Inspired By... throwback

It's again the 10th of the month and time for the "Inspired by" creation! But what is Inspired by? Every month awesome Marsha and I choose a subject to be inspired by. It can be for example an idea (link), a product (link), a person (link) or a book (link). Or anything! Then we make something inspired by that theme or a piece of art and share it with you and each other on the 10th of the month. You can browse the past "Inspired By" posts from here (link).

This time we went back to the beginning. I'm not referring to the Big Bang or origin of species, but the beginning of our blogging lives. I have actually deleted all the first posts, so unfortunately I can't show them to you or link back to them. But instead I started to think WHY I started blogging and what those first posts were. 

I started blogging when my older daughter was about six months. The reason I started blogging was that I just started to do scrapbooking layouts and wanted to share them. And why I started to scrapbook was that I wanted to document the life of my new baby. About a year after, when my second daughter was born, I started to use mixed media in my work. And for the longest time all my pages were about my daughter's or at least related to them. 

After pondering the theme for a while, I realized that it was a no-brainer at all. I shall tell more below, but first I want to share the link to Marsha's blog (link) so you can go and see if she has linked back to the first post she has ever made! 

As my daughter's have been and still are one of the reasons I scrapbook (the other reason is that I love the process!), I asked them to play with me. We would all create a layout together. As I teach mixed media and scrapbooking nowadays I took one of my classes and we used the same steps as I use in that workshop. I asked both of my girls to scrapbook about themselves, to document something they are experiencing now. I , on the other hand, took a picture of them two as my starting point.

First I let them decide the photo, then the background paper and the colors. I just showed them the techniques and then they used their own imagination to do it. It was a wonderful experience! They followed the steps quite closely when we worked with the background but started to do their very own thing when we got to the paper layers. Underneath you can see the pages they made.

 

My older one, on the left, documented her await for the summer and sun. She used a lot of yellow in her page which is her favorite color. As I use English in my titles, they did the same and her title is "sun". My younger one titled her page "love" and used a photo of her beloved skateboard. Instead of writing something she's experiencing or feeling right now, she wanted to write a story that fit the dark shades she used. Purple and black are her favorites. Her journaling is about night, thunder and a girl.

My two girls are in some ways the same but on other ways they are complete opposites. So it was quite funny that they chose contrasting colors in their pages. As I was doing this page at the same time with them, I wanted to incorporate their color choices to my page. I normally tend to gravitate towards analogous palette with colors that are near to each other so the contrasting colors were a challenge for me but I think I got it working. 

My journaling is about that moment, about scrapbooking with them and how they are quite eager to take part in any thing new. That's kind of the magic in this "Inspired By" - the project is not super special looking but the process was even more so. It's not always just about the end result, it also can be the journey to that point. It's kind of my philosophy in scrapbooking - to me the process and creating is at least as important as the finished page. 

Thank you for stopping by today! Now it's time to head over to Marsha's post (link) if you haven't already! 

Materials: 7 Dots Studio, A Flair for Buttons, American Crafts, Ranger, Scrap FX, Prima Marketing