Hi!

This is Elizabeth Dillow for Big Picture Scrapbooking and I'm here to convince you to take my upcoming workshop, Inspiration Defined.

How about the short reason first?

Everyone can benefit from a little inspiration training from time to time. Unless you're feeling on fire with creativity every single day of the year, this means you, too.

How about a few more reasons?

Inspiration is certainly not new territory when it comes to scrapbooking and other pursuits. The idea of looking for inspiration everywhere is old hat to most creative types. Here is the point in this audio message where I share one of the crazy analogies I used to be known for among my high school students-sometimes my analogies flopped, and sometimes I was rewarded with an entire classroom of faces experiencing an aha moment. This one is pretty simple:

Think of scrapbooking as an effort to grow a beautiful gerbera daisy from a seed in a terracotta pot. The terracotta pot itself is like the collection of tools you own for use in scrapbooking. The dirt and seed? The consumable materials you buy to use with those tools and the ideas you're trying to cultivate. You might get a sad looking little sprout without devoting much attention to your plant, but chances are, without water and sunshine? It's going to wither and die. The water and sunshine in this cheesy little analogy, of course, are the pieces of inspiration we absorb and translate into our own good ideas when we sit at the scrapbooking table.

We all learned in kindergarten how growing a plant works: dirt, seed, water, and sunshine.

I can't tell you how many gerbera daisies I've killed in my life.

Just because you know how to do something doesn't mean you're actually doing it.

And that is where my workshop comes in. See how I did that?

Like water and sunshine, inspiration itself is readily available and quite possibly the most important tool in your bag of scrapbooking tricks. More importantly, I am convinced that scrapbookers who work hard to gather, organize, and use the inspiration they find in the world are the scrapbookers who will be scrapbooking in ten, twenty, even fifty years. The ones who forget to water their figurative gerbera daisies are eventually going to get fed up with the dead-end cycle of planting a seed only to watch it perish. Simply put, inspired scrapbooking is sustainable. Uninspired scrapbooking is boring. It is human nature to lose interest when we're plagued by boredom.

During the course of my workshop, we're going to focus on those three important words when it comes to inspiration: gather, organize, and use. You can gather a thousand ideas a day but if you don't figure out a system of keeping track of it that works for you, you're never going to use it. Sitting around organizing good ideas for later use without actually acting on any of them isn't that great an idea either, so we'll work on putting our newly inspired selves into action to make cool pages and any other creative endeavor that strikes your fancy. There aren't many required supplies in this class because I'll count on you to use what you already have and love-and you certainly won't be creating replicas of the pages I've created to share, because at its core, inspiration is very personal. We might have the same object in front of us, but we're going to look at it and translate it differently. It's mysterious how our creative brains work, isn't it?

We'll also spend some time examining three major categories of inspiration as they relate to scrapbooking: color, design, and conceptual inspiration. We'll be busy, but I promise it won't feel one bit like work-inspiration seeking is funny like that.

I also have a few surprises planned; you'll have the exclusive opportunity to meet some HIGHLY INSPIRED, well-known women from other creative fields and get a sense of what inspires them. You might be surprised to discover that defining inspiration is not so different in scrapbooking than it is in writing, photography, quilting, or music. The quest to nurture our inspired selves is pretty much universal.

Are you convinced? I hope so, because this is going to be a lot of fun.