Challenge Yourself

Written and Created by PaperCraftCentral Susan

Challenge yourself to create!

"Talk doesn't cook rice"
~ Chinese Proverb

Do you feel a little stale with your scrapbooking? Has your Mojo gone on holiday? Why not challenge yourself to try something new!

"And how do I do that?" I hear you say? Well, there are many ways to stretch your paper craft skills and give you a renewed desire to scrap.

NEWS FLASH: Stay tuned for a personal scrapping challenge I have set for you at the bottom of this page!

Challenge yourself with Scrapbook Skill Stretching Ideas

One of the best ways I have found to stretch my papercrafting skills is to get together with some friends who also scrap and ask them to dare me to try something new in scrapping, and to go ahead and name the dare!

Here are some of the dares I have taken part in that have stretched my abilities:

• Scrap someone else's photo - swap a favourite photo with a scrapping friend and give her permission to make a layout in her own style, while you do the same for her photo. It's amazing how differently you will see your own pictures when they are scrapped by someone else, and this can spark further new ideas about other photos in your own collection
• Choose a colour you don't normally use and make a page
• If you normally make single layouts, make a double layout this time. Use a series of photos and link the two pages together with similar papers, a sketch that travels across the middle of the two pages, drawing a border around the two pages instead of just the one...
• Try to scrap the way a friend does. Study his/her work and see if you can make a layout with some of your own photos using his/her methods.
• Use a sketch to create a page. You can draw your own or hunt for other people's page sketches (Try drawing your own sketch! It may not be as hard as you might think!)
• Study some magazine pages that you really like and base your layout on them. Magazines lay out their pages a bit like a scrapbooker does, for maximum impact.
  
• Use a different medium than you would normally use on your page. If you have never scrapped a piece of velvet or lace into your pages, try that. Or choose to use inks, paints, crackle mediums, texture mediums, embossing, etc on your page to give it a 3-d effect.
• Start a Circle Journal with some friends and study their entries into your journal. Instead of mailing your albums to each other, another way to have a Circle Journal swap is to decide on the theme for your journal and just send each other a page for every member's album. This saves on postage, you keep your album at home at all times so it cannot be lost, and you still get to study each other's techniques.
• Scrap the scraps! Get together with friends and take along your box of off cuts and scraps. Challenge each other to make a layout with each other's scraps! (That's how I made the sunset layout on this page in fact!)
• Put together your idea of a nightmare kit and challenge someone to make a layout with it. This could include such things as designer series paper you no longer like, elements that are now out of fashion, elements you have never known what to do with...
  
• Limit yourself to only five elements for a page layout and see if you can make a page that satisfies you with just them.
  
• Scrap something unusual - an empty Ferrero Roche box, an empty Pringles tin, or a picture frame for example. I even embellished a bra once to raise awareness for a breast cancer cause scrapbooking day! 

• Make your own embellishments. Try making your own paper flowers or build an element out of punched shapes. Or alter some store-bought elements by inking them, embossing them, stamping them or treating them in some other way.
• Start with a quote you like, then choose the pictures and elements to scrap with that quote.
  
• If you normally scrap chronologically, give yourself permission to scrap something you have been wanting to do that ius outside of your own self-imposed timeline. Sometimes we create rules for ourselves that don't always suit our needs and interests, you know?

My personal challenge to you:

I trust you now have some ideas to use to challenge yourself to something new in scrapping. If you have more ideas that have allowed you to challenge yourself, please do add them here to inspire me. We all need fresh inspiration!

And if you take on my personal 16 week challenge as listed above, I would love to see the layouts you make.

Go on - I dare you to challenge yourself!

Happy Paper Crafting!