Jumpstart your Creative Juices!

For those who don’t know me personally, I am a scrapbooking-paper cutting-glue loving fool.  It really is my all-time favorite way to relax. Well, after watching Law & Order re-runs, that is. And truth be told, I actually let Law & Order re-runs play on the tele while I do my scrapbooking anyways. It’s the best of both worlds 🙂

Anyhoo, just because something is your passion does not mean you always have time to enjoy it. And that is where I am with my scrapbooking. My days are so busy that unfortunately this ole passion-of-mine ends up taking a back seat.

Don’t believe me?? Well, if my albums showed the stages of life I was in … my daughter is still in 3rd grade [and she’s actually in her first year of college] … my son has just been born [and he’s almost out of elementary school] … And my husband?? Well, we are just barely dating 🙂  Doh!!

BEHIND does not even begin to explain things!  Oy veh!!

But that was then, my friends, and this is now.

I have recently discovered Scrapbooks, etc. layout sketches!! And all I can say to that is Cha-ching!

These sketches are as so amazing and awesome that I can’t imagine how I survived without them.  In fact, my new motto has become “Why reinvent the wheel?”  I can now use the hard work someone else has done to jumpstart my creative juices and get the pictures off the flash drive and into the album!!  And that ‘s what it’s all about afterall, the albums.  Sharing your memories!!

In fact, it works so great using these sketches that yesterday afternoon I did TWO pages my friends in ONE day. Say what??

Of course, it didn’t hurt that “my boys” were away all day at some foolsball game and I had peace and quite … but you didn’t hear that from me 🙂

This is one of the pages I did yesterday … in less than one hour!  The original sketch looked like this:

Source

It can be found here.

I first figured out how many pictures I had to work with. Then I searched for a sketch that matched that number of pictures. Once I found what I liked I took the idea from the sketch and ran with it. I laid everything out in my Silhouette SD.

Source

Once I had that part done I gathered some papers that I liked …

cut out all the pieces parts with my Silhouette SD …

glued it together …

and ended up with this as MY version of the sketch:

** Note:  I edited the photos weeks ago in Photoshop and printed them at Sam’s Club so I did not add that amount of time into my “less than an hour” srapbooking.**

Supplies Used:
Mountain Border by Silhouette (I edited the image and used the “offset” feature for the red background)
Karate Side Kick by Silhouette
The belt colors journal strips were done with the print & cut feature in the Silhouette SD.
The round shaped journal spot for the title was done with the circle shape tool in the Silhouette SD.
Paper products were bought from the Martial Arts Party Store.

If anyone has questions on how I did any part of this with the Silhouette please feel free to email me at radmamatwo at gmail dot com.

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And there you have it!!
What ways do you use to “unblock” yourself and let your creative juices flow??