From Pinterest to Real Life - The Collage Wall

Pinterest...
I have a love/hate relationship with Pinterest.
I love/hate finding good things that waste my time because I'm already soooo good at wasting my own time. I also love/hate finding so many good things that I get overwhelmed thinking about the awesome potential of it all. And then I do...nothing.
See... that's why I love/hate Pinterest, and that's why I resisted joining up for so long. So I'm determined to only (mostly) pin things that I will actually (might actually in the future) do. And today I'm celebrating something I actually did! Yea ME!

THE COLLAGE WALL

I'm a photo addict. I love taking pictures and having pictures taken. I like displaying them, and fortunately in our new house we have HUGE walls and TONS of wall space. So I decided to do a collage wall.
Now note, I had done a collage wall in our old house, and I liked how it turned out, but I didn't love it. It never quite looked right. So I went to Pinterest and looked for some help in this area. I found this...

Source: thelittleblackdoor.blogspot.com via Sarah on Pinterest

I found all of the pictures in the boxes that we had that had silver frames and collected them all together. There were 15. I traced them all out on an old roll of wrapping paper.



I also labeled what picture I had traced, and I marked where the hangers were on the frame...you'll see why in a minute.



And then I cut them all out. It was tedious, and I wondered if it was worth the hard work...but I pressed on. I initially arranged all of the paper cut outs on the floor. It was a little easier for me to move them around and play with them like puzzle pieces.



Then I used my handy blue painters tape and bullet level and started taping them to the walls.



I kept putting up my little squares on the wall until I had this



Then I had my Main Squeeze come in and start drilling screws and hanging pictures. I totally could have done this myself, but he's so good at it, and it went very fast. It would have taken me 2 or 3 times as long.  Remember where I marked the hangers on the paper? He just put the screw in the wall through the paper, then ripped the paper off the wall. We did a little measuring and leveling at this point just to make sure it looked the way we wanted it to.



When we finished, it looked like this....



A couple lessons from this project...
*If you're a perfectionist, this project will drive you crazy. It's hard to take a 3D object like a frame and transfer it to a 2D piece of paper then cut it out perfectly and hang it level. If you look closely, my results are not perfect, but I think they're pretty great!
*Frames with table top stands are hard to hang on a flat wall. Your frame will not sit flat on the wall and will not look level. We destroyed several stands by ripping them off the back of the frame in this project. That was fun!
*Command strips by 3M are one of my favorite products. We had frames that just didn't want to hang right with the screws and hangers, so we'd cut a command strip and put it on the corner and it would help it stay.
*If you have old frames that aren't all the same color, use silver craft paint to make them all the same color. It saved me a ton of money.
*It does take a lot of time to trace, cut out, lay out and hang all the paper cut outs. But when it comes to the actual hanging, the time flies by. This day, my main squeeze and I had hung 29 pictures. Most of them by using this method. Once I got all the paper cut outs taped up, it took him an hour to hang the 29 pictures. Boosh.

Have you ever tried doing something like this? How did it turn out? Do you love or hate the process of hanging pictures?

Memory keeping for teenagers

It's no secret that I enjoy scrapbooking. Besides the fact that it gives me an outlet for my creativity, it gives my family a place to appreciate how truly good our life is. I love watching my kids pull out the scrapbooks and look at photos of themselves and ask what they were like when they were babies or toddlers. I love talking to them and sharing memories. They always laugh. Now that my oldest 2 are starting to read, they can read the stories I recorded on my pages. I didn't scrapbook much before I got married, although I do have one scrapbook of My Main Squeeze and I when we were dating. I have one scrapbook of us before kids too. Then the "scrapbooking industry" blew up!

I kinda wonder what my scrapbook would have looked like as a teenager, and I wonder if my memories of my teen years would be different if I had recorded memories as they happen. I tend to remember some of the things that were hurtful in my teenage years - nothing permanently scarring, just typical teenage drama. But I know the everyday stuff of my teenage years was not so dramatic, and some of it was fun and funny and enjoyable....I just can't remember the details (except the time I tricked my parents into thinking I had gotten my belly button pierced....boy were they ticked....that was hilarious. But I digress...) I think if I had journaled or scrapbooked, I may have a different outlook of my teen years. I think teens today will even have a different outlook because of recording the everyday on facebook and twitter. Have you ever stalked a teen's timeline? Full of pictures, funny bits of conversation, jokes, links, stories, and a fair bit of being snarky at each other.

Here's the bottom line...Live your life to the fullest and record it so that when you look back on it, it's not just the bad that stands out (because our minds, by nature, tend to remember that stuff).

If you want some more thoughts on this subject, check out this link from Becky Higgins (a world famous scrapbook person). The reason I wrote this post was because I read this blog post.

Creative block

Creative block.....arrrrrgh.....
We all get it. We all hate it. We all have to deal with it, and it causes frustration along the way. For me it happens the most for me when I have too many things on my plate. If there's one thing I know about myself is that I need regular intervals of creative activity in my life. It can come in the form of music, writing, decorating in my house, painting, photography, or scrapbooking (which is my favorite). When I get too much stuff on my plate, I feel that need for creativity in my soul the most, but I rarely make the opportunity to do so. All in all, it makes me pretty grumpy.



I'm in that place right now, too much on the to do list, and not enough getting crossed off. No posts on the blog....no glue or paint on my hands...no photos on the camera waiting to be edited... I'm looking at my calendar for a chunk of time that I can make an appointment with myself to get doing what I love to do, but often, when I do make that time for myself, I get overwhelmed at what to do. So many projects, so much inspiration, so little time....and unfortunately nothing substantial gets done! Aggravation on top of aggravation!

Sometimes it's not just the getting started that gets me, it's knowing how much it would take to get finished. Let's take my daughter's baby book. All the scrapbook layouts are in a box. Yep. A box. I was working on the pictures from the last few months of her first year when I discovered digital scrapbooking. Suddenly, I didn't have any desire to hold a glue stick, but I already had the pictures printed and supplies and embellishments purchased. I have even gone through and listed how many layouts I have left. Do you want to know how many? 8. Only 8. What's keeping me from getting them done....well....part of it is the frustration that I had with paper scrapping that I don't have with digital scrapping - never running out of letter stickers, not leaving a mess on the table when I have to stop scrapping to pick up my kids at school...I could go on, but I won't.

So what's a girl to do? There are a few things.
I set a timer. I have to have a deadline. I work the best under pressure. So I turn on the timer and attack my to do list. If I get stuff checked off, I'm more likely to not feel guilty for doing something creative for me. You need to know that sometimes this approach backfires on me. When I push myself so hard, sometimes I just don't have the energy to be creative.



Another thing I do is look back at some works in progress. We all have them... I'll open up all the layouts on my computer for a book that's not quite done - like the Christmas scrapbook I've been working on for 2 years now, or the "Funny things my kids say" album that only has a few layouts in it. Sometimes that inspires me to try something to add to that album, or sometimes it just reminds me why I like scrapping.



One of my favorite things to do is to accept a challenge. Many digital scrapbook sites have a forum where members will challenge each other - either with new techniques, themes, or ideas - and sometimes the challenges are just random. One website I've been stalking recently is the Digi Dares. Each week, they post a challenge, and when you complete the "dare," you post your results in a gallery and link to it when you comment. Each week they choose a winner.

My favorite challenge is a speed scrap. My favorite place to speed scrap is Scrap Matters. They tend to have a speed scrap every week, sometimes twice a week, and most of the time they fall at times when I can participate. This is how it works. A host compiles a set of directions to complete a layout, and over the space of an hour, they will post those directions one at a time using either a chat room or a forum. Most of the time, you'll have 6 or 7 directions total and you'll get a new step every ten minutes. So at the end of an hour, you'll have a whole layout done! Now you're probably thinking, "Ten minutes per step?!? That's a lot of time!" Not so much! You're not in charge of the steps! And most of the time you're chatting it up with the other people in the chat room! It's a fun thing to do. When you're done with your layout, you can post it in a gallery, and check out what everyone else did with the same directions as you had. Sometimes you'll be amazed at how people interpret the same steps differently.

As I was thinking about Creative Block, I decided it would be nice to hear what some of the people from the scrapping community have to say about creative block. So over the next few days, you'll hear some perspectives from other inspiring people about how they get past their creative block. See you tomorrow for our first interview!

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Location:In my car....