Ideas and Inspiration

I am constantly finding ideas and inspiration in magazines and on the internet and I usually compile them as scrap images or images on my hardrive or in my favourites folder, but this was becoming really problematic to sift through when I was looking for a specific item and somewhat fragmented as things were located all over the place. So I came up with the idea of making an Ideas and Inspiration journal.

I went through the images I had stored on my computer and printed off a selection and then collected together the magazine articles and scraps. I bought an unruled journal from WHSmith and made five sections throughout the journal; beads, cards, sewing, alterables and other. Then I went about adding the various images I had collected to the journal in the appropriate sections.

In the beads section I have all sorts of ideas for jewellery, stitch markers, book thongs, decorations, keychains etc.

The cards section contains ideas for greetings cards, recipe cards, invitations, envelopes, basically anything made with card or that involves papercraft.

The sewing section is my favourite and contains ideas for eye masks, sleep pillows, aprons, wall organizers, recipe card holders and so on.

Now, the alterables section contains pretty much anything that isn't covered in the afore mentioned sections, tea tins, card, paper mache and acrylic boxes, glass bottles, acrylic blocks/coasters etc.

As for the other section, that contains editorials from magazines, advertisements for various online shops, advice, tips and techniques and information on upcoming events.

Now when I am lost for ideas I can just pick up my journal and flip through. The beauty of it is that I can add to it as and when I want.

Making this journal has lead me to start compiling photos of my own creations to put into a similar book. That way, even if I give items away as gifts I will still have a tangeable memory of my handcrafted achievements. Cool, huh!