paper + glue + pictures = love

So I find myself with a new hobby...scouring blogs of fellow scrapbookers - professional and amateur alike. I could spend hours a day in pursuit of a new layout - I'm always looking for new ideas and pages to scraplift. I feel like a fly on the wall, peeking into the lives and creative minds of people who love this hobby as much as me.

Sometimes I find myself envying the professionals - women who I idolize like Cathy Zielski and Ali Edwards. These girls are my long lost best friends, and they don't even know it. They have taken their passion and found a way to get paid for it. It's the american dream, really.

There is something about the colors, paper, ribbons, embellishments, pictures, and journaling that inspire my inner artist. I can't decide if it's the self-satisfaction of completed pages or the actual creation of the pages that brings me the most joy. I find myself craving creation. If it's been a while since I've worked on anything, it calls to me. Paper waiting to be paired with colorful ribbon; buttons and chipboard begging to be used; pictures needing a home. Sometimes a picture will hit me in such a way that I know immediately what I will do to bring it to life. Other times, I will scour magazines, books, and blogs in search of inspiration. What I end up with is a little slice of me in paper form - preserving the artist buried inside for my posterity to someday love, treasure, or file away. I don't do it for them, but I hope that by my doing it, they get a sense of who I am and who I long to be. It's my version of art. It's me. Creating, loving, doing. It needs me; and I need it.