Inspiration all around

If you're like me you find scrapbook inspiration all around you. A great quote, design, product, technique or sketch may come to mind no matter where I am, or what I'm doing. Sometimes I have a pen and paper handy, other times unfortunately I have nothing handy and I might lose the idea. I have ideas scrawled on every imaginable piece of paper, especially shopping receipts in my purse, or a paper towel from the barn. My desk pad calendar is full of little notes to remember, ideas, doodles/scribbles, and calculations! I really should organize some of them into a proper notebook organized into categories. I have sketches from a number of years ago that I fully intend to scrap; they may not end up exactly the same as I may have imagined them at their inception, my scrapping style has grown and changed, as well as my scrapping stash.

Recently however I've added another quick method of capturing the source of my inspiration... my cell phone camera! I always thought it was a pretty useless feature since the image really isn't big enough to capture anything considering it is only 480x640 pixels, not much bigger than an index print. However I've been finding that it makes a great note pad! If an image doesn't do the trick you could always draft a text message to yourself. This spring I found a beach bag that had great design, texture, and stitching that would relate well to some patterned paper I had, and create the basis of a layout. I grabbed a pen and receipt and doodled away, but now I would just grab my camera and snap a quick picture to jog my memory when I get home. Sometimes I run into a great quote, I could snap a quick picture much faster than I could copy it down. No longer do you need to rip that magazine page out of the magazine at the doctors office (doesn't it bug you when people have done that to part of an article you really wanted to read!)

However you record your inspiration, I just want to encourage you to keep looking around you, you will find inspiration for your next layout!