Testing and trying...

Trying something new in scrapbooking, is hard...and frustrating...and costs alot as you make alot of mistakes and have to re buy stuff! lol.

But I have really enjoyed the last few weeks...lots of things to try, some I have given up on and some that I will keep. And I have a few things to pass on to you...so....

1. When introducing something new, or something that you find really hard to use...start with it. Take stamps as an example.
I started my pages as I normally did and tried to add them in at the end......this did not work. One of the reasons why I never used stamps was that I could never get them to look right on my pages. BUT...I found that if I started off my page with them, I then could build my page around it and somehow it looked 'right'.

Take this page for example ( actually it is not going in my album, i have a 12 by 12 frame to put it in)... have scrapped these photos before, but the page got ruined thanks to a glass of water insert cross face here, so i had to make it again)

..I added my stamps to the edge before I did anything else and it worked so much better for me than trying to get them to fit in at the end. When making the little blocks on the page, I stamped the frames first and worked each block around it. Better than trying to add them in afterwards.Am I making sense here?

2. Give yourself a break...trying something new is hard, very frustrating and annoying. I have been scrapbooking for 8 years now and I am very confident in my style, what I like and how I work. I am not one to give up on something easily ( my husband can vouch for that lol)...There are times when i wanted to throw away the whole page, as i messed up the ink splatters or the stamping. My husband then told me that it was like I was on a training course..like the ones that I have to go on for work....think of it that way...your training and that takes time.

3. Be prepared to make a huge mess.....I am not a particularly messy scrapper, this is due to the size of my room and the way I have it arranged. Everything is within an arms reach, so easy to put back, but  with paints out, trying them here there, different stamps on different blocks etc, my room looks like a bomb has hit it...I have four rulers, but by the time i had finished this page, i was using my sons Transformers one as that was the only one I could find lol!

4....the biggest...stick with what you know...I know my pages all tend to have stuff lined up in a row. This used to annoy me as people called my work samey..... but I do this for me and I am happy with that...but when I tried to do something different at the same time as adding different mediums onto my page...BIG DISASTER! stick with a page or sketch that you know...to much at one time makes for a unhappy scrapper!!! lol..my next project is to loose that line across my pages and to find away to change it up.

Okay so i have rambled on enough for today...I am off to re start the August kit for Papermaze...after a paper disaster it has to be re done..not much time to do that so I had better get started.