Category: Creative Journey

I continue telling my creative story, and sharing old scrapbook pages too. If you have questions or perhaps chapter suggestions I’d love to hear them…

As I worked on figuring out what “my style” meant, I found  identifying what I was NOT was far easier. I mean – I like both wild shades of pink and bold paint strokes AND delicate lace. Grungy inked and sanded paper edges and rhinestone encrusted projects. Super girly stuff and more rugged looks. Lots of photos and single photos. I felt like a walking contradiction – and it was frustrating.

Some layouts (like the one below) I felt were close – they were pure “May” creations, if just a bit off in execution. So what wasn’t “May”?

The first thing was to realize that I was bad with really graphic papers and designs. Below is a layout (the I and Y have fallen off title, FYI) that is purely magazine copying/trendy attempt. In no way is it me. There is no journaling outside of the date. It’s truly a worthless page. There’s no heart here, and believe that I made note of it (back in ’05) when I was reviewing what I wasn’t.

I also wasn’t great forcing photos I wasn’t inspired to work with at the time. Weird things (like page below) would result.

I was into more creams and browns (not so much black & white for paper choice), and I was NOT good at preventing trapped white space, or planning for my titles. The example below is a page that I felt like almost made it to great – it was so close to the vision in my head – but not quite.

I also didn’t like when I worked with trendy product just because it was the thing to do. Not only did it feel false, but the pages always seemed a bit off to me. As I found more things I didn’t want in my scrapbooking, I also found things I did. The hardest thing for me had to be breaking free of what was expected.

The only person judging me, or critiquing with heavy expectation, was me!

I still don’t have what I consider a “style” in the traditional sense. I had to embrace that I’d never fit into a neat cubby like “linear” or “clean” or “shabby” all the time. Guess what? That is OK! You don’t have to put a label on your style. Just having it, just being intentional and personal in your choices makes it so. ENJOY.

Other things I accepted I wasn’t was good at layering tons of patterned papers, working with striped papers, titles (I still struggle!), warm colors, keeping things super simple, balance, and so much more. In finding what I wasn’t good at I was also discovering what I did NOT want to be. In doing this, I exposed what I did want in general terms, and found myself with goals and things to shoot for.

I wanted pages with more journaling and stories. Pages that looked pleasing to my eye. More fun stuff. Pretty colors. Trendy stuff only when it spoke to and suited ME. I just wanted to be May.

Turns out, it wasn’t too much to ask…

It might sound goofy, but the more I became at peace with my crafting style, the more I was at peace with myself in general. Accepting myself, my flaws, my quirks, and my individuality are things that could be put into any context of life. Though I didn’t realize it at first, getting myself to a happy crafting place would be one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself.

Today I’d like to talk about me. Now I realize both being a blogger and scrapbooker I do both on a regular basis, and this whole ‘creative journey’ series I’ve been sharing is, well, about me. I actually mean it in a more literal sense today though, as I’m going to share ‘all about me’ layouts from 2005-2006, also known in my scrapbook history as my time of greatest change.

When I was teaching at local stores and retreats I used to teach a number of “all about me” classes as well as making a lot of ME pages. I don’t make loads anymore, and honestly I think it’s because there aren’t things I’m working out in a way that makes me inspired to do lots of just me pages at the moment. If I had a story or thought I wanted to share in this way, I sure would.

For a while, though I didn’t realize it at the time, I was figuring out who I was as a crafter through scrapbooking about myself.

One of the worst things I ever did was to try to pin myself into a set “style”. I just don’t fit into any of the neat little boxes and doing my wild “me” pages with no rules or ideas held back helped me see this. I had so much pent up and held back creativity (from trying to fit in) that when I started doing these pages I exploded.

I went wilder than I like, but I think I had to. Take it to the far end just because I could to free myself. What I see as I look back at these pages was a woman who’d caged herself in and was breaking free at a full run.

I actually did art journal quite a bit during these times, though mine ended up more diary style than creative/technique heavy. Even with that release (and FANTASTIC outlet to improve my writing skills) I still needed to muck up my pages – to rebel against “the man” who was telling me to keep it simple & clean.

reminder: no man or woman was actually telling me that I had to do this, it was all self-inflicted.

Basically, I was giving myself permission to do whatever I wanted. Anything at all. I’d just sit and do whatever I felt like – to heck with design qualities or the end result. I was really trying to break free of my newly learned bad habits in scrapbooking.

I needed to “mess up” pages and be ok with it.

The page above happened late one night. I was working on my 2005 Memory Makers masters entry and trying to please the judges. Something happened and I snapped… in a good way ultimately. The page was a major ‘lightbulb’ moment in my creative journey.  Needless to say I didn’t win, or even get mentioned. Know what?  That was OK. More than ok because I was doing things my way, the way I wanted them done.

So what would I suggest to somebody looking to do stuff about themselves? Start anywhere. Just take a thought and run with it. Don’t worry about spelling or being right – just DO. Shut down your brain and play. If you’re more comfortable, work with a journal or notebook that feels less formal. You could do your favorites, something you worry about, things you like, a detail, a meal you learned to make… how personal or how big or small is up to you. It’s all good.

I even did a “me” page inspired by my Jr. High collages where I’d glue tons of things that I liked to a sheet of paper.

This remains one of my all time favorites. It’s messy, it’s got bits of favorites all over, and it was made purely in fun. Only for me.

because I can.

The “me” pages definitely helped me creatively. I realized that I am ok with having my own style but not fitting in one “official” style type. I also made the decision to embrace myself – flaws and all much as I can.

I will mention here that during 2005 is when I started my first blog. Forcing myself to sit down each day and think of something to share or write, writing about my process on creating a layout, and just the act of writing was helping me. Creativity is a muscle that must be worked out regularly in some way, and the more I got that, the happier I was.

The #1 thing I learned, by far, is that I would never be finished with the journey. I’d always be growing, changing, having new stories to tell and coming up with new ideas. I was never going to reach a place where I was done and my style and preferences would be set.

how could they?

As a new mother I had the time, but in much smaller chunks and not whenever I wanted as I had before. I was going to need to adjust to my baby’s schedule and I really needed to get better at identifying what does (and doesn’t) work for me as well as learning how to call on inspiration at will rather than waiting for ideas to come to me.

Now that I have my own ideas flowing strongly through my head (instead of what I think others want) things would keep getting better, this much I knew. I dyed my hair back to it’s normal shade of ‘boring’ dark brown eliminating my blonde highlights for good. I went back and looked at my layouts (all of them) making lists of good, bad, ugly, awesome.

I owned up, at long last, to just being ME. I accepted that I’d never be uber-cool or cutting edge. I’d never be a trendsetter or fashionista. I’d just be plain ‘ol me. Bookwormy, purple loving, creative mess of a brain, me.

 

Next installment to come next week: what doesn’t work for me. If you’ve got questions or want to see something in particular please feel free to ask!

I thank you all for the amazing responses to my creative journey. So many touching e-mails, and it makes me so happy to know that hearing my (very honest) story is moving to you. I’ve got a LOT more to say, I’ll keep posting installments as I’m ready. In sitting down to write the next chapter of my creative journey, it seems fitting that I got lost. I’ve been trying to figure out how to tell the tale in a way that makes sense, especially since I don’t consider my journey over, but rather I’m in the middle of it! Without further ado, here’s the next chapter…

In the first six months after Elizabeth was born I had a lot of time on my hands. I wasn’t working, and my darling girl took 4 – 6 1hr naps every day. This meant that I had little bits of time to scrapbook each day, and I was determined to find a place for myself in the industry. I submitted a LOT of layouts to the magazines. When I say a lot, I mean at least 100- pretty much every page I’d ever made. I also tried my hand at teaching for another few stores. Classes were hit or miss. I never knew what people would like or not like.

Not a one submitted page got picked up, and when I’d give up on a layout and posted it on my 2peas gallery they’d get mild praise, but never the pages & pages of comments I longed for. Shallow and lame of me? YES. At that time though, I was really just looking for praise of my work and confirmation that I had something to offer. That I had something worth sharing.

I spent over 8hrs on the layout above. You’d never know it to look at it, but I agonized and stressed over every detail on my layouts. This one I used foam dots to put a color photo of Elizabeth over a black & white of the same photo. I also hand-cut the title from a font. Looking at it objectively (now) I can see where I was going wrong, but in that time, in that moment I thought it was the best layout I’d ever made, and it was a turning point for me.

If this, my “best yet” layout didn’t get chosen by magazines or flooded with praise, who was to say anything I did would? Who was I scrapping for? Why did I think I needed to be something I’m not? More importantly: Was all this ‘pressure’ I felt to fit in from the industry, or was it all in my head?

The answer, of course, is that magazines or other scrappers don’t pressure a person to fit in. I’ve NEVER actually seen or heard this! But, in my mind at this time I thought I had to try and fit in, I’d pressured myself to the point of having no idea who I was creatively. Since I didn’t have a job, and was under no requirements to create for specific things, I figured out I was lost pretty darn quick. The real question was, how in the world would I figure out where I wanted to go?!

Believe it or not, the rejection (oh there was a LOT) and the lack of my popularity on-line didn’t upset me. I’d been competing (horse shows) since I was 10 years old, and I recognized that it wasn’t personal… I just wasn’t an it girl. I didn’t have a distinct style, and I was doing pages that I thought would please other people, but they didn’t.

I wasn’t enjoying my scrapbook time & process, so how could I expect anyone else to like what I was up to?

The layout above is one I did for a design team call. NOT the photos or look I’d have chosen for myself… but I wanted to win. I didn’t. If anything, I’m glad I got rejected repeatedly. I sent off letters, photos, e-mails, and such to every manufacturer I liked asking about designing for them. I either got “thanks for being a customer, we appreciate your support” or no reply period. Why, looking back, am I glad that I was repeatedly turned away?

It quickly forced me to realized that it wasn’t them, it was me. I was making what I thought “they” wanted… and they didn’t want it! So, logically, I quickly decided I ought to be focusing instead on what I wanted. Looking back this period felt like YEARS, when in fact it happened very quickly over the spring & summer of 2005. What I determined by the middle of summer was this:

• I didn’t want to scrapbook “for” a magazine or anyone else. I wanted to scrapbook for my own joy & albums
• I had NO clue what “May’s style” was
• I needed to get better at title treatments
• My photos were often cause of frustration. Not photos themselves, but placement
• I sucked at journaling. I wasn’t telling stories, I was spouting off canned responses.
• I missed making stuff up and playing as if nobody else was watching. Stuff like my DisneyWorld album.
• Bottom line: I had lost my joy of scrapbooking AND I was unhappy with the pages I was producing.

I wasn’t happy with what I was making, it didn’t feel legit. It was time to figure out what my own style was, and what I liked.

One thing that was going great during this time was talking to (and becoming friends with) wonderful ladies on message boards. Some were working in the industry, others just enthusiastic scrapbookers like myself. I found encouragement, support, and friendship and that was huge. “Scrap-lifting” was (as it is now) quite popular, and I decided if I wanted to try and figure myself out scrapbook wise perhaps lifting some scrapbookers I liked would help me figure it out. This layout with all the ribbons is one such example.

This was one of my favorite pages (again, it was lifted)

You have to understand that I’m a nerd. I was never happy in school unless I knew I gave my very best, and that’s an attitude I use in my approach to much of my life. I want to give my best. If I am doing that, I can be satisfied. I KNEW that I wasn’t doing my best in scrapbooking (hello, many pages with NO journaling? lame!) In search of my own self-paced scrap lessons and figuring out where I wanted to go with my crafting I turned to lifting. The scraplifting helped me with 4 things:

• I don’t like a lot of matted photos! Why I’d been so hard-core in matting I don’t know, but in lifting I discovered I prefered them (mostly) to be placed without the mats.
• I got good at seeing the bones of layouts. Dissecting the pieces and design, figuring out what was so right about pages I admired.
• I started noticing the details that I was drawn to, and finding things that work for me. Things that I said “yes, this feels right” when I was creating.
• I always asked permission to ‘lift’, and I shared my take. Sometimes talking with the original designer gave me new ideas and insight, not to mention the chance to praise a fellow scrapbooker.

I didn’t find nirvana overnight, and that’s ok too. What I did find, was that it started to be fun again. That the joy I used to feel, the carefree feelings I used to have about scrapbooking started to come back.  I was still lost, but not nearly as I had been before.

My layouts were still nowhere near polished, I often made key errors, was terrible with patterned papers, and I walked down a lot of wrong roads in the Summer and Fall of 2005. That was ok with me. Why? If there was one thing I wasn’t afraid of, it was failure. You can’t find success without it, and sometimes crazy ideas worked out. I knew this, I’d spent 2 years as a scrapbook store manager trying out various classes and crops and promotions – I understood you had to swing and be ready for it to miss… or be a huge hit.

Mostly, I understood and respected that like anything, I needed to put the hours into my scrapbooking in order to figure out who I wanted to be and what my style is.

I needed to focus on me + my craft.

I started getting this wicked feeling too. That I could do ANYTHING I wanted and to heck with trends and rules. If I wanted to go back to detail cutting photos or make things messy on purpose or… well anything. I could. Shoot – I could start mixing stuff up if I wanted to. I could do ANYTHING if I so desired.

Scrapbook rules were made to be broken.

It was an intoxicating thought.  I don’t have to fit into one pre-determined “style”. Nor do I have to use specific brands. While I’m at it, I could just make art journals instead of layouts in the traditional sense. The only person stopping me, the only reason I couldn’t? ME.

 

I will try and post a new ‘journey’ post each week. I will be talking about process, finding and defining style, rules, and much more. I hope you enjoy and stay tuned. If you have any questions or comments I welcome them!

It’s time to talk about the years I spent as a Scrapbook store manager and my creative (scrapbook) journey. This was Summer 2003 – Spring 2005, nearly two years. I walked in thinking I knew my stuff and applied for a teaching position even though I’d never even taken a class. I walked out with an offer to manage the store. At the time I was working at a posh Napa resort that caters to the rich & famous (rooms from $600-2500+ a nite!), and while I loved working there the drive to/from work was killing me and I wasn’t so sure it was worth the pain. I had a shiny travel & hospitality degree I was happy to be using, but the offer of more money and working 10min from home was too great a temptation. I said yes.

I learned so much about classes, techniques, scrapbook companies, and what was trendy at any given moment. I learned about making class and sample pages (no photos used), making the most of product that wouldn’t sell, and of course managing a staff of crafters. I attended trade shows, taught classes, and generally had a great time. During this period I had three dogs at home, and a husband who went to work 24-72 hours at a time so I did most all of my scrapbooking there at the store. I was almost exclusively a “crop” girl – official or just random daytime use during store hours.

Having a very generous discount and access to most any product gave me a lot of choices. Keep in mind this was a time when Ali Edwards had just won Hall of Fame, Cathy Zielske’s first book was about to hit shelves, and companies were popping up every month. This is when Basic Grey first introduced their debut collections, when new product types were coming up all the time, when rub-ons for scrapbooking were a novel idea, and before Tim Holtz released his distress inks. I was there at the EK Elite event for retailers when they announced that they were going to make Disney Jolee’s – yep, I got to have a front row seat for much of the industry hey-day. It was a real good time to be in my position.

Here are some samples of my work from 03/04…

I did a lot of computer journaling (due to ugly handwriting), I was very concerned with the latest/greatest and being in style, and I often did not do journaling because I would finish “later”. (note I never did – see the New York page above). Above all though, I made pages I thought would get me praise from other crafters. Yeah, I shake my head thinking about it now but I wanted to be praised. I did what I thought would be cool. I used products I didn’t even like (but were trendy), and I agonized for HOURS over my creations. I would destroy pages that I felt didn’t meet my expectations, and I spent a lot of time being disappointed in myself.

I only crafted photos that I thought would make pretty pages (story/memory or not). Looking back I did some pretty wicked cool stuff – in fact I see some details I’d like to revisit. The key problem I had in making my pages “better” was simple: I didn’t have enough experience in layout design or knowledge to draw on in taking stuff and making it more finished, polished, and bringing it all together. I’d describe my pages during this time as full of interesting ideas but lacking forethought and follow through to completion.

But I was worse than a teenager with peer pressure. I was so totally hung up on people thinking I was all that, so caught up in wanting to get noticed, that I forgot what I was supposed to be doing.

Telling a story. preserving memories. having fun.

This Savanna page remains one of my favorites from his time period. I told my story, I got creative, I had fun. It didn’t work out for me this well very often, but happy creative “aha” pages like this one kept me going strong and trying, trying, trying. Each of those letters is a hand twisted wire with beads placed on it, then adhered to the twine. I already told you – this was a time when I was still going wild with the making things, and I was obsessed with beads on my pages.

It was during this time that I discovered www.twopeasinabucket.com and started posting there. I will confess that I posted in the gallery with the sole objective of getting people to say nice things about my stuff.

It really didn’t work.

I know I’m sharing with you the ugly side that can consume some scrapbookers but I do so because I feel like it’s important. I want you to know I’ve been there. That I fell victim to the self-inflicted pressure while still loving and enjoying the hobby and all the amazing goodies available to me.

In the end I left the store because I didn’t think I could do it to my high standards and still give my new family (Elizabeth had just been born) the attention and love they deserved. I wanted to stay on as a creative team member but the owner didn’t have paying work to give me, so I had to leave all together. Things would get worse before they get better – but I was too stubborn, and too in love with my hobby to quit. I had ideas in my head that weren’t translating right. Pages that had good ideas but didn’t quite come together. I was very frustrated, and looking back I know it was because I was so very close to a personal breakthrough but couldn’t see how to get there or what to do.

My years of living here with three dogs and scrapbooking socially whenever I wanted, drinking too much Starbucks and eating out way too often were overall happy ones. I did capture memories like my dog’s anal gland surgery (complete with “stitches” on the pages) and I learned so much from embossing powders to stamping to engraving to – well let’s just say I tried darn near every product released for scrapbooking.

Professionally all of the information I gained has served me well, though personally when I moved on from the store I had no clue who I was, or what I liked in scrapbooking. In the first year of Elizabeth’s life I was going to have to figure out – what does MAY really like? Who is she as a scrapbooker, and what’s her style?

The downside of all the sample pages, class samples, and scrapping to impress others was that I didn’t know what I actually liked anymore. I would have to figure it all out, and decide what my goals were professionally – not to mention how to achieve them. I knew one thing though: I was NOT a fan of that darn Cathy Zielske, no matter how nice she was in person at the trade show. She was doing these insanely minimalist pages that customers were wanting to see more of and I SUCKED at minimalist graphic looking pages. I spent many a day trying to recreate her looks and got ugly pages and eye twitches.

 The minimalist trend was killing me… and yet… it would be what freed me.

Stay tuned