My creative outlets often come in many forms, I’ve never considered myself a scrapbooker or paper crafter, but one creative activity I’ve come back to over and over again is sewing. I consider myself to be some-what practiced on a sewing machine, enough to have the confidence to wear my garments out of the house.
I’ve gone through a couple of the CreativeLive classes as a student, like Making Fashion: Draw, Draft and Sew by Jay Calderin, where I took his advice and actually started to draw out some of my ideas before starting to sew and found it extremely useful to either encourage ideas or throw them in the bin. Watching Simple Sewing Projects for Beginners by Susan Beal refreshed my existing knowledge on basic sewing stitches and encouraged me to try something different in my creative process.
However, I just finished producing my first class on scrapbooking and paper crafting with Close To My Heart, a leader in scrapbooking and stamping, CTMH has been in business for over 30 years. The class, Scrapbooking, Paper Crafts, Stamping, and More! was a two day extravaganza where the Chief Communications Officer and the Creative Communications Manager along with three consultants went through the products and showed innovative and creative techniques to use paper crafts, stamps, and much much more. The connecting thread throughout the class is a powerful notion to create physical memories of our life moments, especially as our lives become more digital. I encourage you to take a look at the FREE class and get inspired by the endless possibilities to be creative and preserve your life moments with the CTMH products.
At the end of the class, I was lucky enough to be gifted some of the ‘left-over’ scrapbooking materials the students didn’t use. I lugged my box of paper, stamps, and blank cards home. And to my surprise, two days after the class I was poking through the box and pulling out items to put on my blank cards. I sat down for a couple of hours, created 11 cards and even got my husband in on it (much to his surprise!). I found myself recalling things like “you can use every piece of paper” and “nothing goes to waste” – I was cutting and glueing and making unique cards. I even tried my hand at stamping, but I think I got more ink on myself and my pug than on the actual cards themselves! (I have determined from this experience that I am not a stamper).
So what did I learn from my first scrapbooking class?
1. Have patience. First and foremost, I learned that scrapbooking and paper crafting can be time consuming – if you let it. There are many tips and tricks to saving time and creating under a time constraint. But having the patience to see an idea through to the end and holding the finished result is extremely rewarding.
2. It’s all in the details. When the class started I began to see how much attention to detail and time went into each project, I thought that I would never have the capacity to create like that. However, after creating my first 11 cards, I found myself wanting to add small intricate details to each one, a piece of sparkle here and a bow there. It really made the difference to bring the cards to life – and it was fun!
3. Experiment with variety. The ladies from CTMH highlighted that the products and papers could be used for any project – paper pocket cards could be used on a folding card. There were no rules to what could be used and in my box of goodies that I took home I found myself mixing and matching to create different looks and textures on my cards.
4. Documenting moments. One of the major take-aways from this class is that documenting our family, friend, and personal moments in our lives is so important in a world where we have an abundance of pictures. Actually taking the time to print the pictures or to journal about a moment is important – because it’s these moments we look back on and cherish.
If you haven’t already checked out the free CTMH class, then do. It’s well worth watching and learning from ladies who’ve been documenting their lives through scrapbooking and paper crafts for decades. And you might just get inspired to make something memorable too.
