Thinking outside the box.

Last weekend I started working on a project that is a pretty big one for me.

I tend to be a single 12x12 page scrapbooker using materials from all over the place, different manufactures, collections and even different decades.... yikes, however this project in particular has been different in a few ways. I have stuck really closely to using just the one collection and creating multiple pages from the one trip. 

 In the almost two decades that I have been scrapbooking I don't think I have done either before. I had in my stash the Endless Summer collection from Cocoa Vanilla Studio which had a number of the embellishment packs so I decided to start from there and work my way through the kit. One of the interesting things that I found was that by being limited to what products I had to work with I used things that I would normally pass over, that has been challenging but I am also loving the outcomes that are starting to take form in my layouts.

 I think that we get stuck in our ways especially when we have been doing something for so long but it is nice to shake things up and try new and different things. I have always had a tendancy to buy single sheets of paper rather than a collection but I think from now on especially when I have an album or a project that I am working on I might stick to the kit format, its been an enlightening time.

Blast From The Past....

I never thought that I would EVER be using these guys again. Somtimes though the simplest of tools that get the job done. Let me take you back to the year 2002. I was new to scrapbooking, in fact most of us were new to scrapbooking. You could not just go into any big craft or variety store and buy supplies and if they did happen to have them the selection was small and very basic, no you either had to know a lady (cough, cough creative memories) or go to a scrapbooking and stamping store. But then Lincraft opened up A new store near where I lived and they bought with them MAMBI softly spoken stickers, Making Memories everything and Fiskars crafting tools. This was where I got the Fiskars shapeboss and I scored it on a great opening sale for just $80 (MY GOD, what was I thinking) and a couple of the basic shape templates. Those shape templates were a life saver, no more trying to find a jar lid or cup that was the right size of circle to trace or wonky freestyle hearts nope, I had templates that I could trace and then cut wonky with my old school scissors.....far out we have come a LOOOOONG way.

 
I would buy one of those templates every visit until I was satisfied that I had all of the basic and important shapes like circles, squares, triangles, weird flat top and bottom diamonds.....cause yes who doesnt want to cut your photos into triangles and diamonds? Putting my sarcasm away though, we have seen huge changes in the industry in those almost 20 years since my days of fluro plastic stencils and that is not a bad thing.
I am so glad that we all have many different options available for us to use in our crafting but sometimes I forget that those simple tools can do the job too.

Not so sure that I will need to use them again any time soon if at all but it was a nice moment to reflect on this hobby that I love so much and all of the changes that I have seen and gone through along the way.