What Inspires You? This Week's Challenge...

This napkin has been hanging on my bulletin board for six months at least. I kept it because I wanted to duplicate the color scheme in a layout for Spring. I loved it; all my favorite things and colors together...green..orange...flowers...butterflies...so, I kept it. I decided one day to take some rubber stamps and piddle at the barn on our new fabulous picnic table. I took flower and scroll stamps along with butterflies and birds, and orange and green ink. I was about to attempt to duplicate this onto a white background cardstock. I'm not finished yet, but below is what I have done so far.

There used to be this chick named Faye Morrow Belle, who had a column in Creating Keepsakes Magazine...some of you might have read her column. Everyone raved about her column...I never quite "got" her style. It was all about how to take something from your surroundings and let it inspire you to apply the same design to your scrapbook page...like I said, I didn't get it, because she'd have a picture of a towel with fringe on it for example, then she'd say it inspired her to make the layout that was featured...and I just never saw the towel with the fringe in her layout...how on earth she could look at a toilet brush holder, or some other random object, and incorporate it into a scrapbook page was beyond me. Now I kinda' get it, but I don't think she actually ever got it herself...the whole point was to let something inspire you...if something inspires you, you should use that scheme, color, or some part of the design on your layout. I must've not been the only one that saw absolutely no correlation between her inspiration and her end result, because she went back to being a bank broker or something like that. I know she's back at a bank somewhere. So anyway, find something around your house to inspire you this next week...could be a magazine add, a piece of junk mail, a billboard arrangement, a menu..look at it in a new way and use it to do a page layout...then post it. Ready, set, GO!

I bought this scrapbook idea magazine/book a couple of years ago, and when I started reading it, I couldn't put it down...I went cover to cover in one sitting. It really did inspire me. I remember for weeks, I'd look at shampoo bottles, labels on food packaging etc...waiting for something to strike me. I guess you have to work at it, because I never did make a page using an inspired object idea. This week, I'm going to do it! I can't inspire my fellow bloggers, then not do the challenge myself, now can I? Below are a couple of scanned pages from the above idea book...just to get your creative gears going.... along side of the layout is the object that inspired the designer.