Combining challenges and inspiration

I've already mentioned that I'm doing daily layouts this month. That's working really well. It's very relaxed and I'm enjoying the process of working through some older papers as well as some newer stuff and trying out some different styles and techniques. I'm determined to get a lot of use out of my Ingonish Beach kit which is the Counterfeit kit this month and it seems to be a perfect combination so far.

Part of this process is that we are trying to follow the prompts from Lain's "A to Z Define Your Style". These were actually the prompts we used during LOAD last May (May 2010) and then she turned it into a daily class (find out about it here). We thought it would be great to just go with it and see how we got on.

Even though I did LOAD last May, I didn't follow many of the daily prompts and so this time, am trying to push myself to follow them and think about what this says about my style. I actually think I've found my style (or couple of styles) after many years of floundering, but it's always good to look again give it some thought.

As part of the process, Lain interviewed some scrappy celebs and then our challenge was to see if we could lift something or be inspired by some aspect of their scrapping. This week's celeb was Jody Wenke and to begin with I thought it would be a big problem to find anything that I could make into a Lisa layout. Her style is very clean and simple. Single photos, lots of white space, limited embellishments - everything pretty opposite to what I normally do! This would be hard.

But I persevered and Jody had mentioned how important music was as an inspiration for her and that got me thinking. I went to my iTunes to see what is my most played track and decided to see if I could make that work. It was "I'm Alive" by Tom Jones and had been played loads more than any other track (don't really know what that says about me :-) ). I thought that was a great title in itself and flipped through my pile of photos to see if something jumped out at me. A photo of Isabella (not taken by me) stood out as it was happy, full of life and sunshine, wind in her hair, laughter on her lips! The whole caboodle. And I figured that a toddler just personifies living in the moment. I thought I could include some of the lyrics too.

As for lifting Jody's style, I went with a central block of paper with the large photo and journalling round the edge (and yes, I used a verse to sum up how "alive" Isabella is!) Then I made it my layout by adding a cluster of fussy cut flowers and elements from my kit.

The result is something I love but also something that I would never have come up with without the prompt or my Counterfeit Kit - Ingonish Beach. I love this way of finding new ways through all the possibilities, photos and stash that I have.

I may even try a layout like this again!