Why We Create

Everyday Adventures

Oh, don’t worry, I’ll get back to the 64 Arts before too long, I’ve just got something things on my mind that I wanted to think out loud, as it were, and maybe someone else needs to hear or think about.

This weekend I spent a lot of time working on just one project. It wasn’t a particularly difficult project, and I can’t show you what it is, just yet, but there was a lot riding on it. Or, well, maybe not, but it felt like it.

You see, it was my first project working with a new Gauche Alchemy kit and it will mark the change between blog writer for the fabulous Gauche Girls and a full-fledged artsy Alchemist. And I want it to be good. I’ve thought about this project, planned it in my head, spent 3 days, off and on, tweaking here or there, debating each step.

Not that I’m worried about it, I know that what I turn in will be fine or even better, I just want to make sure I do it right, that I justify their faith in me.

What’s different, though, is how I would have approached this if it had just been another project for me, or even a gift for someone else.

In those cases, I take a much different tack. Sure, I plot and plan ahead of time, but when I sit down to start I usually go like gangbusters until I reach the end. Unless the project itself is something that’s going to take a while (like knitting), usually I finish it in one, sometimes mammoth, sitting and move on to the next.

All of that led me to the thought:

Why We Create

The project I’m still finishing is meant to showcase a particular product, so I might make a concerted effort to show more of the different items included in the kit than I would have normally.

If I’m creating for a friend, I’ll make sure to include little touches that mean something to them, or represent secrets or jokes we share.

And when I create for myself I tend not to think, just to do. Because creating for myself isn’t about the what, it’s all about the why.

So the WHY affects the HOW, but it’s still creating.

And that’s what’s truly important: that we keep creating. Whatever it is, as long as we keep working at it, we’re bound to improve and innnovate and keep the inspiration train rolling.

I create for a lot of different reasons. Sometimes for fun, sometimes for work (though, truth be told, creating as “work” is some of the best work I do!), and sometimes just because. I’ll bet you do the same–or you would, if you get out of your own way long enough.

Ergo…

Why we create may affect how we create, but as long as we just create, we can't go wrong

Click for the full-sized image.

4 Lessons From an Unexpected Source

Everyday Adventures

Ever wonder what happened to an entire week?

I have that feeling right now, but I know where it went.

Last Monday night I had that familiar feeling in my right ear (a more-common-than-I’d-like occurrence for the past 2 years), so in the drops went. By Wednesday morning not only could I only “sleep” (read as: flit in and out of wakefulness) sitting up, the swelling was so bad it was not only visible along the side of my face, but interfered with my jaw. Major antibiotics and pain pills and several days spent holding down the couch and I’m now almost back to normal (ear is still a little muffled, but the pain and swelling are gone).

There went my week and most of my weekend.

The funny thing is, I had already decided last week was going to be an improptu blog-cation after an incident Sunday night that still had me a bit rattled come Monday morning. But in my version of events I was going to spend the weeknights tidying up my office, working on personal projects that always seem to get pushed to the bottom of the list, and Saturday catching up with an old friend.

None of that happened.

In hindsight (wonderful thing) I learned a few things from that chain of events that forced me to slow way down. And those realizations have something to do with creativity.

1. We need to trust in the good.

My meltdown Sunday night happened because not only could I not get out of my own head long enough to fall asleep, I was convinced–on some level–that things were going so well, lately, that catastrophe was due to strike any moment. Usually I operate on the pendulum theory: that, while extremes to the good or bad can happen from time to time, we spend most of our time hanging around the middle, or neutral zone. If we trust that to good comes to us in its own time, no strings attached (except for maybe all that hard work we put in, in the middle), we don’t have to be so scared about what’s around the corner, keeping us from moving forward. From creating more good stuff.

2. Having a safety net is a good thing.

While I was trying to keep my freak-out to myself, Todd woke up and stayed present with me, talked to me, and heard me out until I managed to eventually settle and fall asleep. Whether it’s someone who’ll listen to your rants, your incredible ideas, bring you ice cream or coffee, depending on the need, or run to the store when you run out of something but can’t break your momentum, having an extra pair of eyes, ears, hands, or shoulders is invaluable. Even if it’s phoning a friend, know where (and who) your net is.

3. Sometimes we need to step back from a situation and regroup.

Enter my blog-cation. I thought that if I could just scale down my to-do list for a week, I could refocus and regroup, coming back stronger the following week. Truth is, when we get so deep into what we’re doing–be it blogging or creating art or planning our next big event–we can lose sight of the little things and not see when we’re heading for a creative crash. Of course, sometimes you need more than a step, which brings us to…

4. Our bodies will force us to stop if we don’t stop soon enough.

How often have you worked or worried yourself into the sickbed? I don’t for a moment doubt that the ear infection was at least in part the result of my worries from the night before compounding the break-neck pace I’ve been moving at. While I don’t regret any of my actions over the last month, or what’s coming up over the next 2 weeks (or the holidays after that), I needed the reminder. And I’m grateful it happened on the one week where it only messed up personal plans (not professional ones).

 

Harvest Fruit Digital Scrapbook mini-kit preview

Using What You’ve Got

64 Arts, Everyday Adventures

I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been working on digital scrapbook pages again. That’s still true, and–based on my experience as a part of the Gauche Alchemy team (which I will be continuing for the foreseeable future, I love working with them!)–have been wanting to find a spot on a digital design/creative team. This means I’ve been submitting applications and had to put up a gallery of my pages so the team leaders could take a look at my work.

That last part had proved the biggest pain  in my ass. I’ve tried numerous plugins only to have one not allow multiple galleries on a single page, another that I tried had a nasty habit of hijacking ANY images I uploaded to this blog the next time I’d go to upload a layout (so if you ever came here and saw a lot of broken image links over the last month, that was why), meaning I had to re-upload and remap each and every picture in the affected posts. And y’all know how many pictures some of my posts use. So I kept looking for a better plugin. A better addition to this blog.

Turns out, WordPress has a native gallery feature that does pretty much what I need without bloating the install with any more plugins. I just didn’t know it.

Sure, I had to do some minor code tweaks to get everything the way I wanted it, but I’ve become good at reverse engineering WP themes, so it wasn’t the end of the world. And I still have to re-upload, tag, and credit a couple dozen layouts before it’s all said and done, but that’s minor.

In the end, I will have just the gallery that I want without having someone else’s programming to deal with, update, or rely on.

Now, what does this have to do with the price of tea in China? Or our day-to-day creative spirit?

How many times have you put off that fun idea because you didn’t have just the right type of paper/fabric/bead? How much money have you spent on specialty tools when the basic ones, with a little ingenuity would have done fine? How many times do we get hung up on the what and forget the why?

If you’re anything like me–and I’ll bet we have a lot in common–you’re nodding your head to those questions. You’ve been there. We all have.

Living creatively isn’t just about following a set of directions to make the same crafts and tchotchkes that everyone else has. It’s about taking an idea and running with it in our own direction. Sure, sometimes you want to do exactly what they did, because you like their end result, but we always put our own mark on our projects because we’re human beings, not crafting robots.

So have some fun with it–whether that IT is a craft project, a meal, or just getting from point A to point B.

And don’t get hung up on the details.

(Except when the details are important, of course. Things like your safety, meeting obligations, and stuff like that are details totally worth getting hung up on!)

Now, if any of you have been curious about digital scrapbooking and wanting to try your hands at it, I’ve put together a little mini-kit perfect for October that I’m going to share with you: for free!

Harvest Fruit Digital Scrapbook mini-kit preview

I actually started this kit a few years ago, and I used it to make the invitations for that year’s BYOP party (which was the year of the Halloween brunch, hence the fruit images), but never got around to finishing it or sharing it. Now that it’s done, it’ll be available for download until October 31st or 500 downloads, whichever comes first. (And if, by some strange luck, we hit those 500 downloads really early in the month, I’ll put up a secondary link.)

The mini-kit includes 6 papers, 4 fruit images, 2 tags, a piece of organza-style ribbon, and a twine bow. All images are 300 dpi, the papers are jpeg files and the embellishments are png files with transparent backgrounds. Drop-shadows are on the previews, only. Enjoy!

[button link=”https://www.yousendit.com/directDownload?phi_action=app/directDownload&fl=SWhZekZqY1NvQnMxZW9LSFJsRHVnVE9yZWt5UmdteDRsUjJuWENHRzVZbz0&experience=bas” color=”#b00″ size=”3″ style=”3″ dark=”1″ square=”1″ ] Download [/button]

"Queen Bee" digital art journal layout

In Defense of Digital

Everyday Adventures

I have a confession to make, my friends: I’ve been slacking.

Not on the must-do stuff. No calling in “sick” to work or skipping blog updates, nothing like that. But my personal to-do list, the one that usually governs my evenings and weekends (especially the weekends) has seen a bit of a shake-up the past few weeks as I’ve renewed an old hobby.

Renewed maybe isn’t the best word, maybe re-obsessed?

Contrary to what many people assume, scrapsoflife.com was not named for my scrapbooking interests, that just happened to be a coincidence, really. But I was a rather avid scrapbooker back in 2003 (technically since the late-90s, and before that if you count the “old fashioned” journal-with-pressed-flowers-and-other-mementos-inside days–you know, before certain companies made it the largest segment of paper crafting ever), amassing quite the collection of tools, supplies, and techniques. Then, in 2007, I picked up a freelance writing gig and a lot of my extra interests took a backseat (unless I could write an article about it, of course).

Over the last 5 years I haven’t done much memory-keeping of the album-and-paper sort. I always intended to get back to it, but never quite got there. A couple years ago I had a brief relapse, but then I got to work on the cookbook and, again, other things took a backseat.

Until 2 weeks ago, when a newsletter from Divine Digital announced a week-long art journal challenge, and I was more than intrigued.

Because that’s the other confession: what little scrapbooking I have been doing in the past 5 years has been digital.

Now don’t get me wrong, I still love paper crafting and traditional scrapbooking. I still have scads of supplies I will use up, eventually, but any busy scrapper will tell you that it’s tough to sit down and get a page done when you’ve only got a few minutes here and there, everything takes up space and little things can get lost, and then you run out of adhesive or can’t find a ribbon to match just that right shade of blue to keep from clashing…

But with digital, a lot of those obstacles fall away. If you’ve never considered digital scrapbooking, think about this:

  • All our pictures are digital these days. Obviously we still have printed photos and memorabilia that could stand organization, but these days most cameras are digital, and scrapbooking digitally means you don’t have to worry about which photos to print and at what size. You size them on the fly in whatever program you’re using and keep on creating.
  • Digital scrapbook supplies are super-portable. I can’t even count the number of times I loaded up a craft tote (or 2) to go to a friends house for a crop. And out of town weekend retreats took a trunk-full! Even when I moved from totes to specialty organizers with handles and rollers and started pre-kitting my photos to make crops more productive, there were still bags and whellies and oh so much stuff to bring. Now? All I need is my laptop.
  • No hoarding that one perfect paper. Digital scrapbook supplies don’t get used up. I know so many crafters who hold onto a piece of paper because it’s so pretty, they don’t want to cut it up and use it because it’s discontinued or might be hard to find again. You buy an awesome digital paper set and you can use it over and over and over again. Same with embellishments, templates, everything! You buy it, you own it.
  • No more searching for just the right shade. Another perk of digital supplies is if this embellishment and that paper aren’t quite right for each other, you tweak the color or hue or contrast to make it match.
  • Freebies galore! Many digi-scrap websites offer freebies on a regular basis, so you can start to build your collection of supplies with very little risk. My 2 go-to sites fall into this category: Scrap Girls puts out a newsletter 6 days a week and there’s some sort of freebie download available every day. Divine Digital, on the other hand, puts out 2 free digi-kits a month, downloadable in daily chunks (you do have to be a registered member of their site, but that’s hardly a down-side since membership is free). Plus you can usually find out what other designers are offering extra downloads if you pay attention to digi-scrap forums.
  • Much less mess. When you’re having to search, pull out, layout, and fiddle you need space and room to get a little messy. Yes, that’s part of the fun, but it can also be frustrating if you craft in a high-traffic area of your home and have to pick everything up to clear the table, etc. Again, just fire up your computer and load your files and you’re on your way to layouts in no time.

Of course, it does help to have good tech at your fingertips. For a while I was keeping my digital crafting supplies on an external harddrive to keep from using up my computer’s harddrive–the files do take up a certain amount of space. But when I got my new laptop last month (with its Terabyte drive), I was able to copy all those files over (redundancy!) as well as download a whole bunch of new files without making a dent in my harddrive’s capacity.

Which program you use is also a factor. I actually learned how to digi-scrap in PhotoShop Elements 3.0 (hint: the current version is 10). It was a series of tutorials from ScrapGirls that showed me how to use the program, and I was able to use that knowledge when I upgraded to PhotoShop CS4 a while back (only because I needed CMYK capabilities, something the consumer-grade PSE doesn’t support). You can download a 30-day trial of any Adobe product to see what you think about it, plus there are a lot more digital scrapbook program options than back when I started (when it was either the aforementioned PSE or Paint Shop Pro!). Heck, you can even digi-scrap in Paint if you really had to (maybe I’ll tell that store/share that layout one day… maybe).

Anyway, back to the point, I signed up for the Art Journal challenge and did my best to keep up with a digital layout a day. It was great getting back into the swing of things, and I’ve since picked up an old album I was working on back in 2007 and completed another 4 pages for on Saturday. I decided I’d share the 7 art journal pages I completed as part of the challenge, today.

"Inner Circle" digital art journal layout

"Super Hero" digital art journal layout

"Inspired Eye" digital art journal layout

"Take Flight" digital art journal layout

"In Joy" digital art journal layout

"Laugh out Loud" digital art journal layout

"Queen Bee" digital art journal layout

Each day’s challenge came with a piece of word art, a theme, some questions to ponder, and then some specific components to include in the layout. Since this was an art journal challenge, for all but the last layout pictures were optional. My goal was more to refresh my memory of how to construct the layouts, how to use the tools available to me, and find out what’s new in the world of digital scrapbooking. I must have done okay, since Day 7 (my Queen Bee or “accomplished” layout) was picked as Member Layout of the Day. Not to shabby for one seriously out of practice scrapper, no?

I don’t know how long I’ll be able to keep up with scrapbooking this go-round, before something else demands my full attention and it sits and waits again. I’m hoping for a good, long stretch, but I’ll ride this wave of creativity as long as I can.

What have you been getting your hands and heart into, lately? Revive any past passions over the holiday weekend? Or do you have any questions about digital scrapbooking that I might be able to answer?

What is Art 4x6 Swap Piece

Arty Goodness in the Mail

Everyday Adventures

I’ve just made it home from a fabulous time at Ancient City Con. We’ll resume our basket-weaving next week, but for this week I want to share about another fun project with the Gauche Alchemy girls!

——————–

After several of the Alchemists participated in Art House Co-Ops 4×6 Exchange, they decided they had so much fun they wanted to do it again! This time we signed up for our own version of the swap using Swap-Bot to handle the random matching of partners, and we each got to make, send, and receive a fun little piece of art.

Rose Colored Glasses 4x6 Swap piece

Mine was inspired by a window pane-style stamp that I’d embossed in white and used a watercolor resist technique to color.  Then I went through a couple of magazines I had lying around to find the words to my phrase: When you look out the window onto the world, do you see the possibility? The backgrounds also came from ads in the magazines, layered with some iridescent punchinella (from Gauche Alchemy, naturally) all stuck down and covered with Mod Podge. Then I wrapped the edges in ruler-patterned washi tape, but just letting the lines show.

It still wasn’t quite right, though. Something was missing. Inspired by all the mists that are popular these days, I grabbed some fabric dye spray I had leftover from making a pair of fairy wings and gave the card a strategic spritz. After it dried–a heat gun makes short work of that!–I was finally satisfied, and off it went (across the pond) to my swap-recipient, Jo of Fiddlesnips!

In return, I received this awesome 2-sided 4×6 from Michelle of My Analog Life.

Create Art 4x6 Swap piece (side 1)

What is Art 4x6 Swap Piece

Want to do some random act of arty-kindness? Take a piece of card stock and trim it to 4 inches by 6 inches. Then put whatever you want to on it: collage magazine cuttings, slap some paint around, decorate it with stickers or tape. Just keep it pretty-much flat. Sign the back of it (or not, if you want to be all crafty-ninja), put it in an envelope, and send it to a friend.

And since it is just 24 square inches, it’s a small thing, a quick project. Working within limitations isn’t a bad thing, every now and then, it gives you a safe space to be creative in.

Are you going to try your own 4×6?