confessions of a cropaholic | a scrapbooking blog

I’ve said it before…I’m your average, typical scrapbooker. I’ve never been published, I’m not a designer and I don’t own every scrapbooking tool in the book. And sometimes, I need a little help and inspiration.

So I subscribe to Creating Keepsakes magazine. Love it. Its chocked full of great ideas, product information, how-tos and the latest industry news. One thing I find super helpful is the collection of layout sketches by Becky Higgins (and I’m so sad to hear that she’s departing from CK). I rip them out every month and put them in a 3-ring binder under “Sketch Layouts”.

Anywho, another thing I love to do is, like so many others, use the layouts scattered throughout the magazine for inspiration (a.k.a. “scraplift”). I go through and rip them out as well and put them in the “Layouts” section of my above mentioned 3-ring binder. Over time, I’ve collected a slough of them. Here’s one I did this week from the November issue…

Inspiration layout (credit: Paula Gilarde)

Paula did a lot of this layout digitally, using Adobe Photoshop and Heidi Swapp for Advantus Digital Brushes. I followed the same design concept and came up with this:

The photos were taken at our last NSD (National Scrapbook Day) event where we were simply “Scrap Happy”. I used a patterned paper and coordinating gemstone scraps, Colorbok brads, acryclic stamps and the DoodleType Critcut font for the title.

Thanks Creating Keepsakes and Paula Gilarde, for inspiring me. What about you? Do you ever take inspiration from magazine layouts? If so, which ones are your favorite?