Today we're hosting a Knack Attack. This is where you admit and decide to be really proud of something you have a knack for. A knack is an acquired or natural skill at performing some kind of task or a tendency to do something in a particular way. As women we often feel the word 'talent' is too strong. See if this sounds familiar "Oh, I'm not talented, I just have a knack for ..."
Our 'knacks' are quite often very unique and personal and how we feel about them just might shape our destinies. It's important that we are able to own our abilities, so we'll lead out and hope that you follow along!
Melanie says:
Colour is something I have a knack for when it comes to scrapbooking. One of my favourite things to do at the lss where I work is to help people choose cardstock colours for the photos they come in with. I don't think I've ever had an unhappy customer! Colour matching is something that many people struggle with, and I feel very lucky that it comes intuitively to me. I'd be very happy to sit in front of the Bazzill racks at work all day and play with different colour combinations, if my boss would let me! I also get lots of colour inspiration from magazines like Real Simple (my fave) Canadian House and Home, and a slew of websites that I have bookmarked in my faves.
Here's some colour inspiration from Compendium that I'm nuts about, and that's been in my 'to use' file for a while now. The taupe cover and the bright orange pages peeking through look so rich & sleek together. Great for a fall layout, don't you think? Or maybe something minimal and sophisticated. I love that teeny tiny bit of yellow in the title that just makes it perfect. :) Feel very free to add in another colour if you'd like, this is by no means set in stone.
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If this happens to inspire you too, post a layout to our Flickr gallery using it. I'll post my version of it on Saturday. I'd love to see what you can come up with!
Stacy says:
I have a knack for coming up with concepts that make meaningful scrapbook projects and albums. It was this knack that provided me the opportunity to present ideas to Lisa Bearnson, Don Lambson and Mark Seastrand all those years ago. These original owners of Creating Keepsakes magazine suggested I write a book (Simple Scrapbooks) that ultimately became a sister publication.
I think most here know that I am an advocate for non-chronological scrapbooking. When you allow yourself to step back and view experiences outside of the strict time line in which they occurred you are free to make unique connections you otherwise might have missed. You are also more likely to conceive of concepts that make your story more interesting.
One of my all time favorite concepts is the idea of breaking down any topic into the component parts of personality, people, places and things. This concept is not only the basis for individual projects I have created, it is the foundation of my Library of Memories system and approach to my everyday albums.
For example, who says you have to scrapbook a travel destination in one album? When I returned from a trip to New Zealand with my husband, I wanted a way to capture our adventure and display it on a small shelf in my music/memory room. Driving to Wellington, we stopped at a beach and collected shells. We later bought a little dish with a Kiwi painted inside, to hold some of these shells. I decided to print my favorite photos as 3"x3" prints (from scrapbookpictures.com) and organize them into personality (US) pictures and those depicting the people we traveled with and met, the places we visited and the things we experienced.
Here's the inside front cover of my 4"x4" US mini-album.
Most of pictures are of us individually, but there are a handful of self-portraits too ...
Look -- you can see Geoff on the right holding the shells we found, that are now a part of my memory display!
