Hello! For those of you who don't know me, I'm Emily Pitts, one of the newest members of the WCS collective. I've been scrapping on and off for almost 4 years now, and in those 4 years, my scrapping style has certainly changed. In looking back, I noticed some real turning points in my style, but I also noticed somethings that have very much stayed the same. I wanted to talk about the things that made it change and the things that have stayed the same this week.
This is one one the first pages I ever did:
It's rather lovely, isn't it? This was 1998. Funky handwritten titles and cutting your photos (gasp!) were all the rage. I had no money, we were college students, I knew I had to use acid free products, so I bought a ream of acid free cardstock from Office Depot, a pack of acid free pens from an art supply store, some rulers with cute little ducky, heart, and car shapes in them for tracing, some templates and lettering books, and a heart punch. I knew I was a good enough artist to do the rest.
I made 11 pages.
I had to stop. I could not for the life of me create a scrapbook page that was of the quality I KNEW I could do. I had taken a lot of art classes in high school, I'd won awards. I was really quite talented. But I just could not do this scrapbooking thing. And the cutting up of photos? That really didn't jive with the family historian in me. I deeply appreciated my ancestors taking such good care of their photos, cutting mine up seemed blasphemous. So I packed up my few supplies and figured someday I'd get back to it. I made sure to label all my photos so I'd at least remember a little bit of information.
CATALYST #1 BECKY HIGGINS
Fast forward to 2004, I believe it was the October issue of Creating Keepsakes I had chanced upon and decided to purchased because one of the articles caught my eye. It was by Becky Higgins and was titled something like, "How My Style Has Changed." I'd flipped through it, and felt an immediate kinship to this woman. I saw pages that looked my my early attempts. Then I saw pages that I LOVED, pages that were exactly what I wanted to create. I figured the time had come for me to get back into scrapping. My little sister was getting married, I should make her a wedding album. So I borrowed all of my mother-in-laws back issues of CK and went to work. Never mind that those issues came out in the photo cutting phase, I could look past that and create pages that I was proud of finally! Lots of double matting to add color, lots of blocks, definitely every picture scrapped, of course 2 pagers, a bit of ripping and tearing, and eyelets and brads thrown in for good measure. I guess you could call this "old school" style, but i am still really happy that I have all these memories preserved. Note the changes: I used my lettering templates instead of handwriting the title. I added a few bits of patterned paper. I began embellishing. Note the similarities: I used my own handwriting.
CATALYST #2 THE PUB AD CHALLENGE
Now I had a vacation album and my sister's wedding album under my belt, I felt invincible! I was searching on line for some reason and stumbled upon this website called Two Peas in a Bucket. I was not a message board visitor by any means, so I'm not sure how it happened, but I found a place they called The Pub. Again, I'm not sure why I clicked on that particular message board, because I am not a drinker, which I figured was what they discussed in this Pub. But I clicked on it, and the rest is history. I found what was called a challenge, hosted by Paula Gilarde. You were supposed to use the ad she provided as inspiration and then post your layout and link it to the thread. This is the first one I managed to get scrapped. I was so proud. I spent way too much time on it and way too much money (I had a photo specially printed 8X12 at Sam's Club for $3 so that it would fit on a 12X12 layout), but that was the start of something that, for the next two years completely shaped how I scrapped.
Here's my version:
Note the changes: Patterned paper became much more prevalent in my work. I altered the photo (gasp), but wasn't too worried about it because it was a digital image. I added a LARGE (for me) embellishment. I hand cut the journaling strips, they are not perfectly straight. Note the similarities: I was still mounting photos. I still journaled using my own handwriting.
I was a very literal scrapper (did you notice I even stayed with a similar color scheme as the ad has?) when I started, I took the idea and didn't stray too far. If there wasn't an exact spot for journaling, it made me nervous. I didn't think that I could do an 8.5x11 page instead of my now standard 12x12, even though I started as an 8.5x11 scrapper. I didn't think to turn the ad on it's side, I had to do exactly what was presented. I leaned on my seasoned scrapping friends a lot. I didn't trust my own voice. That slowly began to change. I'll tell you more about that tomorrow, I'll show you some more examples and talk about the next few catalysts.
But going through these first few pub ad inspired pages made me want to revisit some of the ads with my current style. And I thought you might like to join me...
So take the ad and turn it into a layout. Post your layout to the Flickr gallery by Friday at midnight. I'll put all your names in hat and one of you will win a $10 gift certificate to Studio Calico. Doesn't get much better than that, right? :) I'm excited to see what you come up with! Until then...
