What's Inspiring Me Right Now

I just received the latest issue of Creating Keepsakes. It's their travel issue, but to be honest it's not really taking me anyplace I haven't been before. That being said I get inspiration for layout colors, design and topics from lots of sources other than scrapbooking magazines. In fact, I sometimes think scrapbooking magazines are worst places to try to get inspiration because the topics are so generic and its hard to not to be intimidated by some of the work of the designers.

So this is what is inspiring me right now.

Julie Fei-Fan Balzer - I really like this designer's work. I recently saw her in action on the pbs show Scrapbook Memories and I loved her doodling ideas and her creative scrapbook style. I was delighted to find she has a blog. Check out her work.

Art Quilts - Now I don't make quilts and I haven't sewn anything since I was a teenager, but I love art quilts. I'm finding lots of inspiration in art quilt designs lately. I think art quilts and quilts in general offer great design ideas for scrapbookers because fabric piecing has a lot in common with paper piecing and the way many of us approach layouts.

Jenny McGuire's column on die cuts in this month's Creating Keepsakes. As usual she had lots of great ideas I had not thought of for using die cuts. I can't wait to try cutting out fabric by glueing it to cardstock first.

Flickr - Flickr is a great source for color and design ideas. First there are tons of scrapbookers and scrapbook layouts on the site, but even better than that, I like to just search a color like "purple" and see what sorts of pictures come back. I often search flickr when I'm stumped for color combinations or I'm just looking for the right "feeling" for a layout.

happy scrapping