WTJ was from early 2012, it is actually different from the ones currently available: the extended edition. This means there are a dozen or so pages that weren't in the original book. One of the challenges for me is going to be doing the original pages a second time without copying the things I did in my first journal.

However, the new "extended" pages are going to be fun because it's brand new and something I didn't have to ponder over the last time around.

This page asks the reader to "smush something colourful onto this page" and some of my ideas were berries or paint. But then when I was packing my stuff to do Color Me Rad the other day, I remembered this page.

Color Me Rad is a Color Run, something that's become popular in the last couple years. In essence you run a 5k route and along the way people throw coloured cornstarch at you and you end up covered from head to toe (including some very awkward places) in a giant rainbow and get stared at like you're personally carrying the plague to spread upon humanity when you walk into Starbucks. 

I've now done three colour runs, The Colour Run (the original) in September 2013, Color Me Rad in May of this year and now a second Color Me Rad. I'm also doing another The Colour Run this September. There is also "Run or Dye" but I believe the date was the same as The Colour Run this year, and I got a discount on the latter from being a "VIP" who ran before. Essentially they're all the same.

For the May 2014 Color Me Rad my friend Erica and I made a vlog of it, which you can watch below.

This time around I decided it would be clever if I pinned the WTJ page to my shirt with my race number and ran through the route and smushing extra colour onto the paper. Unique and a pretty cool idea, I thought!

This is after running the actual course, but what may be deceiving is that you get the majority of the colour from the "after party" where there are colour tosses. You can see that in both the vlog above and quickly in THIS Instagram post. 

On the finished page I pasted some "colour bomb" packaging that I collected off the field afterwards (darn litterers). The colour bombs contain the coloured cornstarch that people throw in the air during the after party.  

Thanks to Erica for running with me and helping me smush colour, and to you for reading this post!

(and yes, that is a fanny pack!)

Adrianna. 

Close The Journal. Write/ Scribble Something On The Edges.

I'm pretty sure it's a requirement of an English-speaking human being to love Dr. Seuss. I even had a VHS of The ABC's of Dr. Seuss and I can still hear the narrator in my head: "Big A... Little A... What begins with A?" I honestly can't tell you why I watched that as many times as I did. 

For my graduation gift from my godmother I recieved a hardcover copy of "Oh, The Places You'll Go!". As did my boyfriend from his, and pretty much everyone who has graduated ever. It is a pretty perfect gift for graduation. 

It's filled with inspiring goodies and beyond perfect quotes. I think one day I'll have to go to Value Village and see if I can find an old copy and use it for an art project, but in the meantime I did a page of my Wreck This Journal inspired by it.

Something I found out (the hard way) from my first WTJ (which you can find HERE) is to do the page where you have to write on the edges of the book first. Or close to first. I did it early on but when I wrote along the edges the sharpie bled through the pages that were done (and a bit thicker) and were visible on lots of the pages. Now, it is a WRECK This Journal so it's not the biggest deal but I have major control issues. 

So on the edges of this journal I wrote part of Dr. Seuss' book, which you can see in the title picture. One of my favourite lines in the book is "Kid, you'll move mountains!" so both the writing on the edges and the quote shown on the actual page connects to that line.

On the left side of the page(s?) (I'm so tempted to call it a DPS... throwback to my yearbook days!) I just did a quick watercolour drawing of some mountains. Back in the day every picture I ever drew had to have a sun (with sunglasses, of course) in the corner and some stellar mountain ranges, so I was well practiced for this day. The watercolour set I got was from a dollar store, so hurray for being thrifty! 

On the right side page I made the cover of the book that I guess is supposed to be the journal into a quick version of Oh! The Places You'll Go. Both the lettering of the line on the left and the title/ author's name were done with leftovers from my Martha Stewart paper punch that I've kept from previous projects. I love how the mismatched rainbow letters give it a super Dr. Seuss-y look. If you'd like to check out those paper punches (one of my favourite crafting purchases ever!) I found them super cheap on Amazon and made a shopping "playlist" of all the things I used on this page of my Wreck This Journal! You can find it HERE :)

Also on the right side you can kind of see the blue-green writing that goes behind the book. This is one of my favourite techniques that I've used in art projects for almost ten years... and it's not going to be retired any time soon. On this one it's about the first half of all the text in Oh! The Places You'll Go. I think it kinda looks like grass which goes with the picture on the other side. Or something...

You can watch the entire process of me "wrecking" this page in the following video!

Thanks for reading!

Adrianna.