Creative Excercise

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Hi - Its Tuesday and that means it Sizzle's turn to blog. So here I am with a creative exercise. I think that creativity is an exercise, sometimes you have to try something new, get out of your comfort zone and learn by doing. Scrapbooking is my creative exercises. It does not come naturally to me, I stress about it; it takes me ALL day to do just one page. For most things I don't think it is worth it but I do it sometimes because it helps me think creatively and using that part of my brain. I don't follow patterns in scrapbooking so it all has to come from ME. That is different from what I usually do. I like to follow a pattern that I know works; that other people have tried and had success with. I feel uncomfortable without instructions or a pattern.

Thus scrapbooking is my creative exercise. Get it?

The only thing I scrapbook are first year baby books. I try (I haven't finished my 2 year old's yet) to keep a scrapbook of each babies first year. It is so hard for me but I try.

Today I started the baby's (Let me warn you that I was so excited to be able to use flowers). Here is what I came up with.

Can you believe that it took me all day (actually part of two) to come up with these two pages? That is a record for me too, usually it would take longer but now I have a Cricut and that really helped me. I suppose part of the time was in getting used to how it works and experimenting.

I am new to it, this was only my second time to use it but it is a pretty cool tool when you get the hang of it. Most everything in my layouts came from the Basic George cartridge with one exception (miracle came from Home Decor). I just have the basic Cricut so I can cut things from 1" to 5.5." I am pretty sure that is all I would ever use it for. I used to want the bigger one but now I think I am glad I got this smaller one.

Let's take a closer look

The letters for Bloom are American Craft thickers and the In is a Memory makers rub on. The brackets came from the George cartridge, I cut them at 1" I figured in bloom was a nice way to say REALLY PREGNANT. Don't you think so?

The little flowers came from a punch and the bigger flowers were cut from George. This page is for my pregnancy picture - which I had to photo edit a wee bit so I don't have the actual picture yet. (I am not clever enough to print them on my own computer even though I am pretty sure I could if I tried)

All the above flowers (the bigger ones) came from George I just printed them at 1" in white and then 2.5" in blue and inked the edges and layered them. The orange flowers are from that punch again.

I have a hard time figuring out how to journal. I HATE my handwriting, it is terrible so That is NOT an option for me. I guess I could feed the card stock through the printer but I am not sure how I would cut shapes around the words if I did that first.... so I use vellum. I run the vellum through the printer and then use vellum tape. It took me awhile to find out about vellum tape but it is the only thing that you can't see - at least as far as I know.

The word miracle was on the Home Decor cartridge, I used the shadow feature for the white and left the cutouts in the a and the e and then cut it again in the orange paper just regular.

(the Cricut has a shadow, blackout and image feature so you can layer and get three different effects)

I haven't figured out the bottom half of this page for the journaling, any ideas? I had a decorative box there but it was too small so I have to re-cut one tomorrow and maybe I will just use my crappy handwriting. Journaling is definitely the trickiest part. What do you guys do? Tips?

Your assignment this week is to try creative that is OUT of your comfort zone, something new or something you don't normally enjoy. Then send us an email with a picture of what you did and what you learned and I will post it next week. Our email is cjuices2@gmail.com

Keep the juices flowing!