Your Personal Style

Whenever I go through galleries at the various scrapbooking websites, I am alway impressed by the each scrapbooker's individual style. Stay with a site for awhile and eventually you can tell who produced a page just by the look of it.

My daughter does bright, colorful pages that highlight the kids and their antics of the day in question. She's done pouting, playing, temper tantrums, stubbornness and sneakiness. Her pages have a personality all their own, and I love and admire her work. My pages, on the other hand, are more classic and refined. Generally, unless I am experimenting with something new, you'll know my pages by careful photo placement, clean lines and a sense of order and refinement. I love what I do, but it is very different than my daughter's style.

Sometimes, however, a certain event or emotion can throw any of us into different look all together.

During this past week, we had an incident on the elevator in our building where someone decided it might be cute to leave something pretty nasty hanging from the elevator ceiling. I was so angry, I called building maintenance and then my landlord. They matched my anger and disgust ounce for ounce with apathy and disinterest. I typed up some fairly scathing letters to the offending parties and posted them in both elevators and on the door to the lobby. That being done, I began to feel better and decided to take a picture of the letters and put together a layout "commemorating" the incident. My mood showed in my work and this was not my typical "classic" layout. I used black card stock with ripped pieces of bright red and yellow paper as accents. The layout LOOKED as angry as I felt, and by the time I was finished I was smiling. The layout certainly wouldn't fit into one of my usual scrapbooks, but it sparked a sense of creativity that deserves a "creative efforts" album.

You never know when a scrapbooking opportunity will present itself. Stay open and don't be limited by the same old style. Sometimes it's good to just go with your emotions and see where they take you. If nothing else, you may have a good laugh and get a little inspiration for future layouts. I'm betting no one looking at my "elevator" layout would have pegged it as mine and that was half the fun of it!