Hey there! Amy Sorensen here, starting off a new week at Write. Click. Scrapbook.
I remember exactly when I had a scrapbooking revelation that changed my process. It was way back in the dinosaur days of scrapbooking (you know…when the stegosaurus and the t-Rex were paper pieced from The Paper Patch patterned paper), and I made a layout that I instantly fell in love with. It had three 4x6 photos lined up in a straight horizontal row, with journaling underneath the photos and a title and some embellishments above them.
Hardly an unusual design now, but then it felt fresh and entirely flexible. I finished it and thought I almost wish I hadn’t used up that idea on these photos, and then that’s when I had my ah-ha moment: I could use the same design, invented by me, more than once!
And thus I started scraplifting myself. (Even though I don’t think we’d invented the word “scraplifting” yet.) I think I've probably made 287 different interpretations of that original idea.
Ever since that experience, I’ve found that while I can find inspiration everywhere, it’s also fairly useful to be inspired by my own creations. This is because it feels more “me” if I came up with it. Plus, why reinvent the wheel? When you find something that works and then use it again, it helps your layouts come together so much faster.
So! To celebrate the creative spark that can be found in scraplifting yourself, we’re focusing on that this week. I hope you’ll join us over the next few days as we explore different ways to use your past layouts to make something new.
One of the awesome thing about scraplifting (yourself or anyone, really!) is that it’s so flexible. You can take an entire design and reuse it, or just a part; you can be inspired by a title or a design element or even a story. Plus, you can take any idea, based on any topic, and use it for a different topic. Here’s what I mean. I made this layout for a Saturday Sketch post last April:
One thing I love about this layout is that wide, short photo at the bottom (with the Easter baskets). It was the start of my current obsession, in fact, with wide, short pics. When I was looking through last year’s Halloween photos a few days ago (because when is it more fun to scrapbook Halloween pics than in October?), I came upon a picture that seemed perfect for the same treatment. So I scraplifted my Easter photo-processing idea and used it on this Halloween layout:
They’re not identical layouts, but they are very much influenced by each other.
Do tell! Do you ever scraplift yourself?
