Giveaway – Stacy Julian’s Expert Class: Twelve!

My scrapbooking is inspired by my desire to document our family’s stories for my kids and future generations.  My own childhood home was lost in a fire when I was in highschool.  As a result  – we lost all of our photos, memorabilia, and stories.  This included a journal my mom had kept during the 2 years that I was undergoing treatment for cancer as a child.  All these things were lost forever and I still feel a huge hole not having those ‘pieces’ of my own story.   Thus I’m inspired to document as much as I can now so my kids will never feel like any of the pieces of their story are missing!

What inspires me…
When I am in a total rut and can’t get myself going, I will look at a product in my scraproom and then do a search on youtube for a video using whatever I searched.  for example.  I was looking at my smash book yesterday and decided to see if anyone had made a video about their book.  I found a great video about making your own “stash book” and that was just the mojo I needed to get going again.  I made a book just using paper from my scrap stash and after completing it decided these would be great christmas gifts for my teenage daughter’s friends and I am going to do another with a little girl theme for my 3 year old grand daughter. It took me maybe thirty minutes to completely finish this project.
I have done these many times…Search for projects made using “xxxx” stamp set, search for projects using “xxx” cricut cartridge, etc…
this gets me motivated and I can go for another few weeks with great projects coming out of a simple starter idea I saw on a video.

My children always inspire me to scrap but it started with losing my mother at a young age and the rubbermaid bin of photos she left behind.

Even though I’ve already enrolled for the class, I’m going for the give away! With gusto!

My scraping is currently mostly inspired by my four grandchildren. They are amazing.

I’m also constantly inspired by online classes. I think I’m a bit addicted, to tell you the truth. :) in a happy way.

What inspires me in my scrapbooking is… Paperclipping, Big Picture Classes AND crafty blogs. Also, just looking at graphics, the world around me and even art can inspire me. Thanks for the giveaway!

Not trying to be a brown-noser or anything, but Stacy Julian has really inspired me to change the way I think about scrapbooking. I have never thought any other way than chronologically when scrapbooking but after reading Stacy’s books, blog and watching her videos, I come up with ideas to scrap outside the box, if you will. Her ideas and passion for scrapbooking have made me think differently and see my pictures in a whole other light. I truly appreciate Stacy and her colourful outlook on life!

I recently made the decision to leave my job for the moment, scary in this economy but as a family having mom stressed out, tired and crabby was not helping any of us.  My MIL has health issues and a lot of doctor appointments and doesn’t drive, so I stepped up to help in that regard.  We have never been super close but all this time together has really increased our bond.  She has told me stories about her parents, her childhood, my husband as a child, many many things that I never knew before and probably would not have known otherwise.  I’m really inspired to scrap some of these stories for her and for the rest of my family.

I am an American who has lived in Hong Kong for the past 11 years. Like many people, I started to scrapbook when my son (now 12 year old) was born. When I arrived in Hong Kong, I was the only person I knew that scrapbooked and there were no supplies available. One of the highlights of our summer holidays in the USA is to buy some supplies – at the moment I am seriously low blue card stock so the summer can’t come soon enough!

Technology has really changed during the last 11 years and it is amazing what scrapbooking resources are now available on the Internet. So what really inspires me is your podcast (and the Paperclipping membership of course). The podcast downloads in Hong Kong on Friday morning and I listen to it by the end of the weekend. Your guests are brilliant and I get tons of new ideas. I love learning about on-line resources and I am now an on-line class junkie. I have taken several classes with  Big Picture Classes and signed up for Shimelle Laine’s December journaling class. And I can’t thank Nancy enough for her Fisker’s paper trimmer “pick of the week”.

I am sure there are many international scrappers like me who are isolated. Paperclipping helps me feel connected with other like minded peopleand inspires me to continue the hobby.

Kindest regards,

Adrienne

PS – I didn’t mention that Hong Kong is the “sewing notions” capital of the world. Whilst I can’t get traditional scrapbooking supplies…ribbon, buttons, patches, metal embellishments, and flowers are available in the markets of Sham Shui Po. Little wholesale shops dot a 4 block area and It’s an incredible shopping experience!

On a more serious note, I recently started working at an assisted living center. Ever since then I have been much more reflective in my thinking.I’m not sure if it has to do with getting older (51) and this is simply a natural progression, as I have never been a “deep thinker” or working with the seniors has prompted this change. Many of our residents have dementia /alzheimers and no longer have the words to communicate their wants-needs or feelings. With that being said, I am much more aware of time passing and what I want the people in my life to know about me, or how I felt about them. I recently felt compelled to start writing in a journal (never managed to do this for more than a couple days ) I simply wrote this from my viewpoint of today. I write to my future caregivers. I make sure to include things I like & dislike that would make it easier to care for me if my words are no longer there. Dementia runs rampant on my fathers side, so this seems to be a very ugly possibility for me.  Simple things that no one will remember unless I can tell them. I have watched how the most simple thing can calm or aggitate a senior. To have no way to communicate that need seems the cruelest insult.
So I am trying to write it now, while I still have words , lots of them if you haven’t noticed :)
P.S.  With the help of another staff member I am also making shadow boxes for all of the residents in the memory care unit, using photos of the family provides. We are hanging them outside their door. It is amazing to watch a man who doesn’t speak, smile, say thank you and tell me his dogs name was Sandy. It was the first time, in 8 months, that I have heard his voice.
I left the hall and cried.

Lately, I’ve been very inspired to scrapbook and I have to thank PRT for this inspiration. After your show discussing genealogy I began researching my family tree. In the hour and fifteen minutes I spend waiting at my daughter’s ballet class last week I was able to trace one branch back to the early 1700s and another to the 1600s. It’s been amazing. Since that day I’ve been quizzing my Mom and Dad endlessly about their relatives and even a found a long lost birth certificate of my grandmother’s online (from Ana Cabrera’s recommended genealogy site). I’ve now been inspired to scrap the detail of my family tree that I know so it may be preserved for generations to com. Also, I find myself wanting to know about these people, many who have the same names as myself and family members, so I’m now going to take the time to write about our stories so maybe someone in the future can get to know us.
Thank you.

Lately I’ve been ispired by older photos. I don’t know why, I just have. Maybe it’s because there were stories left untold and the photos were prompting me to get them told.

Deep down I have always had a love of paper and a creative desire, but I have gotten lost. I started creating chronological memory albums about 10 years ago but quickly fell behind with the birth of my first son, 5 1/2 years ago, and my second son a couple of years later. Over the summer, I started to get back into scrapbooking and have three sources of inspiration right now.

First, my son has recently been diagnosed on the autism spectrum. I’ve know for a while that something wasn’t “typically” developing. Through the years, though, I have struggled to try to capture that perfect “typical” shot of him looking at the camera and smiling, instead of just getting the essence of him. I have come to realize I want to  tell the story of his life and triumphs rather than trying to create albums of a perfect looking child. He is an amazing kid and I have only recently realized what a rich source of inspiration he could be. Instead of trying to duplicate all of the many boy pages that are out there, I am focusing on him and his unique qualities (funny, insightful, routined, loving).

Another source of inspirtation is coming from a technique we use with him called social stories and story boarding, which he loves. We use a series of “scences” to help him learn appropriate behaviors and habits. So I had a lightbulb moment about using this as a starting point for my scrapbooking. I am now thinking ahead about the stories I want to tell about and to him in the past and in the future. I am actually starting pages where my journaling, the story, is what is inspiring my layout. (For example, me describing what I loved to do as a child and why, such as things he loves to do too — play games and be outside — and then also capture his comments about why he loves it.) I can’t believe I am attempting pages where I have journaled first and am looking for pictures or graphics to support my story instead of the more typical struggle to think of a title and some “required” notes/journaling about the scrapbooked photos.

A third source of inspiration is Stacy Julian. Over the summer I borrowed from the local library her book, “Photo Freedom” and felt transformed. It started this whole process to help me realize I needed to focus on the stories about life and relationships!! Her class Library of Memories was already underway so I was sad to have missed that opportuntiy. I want to learn about color and how to use it as a source of inspiration in my albums — how can it support my stories? My son has strong connections to colors, and numbers!, so I think it would be incredibly inspiring for me to learn more about how to use the color wheel to my advantage through the Twelve class.

One of the things that made me really sad was when my siblings and I went through my mom’s many pictures we found in the basement.  Mom and dad travelled quite a bit for the farming folks they were.  We had envelopes of exotic looking places that usually featured one or the other  but we did have tons that were just scenery.  Beautiful, interesting scenery but we didn’t have a clue where most of the images were from. This moment we had motivated me to take that leap, take Stacy Julian’s class on Photo Freedom and start telling my families stories.  I so wish mom or dad had taken the time to jot some of their thought and stories from these places… why did they choose to go there.  What influenced them once they came home fromt that location. I can’t go back and I don’t have those stories. But I will make sure my family has mine!  I know I need to keep pushing on and so I would love to take the workshop entitled twelve.  Love everything Stacey and the really cool thing is the end celebration concludes on my birthday 12/12/12!! Thanks Mary

My biggest inspiration has always been limiting my materials. I know that might sound strange, but I get overwhelmed by choice, and the fewer things that I have to work with, the more my creative side has to take over and figure out how I want to make my small stash work for me. In fact, whenever I hit a lull in inspiration, the first thing I do is purge my craft room and narrow down my choices.

Leslie

The day before Thanksgiving last year, my family was with my dad at the doctor’s office to hear some options about surgery for a growth in his bile duct that was making his liver not function. We were totally caught off guard when we were told that my dad only had about nine months to live from the onset of his diagnoses and he was now in his fifth month. After many tears and prayers, my dad felt God leading him to a prayer service that was held in his honor. . . and a year later my father is healed and the growth can not be found!
So what is inspires me is the thankfulness and ability to share the history and stories of my family.

Without a doubt my college students are inspiring to be more open in my scrapbook journaling. I have taught in Higher Ed for 7 years but this year I moved to a new college and I am back teaching a basic wellness course. The assignments are intended to bring students out of their comfort zone as to what wellness really means.  I have been brought to tears, shivers and general awe with some of their reflection papers. I figure if they can be this open and honest with knowing me as their instructor for only a few weeks or months then I can definitely be more open and honest in my scrapbook journaling, since it is my story just as their reflection papers are parts of their stories.

Thanks to a class long ago titled ‘U R2 Cre8ive!’  at a fledgling site called Big Picture Scrapbooking by
someone I was vaguely familiar with named Stacy Julian, I learned not only that
I really

am creative, but that inspiration can be found everywhere. Just
this week I was inspired by a book jacket at the library (font/title
inspiration), reminiscing with a colleague (scrapbook page topic), and the song
title from a choral workshop for an art journal page (What Hath Night To Do
With Sleep?)

My newest source of inspiration is Pinterest, and for
someone who is most inspired visually it is a virtual treasure trove of more
ideas than I could possibly explore in this lifetime. Not to mention a
wonderfully simple way to organize it all.

It would make me twelve kinds of happy to win a seat in Stacy’s
class; thanks for offering such a great giveaway on  the Roundtable!

My gran-in love passed away last week aged 92. It really does have an impact! Sending you love in this difficult time. After getting through a really difficult car accident myself where a woman was paralysed I understand that it can be traumatic. Just wanted to send you hugs and let you know that there really are people who understand x

Sometimes I feel I can be inspired by just about anything and everything. Since I started scrapping in 2006, I felt I suddenly started noticing everything differently. I moved quickly through various phases of scrap-growth (chronological, event-based, product-obsessed and driven, style surfing, etc) until I found my own style and way of scrapping, and now rarely a day goes by when I don’t think, at least a handful of times, “I want to scrap that!” or “ooh, that’s a scrappable moment” or “I need to make a mini about…” and on and on. 

Many times I have these fits of inspiration in entirely “inappropriate” moments. I can’t just drop everything and scrap. How do I keep the inspiration alive until the time comes when I can scrap?Thanks to the LOM system, which I’ve had up and running for a few years now, I can (usually) find what I am looking for in the photo department when I feel a burst of inspiration that makes me want to scrap a certain photo or a certain type of photo. Thanks to the fact that we move every few years, I am forced to cull through my stash and constantly reevaluate how I store and display it (it gets more functional and fabulous with every move). But…But what do I do with all the ideas? How do I rein in all of the overflowing inspiration? I am assuming that Twelve will provide a ton of inspiration, but I am also hoping Twelve will help me learn how to turn at least some of this marvelous stuff into productive scrapping.

I have been newly inspired to create, through scrapbooking, my life – in short, to make it BETTER – because of some recent, life-saving treatment that I received last month at the UCSD Medical Center in San Diego over a 3 week period.  I am grateful to have my life back, and determined now, more than ever before, that I will create and record my life stories, and those of my family and close friends, because I am grateful to be alive and I want to share my stories and the journeys I have been through these last 50 years.  I am worth it.
Thank you, BPC, for helping to inspire me to create joy for myself and others.  

*Ok, so I tried to post this last night, but for some reason it wouldn’t let me so I am trying again now – I’m sorry this is late, I really didn’t mean to post this past the deadline!*

In the last couple of months I have realized that along the way I have allowed myself to be defined by negative situations and hurtful words that I have encountered over my life time. These situations and conversations so often were so nuanced that I never picked up on the fact that they were shaping my paradigm of myself.

These last months have been really hard as one by one I’ve been pulling out these false personal beliefs and examining them with a microscope. It has been a very exhausting process, but as I have started to heal these old wounds I am finding peace.

Scrapbooking has been integral to this process because it is allowing me to redefine my personal history – and that is HUGE. I am able to edit out the parts that have torn me down all my life and shine the spotlight on the areas of my history that build me up. My scrapbooks are becoming a place of solace that I can go to physically show my self-worth.

It is also affording me the opportunity to give my children a lasting chronicle of their story, so they know with out a doubt how incredible they are. Wanting to get those stories written has been so incredibly inspiring, and it is an inspiration that feels completely different from anything else that I’ve encountered.

Hey, Karen — I’ve been thinking about you, hoping you’re okay. Glad to see your comment here — it means you’re doing alright! :)

That’s awesome! I’ve been feeling the urge to do some major off-loading!! Hearing you talk about how free and unencumbered you feel (which has always been the #1 need of my life in all aspects, both conscious and sub-conscious!) makes me even more motivated.

Glad you’re doing well!!

Well, I’d be tickled pink and a million other colors to win this!  ;)  I’m completely inspired by my beautiful little boys, by nature and lately by sketches!  Thanks for the chance to win.  ?