How it all started…

I have been meaning to cull my magazines down and keep only articles I want as well as inspirational images.  While I planned on making a nice little binder, I was fully inspired when I ready Vickie Hallmark’s how-to article on a really sophisticated way to store all of this food for though.  It basically started out with the necessity of clearing out some of the piles of magazines that I’d been accumulating.  Who doesn’t have that problem?

There’s one stack.  A small one.

The basic premise was to go through all of these magazines, tear out articles of interest and inspiring images.

Next step was to clean up the articles and get them into a binder and use the images in a creative collage type scrapbook that I could flip through for inspiration.  Not being a scrapbooker, this would be more of pasting images to a page and maybe writing some notes in a nifty pen color like silver.  Or white.

So, everyone once in a while I’d sit down with a stack of magazines and go through them.  It seemed as if my pile of magazines was still growing at a rate faster than I was moving with my project.  The pile of magazines started to get a bit ridiculous so, given the fear of the fading economy a couple years ago, I let some of my subscriptions lapse.  However, I still received those which I advertised in and where my articles were published and every once in a while I’d get one where someone else had used my beads for an article or jewelry piece.  To add to that, I had subscribed to a couple fashion magazines to see if I could get more into the trends (and those magazines are THICK) as well as a couple free trials from stores where I shopped.

I have this rolling case that I have full of magazines that are waiting to be culled down for this project.  I can’t tell you how many times I’ve carted it to our vacation home declaring, “this weekend I WILL get through these!”  Only to bring them back home with me, fully intact.  My husband is probably sick of loading and unloading that thing.

So, this weekend, after feeling even more burnt out on the bead biz (more on that later, yes?) I decided to ‘craft’ for fun.  Why not start to make my scrapbook/inspiration pages?  So, I pulled out the three ring binder that had been housing these articles and images and started to spread out the images.

Ahhhh.  This felt so good on so many levels.  Seeing all of those inspiring pictures, knowing I was getting to something that has been in process for years, and detaching from worrying about posting beads for sale, blogging, working around the house, etc.  I got to sit with my pictures spread out on the floor and do a craft project with my kids doing fun stuff around me.  I liked it.

Even though it made a mess, and didn’t get finished, and is still on my floor today, waiting to be finished, I’m ok with that.  It WILL get finished (at least this stack of zines) before I clean up.  I only need to keep the kids from running too fast through the living room and sending the pieces flying from a gust of air.

Here’s a quick pic of the start of the pages:

This is really a neat project and has yielded some interesting observations about myself and what inspires me…I thought I knew that stuff already but as I organized images into pages, patterns started to emerge.  More on all that tomorrow.