Lately I’ve been suffering from a case of the end-of-summer blahs. You know, where nothing…and I do mean nothing… seems to spark my interest. Yard work is uninviting, inside projects hold no charm and even my blog is boring, as my better half recently pointed out to me. Needless to say, it was with a sense of dread that I approached this month’s Five on the Fifth. Where can a girl find a starting point when creativity takes a hike?
It turns out the answer was easier than you might expect. I went to the one place where I know I’ll find inspiration perfectly matched to my design aesthetic: my own scrapbooks. That’s right, I scraplifted myself. I grabbed an album, flipped through the pages until I found a page that “spoke” to me then I set off to recreate it with different photos and supplies. And you know what? The end result is something totally different but that’s a good thing.
Here’s the page that caught my eye:
It’s one I did for Creating Keepsakes several years ago but good design never goes out of style. It has all the things that say “me”: Clean lines, a grid design, simple patterns, and a story supported by the pictures. I’m slowly working my way through my brother’s share of the old family photographs; could I make this design work with those pictures? The answer is yes and here’s the result:
Supplies:
Cardstock: Bazzill Basics Paper Patterned paper: Deja Views, Fancy Pants
Corrugated papers: DMC Industries Punches: McGill
Ink: ColorBox, Clearsnap; Tattered Angels
Paint: Golden Paints
Chipboard letters: October Afternoon
Pen: Staedtler
Font: Zurich, Bitstream
Other: Glossy Accents, Ranger Industries; dictionary paper
Journaling: The long black pages of an old-style album yielded these photos that left us with more questions than answers. A class photo: A prom dress? Does the hand tinting reflect the look of the original? And who are the young men…family, friends or boyfriends? The only name we have is “Frenchie” for the photo booth close-up, but who is “Frenchie”? Still, this peek at Mother as a teen is intriguing and the background scenery of the Hedrick front yard brings back fond memories.
When you have a lot of old photos but don’t have many details about them, you have to look for a common thread among them. Here there are two: They’re all of my mother as a teenager and they left us with a sense of regret that we don’t know more about them.
So many of the pictures are really small and it would be easy for them to get lost on a page, but by clustering them together in small groups, they have more visual weight and thus, more prominence. I simply substituted those clusters for some of the single photos in the original design to keep the same balance. Some corrugated paper strips compensated for the varying sizes and gave me the same vertical line as the rickrack in the original as well as a little dimension without a lot of bulk. Repeating the journaling on the circles would compete with these small photos so I opted for flowers instead. An added bonus was they were left over from this project, allowing me to rely on past creativity when my own seemed lacking. Their round shape served the same purpose as the circles, softening all those right angles, and the larger artisan shape rather than half-circles seemed a better fit with the vintage feel of the photos. Just having somewhere to start from made this page come together quickly and along the way my creativity came back from its hike, at least temporarily.
The journaling is as much about what we don’t know about these photos as what we do. Five simple questions, some only a few words, form the core but it’s really the only story we have at this point. Had we known of these photos when Mother was alive we might have learned more but they’re still treasures and we deal with what we have.
Chances are you won’t be working with tiny old photos (but kudos if you are), so I’ve created the layered photo templates for the original page. There are four 3x3 square photos on the template but I left off the two larger photos you see on the layout on the theory that you know how to get 4x6 pictures from your processor or your printer. Here is the download:

Download SeptLayeredTemp
And it wouldn’t be Five on the Fifth without some freebies to make journaling a little easier. These are rather generic in subject with a nod to back to school. You can download them here:
Download SeptExtras
Scrapbooking is just like everything else: Sometimes you just need a starting point. Once you take that first step, you can follow the road to the end but we can all use a little push to get out of the gate. I chose to scraplift myself. While I encourage scraplifting in general, I think we often overlook using our own completed pages as inspiration and we shouldn’t. After all, where else are you going to find inspiration so attuned to your own style? And besides, you have the added benefit of reliving those fun memories and celebrating past design choices in the process of finding that creative push you need. But if you’re looking for a different inspiration, here are five more starting points you might use:
1. Check out Shimelle Laine’s new Starting Point concept on her blog. She’s done the cardstock/patterned paper foundation; you duplicate it then add the photos and pretty extras to finish it off. The link is to one of the first ones she did but she’s making it a regular feature on her blog so you’ll find others with a quick look around.
2. Take advantage of the talents of professional graphic designers by starting from an advertisement. This one by Paula Gilarde at Write.Click.Scrapbook. is a great starting point and I love her interpretation. You can find more ad inspiration challenges at other scrapbooking websites too…Google is your friend.
3. If it seems you’re always working with the same color combinations (like me and teal), shake things up a bit with a new one. Hop over to Kuler and challenge yourself to design a page using one of the color combos rated most popular with professional graphic designers who hang out on their site. You’ll be amazed at how a fresh mix of colors will spark your creativity and open you up to new possibilities.
4. A trusted starting point for design is to work from a sketch, and for me there’s no better place to find one than Sketch Support. Not only do I love the way Alison Davis fills her pages with lots of photos but still has room for fun extras, but she and her design team do a terrific job of showing you how to interpret the sketches in a variety of ways so you can use them over and over again, giving you lots of starting points. She even shows you ways to turn card sketches into layouts. There are links to all her past sketches there on the right so you’ll have a bazillion starting points…more or less.
5. Sometimes you’re in the mood to scrap but uninspired by the photos and stories at hand. Maybe what you need is a starting point for a new story, one you hadn’t thought about telling until the idea was suggested. You’ll find some great writing prompts at the Write Source as well as the Creativity Portal. Don't get hung up on the fact that some of them are topics for students' writing assignments; there are some great scrapbooking layout ideas within those suggestions.
Whether it’s scraplifting yourself, finding your direction from one of my suggestions or just grabbing some pictures and paper and doing it, the idea is still the same: Create a scrapbook page that documents a part of your life and use a list of five things as the basis for your journaling. I've given you the starting points; the rest is up to you.