Inspiration

One of the hardest things for me about creating is believing enough in myself. I'm always afraid that my creations are not good enough, too simple, or boring. So, I've had a tendency to CASE (copy and share everything) cards. I don't always CASE them completely, I will often times change the colors or the stamp set. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying don't CASE. I've been really happy with many of the cards I've done this way. They often end up taking on a life of their own and end up looking nothing like the card I was attempting to CASE.

However, I was often left feeling that maybe I'm not good enough to do this on my own. Part of the reason I started this blog was to challenge myself to create and not CASE. So, how do you go about doing that? I've decided to start out using the challenges posted on many different websites and use those sketches and create from there. My FAVORITE website (Splitcoaststampers) posts weekly challenges, both sketches and color combo's. Today I was playing with Color Challenge #147, Taken with Teal, Real Red, & Certainly Celery, these are all Stampin' Up Colors. I then went to the sketch challenges and found #155. I really wanted to use my brand new A Beautiful Thing stamp set from Stampin' Up!'s new Spring/Summer 2008 catalog. I purchased this set last month are part of my demo benefits of getting to order things in advance! Sketch 155 just seemed perfect. I really like how this turned out! The scan doesn't show that I stamped some swirls from the set in Taken with Teal, but I'm happy with my first attempt.


My second attempt uses the same color challenge, but sketch challenge #157. I like my first attempt better, but one isn't too bad either if I do say so myself! I'm playing around with some other challenges today too and I will share those over the course of the week.

Have fun and get your fingers inky this weekend!