Hi Everyone! It’s my first time to host the write.click.scrapbook. blog and I’m very excited to be here!
This month’s gallery, as part of our Summer Scrapbook Rescue Campaign, featured the trusty 4x6 photo. We had hoped to inspire you to get back to the basics and get more done in less time. Wouldn’t you agree that August is a strange time of year? Maybe it’s because it is a transitional month? It’s that time when summer is winding down and simultaneously everyone is gearing up for school (well, almost everyone). It seems like there is a lot to do and not much time to do it.
Sticking with August’s theme of easy summer scrapbooking I want to take this week to share a few of my favorite ideas for getting the most out of my creative time. None of the ideas that I plan on sharing this week are new. You’ve seen them all before. But I want to gently remind you that scrapbooking your memories doesn’t have to be time-consuming and not every page has to be completely new or revolutionary. Because the truth is, doesn’t it seem like life is always busy? I know that the ideas I’ll be sharing this week will be helpful to you as you scrapbook your summer memories. But my real hope is that you’ll keep them in mind all year round whenever life gets busy but you still want to squeeze-in some creative time. Alright, let’s get started.
I’m going to begin the week with the concept of scraplifting. This past May the gallery featured designs from the collective that had been scraplifted from reader contributed layouts to the WCS Flickr gallery. I have to say, that was one of my favorite galleries. Today though, I want to focus on another side of scraplifting – scraplifting yourself. There is nothing easier to do when you are stuck, short on time, or in a creative rut than to pick a previously made layout and flat-out copy it. I scraplift myself all the time. It is such an easy way to get a page done quickly (plus, when you scraplift yourself it doesn't feel so much like cheating). Design choices like photo size and the placement of journaling and title are already made for you. If you want variety, you can mix things up a little by changing the placement of embellishments. But if you want to, you can also copy those little details exactly and save yourself even more time. Did I mention this is an easy way to get page done fast?
I might as well come-out right now and admit that I am a slow-scraper. I am. I don’t mind it though. I like spending time going through all my patterned papers and embellishments while making my pages. It’s part of the fun of scrapbooking for me. But I do get stuck or frustrated sometimes. Every now and then I just need a push, something to get me going. That is usually when I go through my albums and pick out a favorite layout, like this one:
and I copy it almost exactly. This page below took less than 30 minutes to complete:
And you know what? I really like it. I didn’t fuss with it too much. I chose a design beforehand, picked out a set of patterned papers and went to work.
Fellow team member Francine Clouden created this beautiful layout:
The design was inspired by this layout of her son:
In her words, “I stuck pretty closely to the original design, just changing the colours and embellishments to make the new page more girly!”
Jody Dent-Pruks created a layout for this topic as well. She said that she loved this idea because, “All the decisions are made for you.” Exactly! Jody picked out a layout that was a few years old, but one that she had always liked. Here is her inspiration layout:
And here is her new layout:
Doesn’t that jam look lovely? I’ve never had cumquat jam before. Do you think a jar would survive the trip all the way from Australia?
Well, jam or no jam, I’ll be back tomorrow with another tip for easy summer scrapbooking.
Until then, do you ever scraplift yourself? Where do you look for inspiration when you get stuck? Do you ever look to your own albums for inspiration?
