Creative Snippets

Creativity is a funny, and sometimes quite elusive, thing. For various reasons, I had needed to adjust plans for a co-op class I was teaching, and had spent three days this week trying to summon creative inspiration. I pored over my favorite books, magazines, and websites to no avail. Beginning to get desperate, I sat down and pulled together my "last resort" class project. Although I was pleased with the final result, it wasn't what I really wanted to do. I wasn't sure what exactly I *did* really want to do...but I knew that when the idea finally came, I would recognize it.

While I was working on the class project, I felt a bit discouraged. As I've mentioned here before, I've been in an extended creative slump for a period of several years. There have been brief creative bursts in the last couple of years, but they have been few and far between...and rather forced at that...projects I had to do for a specific purpose, with a deadline. I miss the days when I could just sit down and "create" for no reason for a few hours...and get totally caught up in the process, rather than just the result.

As the evening wore on, however, true creative inspiration finally hit. I debated...surrender to the desire to stay up all night and "run with it", or concede to common sense and the lingering effects of sleep deprivation over the past few weeks and go on to bed. In a compromise, I stayed up later than I should have, making notes and jotting down ideas, but didn't actually drag out supplies and dig in. :)

Today's schedule is pretty packed, but I'm hoping that the motivation will still be there tonight once everything settles down. I've even had a strong urge to get my feet wet again in the pro scrapbooking world. It's been years since I even kept up with things in that arena, much less participated or even attempted to submit anything. We'll see what happens from here with that. :)

In the meantime, here are a few photos of our project for today...

And for those who enjoyed the calendar art journal pages I linked to the other day....here is another really neat one, this one including photos. I think I will incorporate photo pages like these in my calendar journal. :)

(The above was written on Thursday. Needless to say, I was interrupted and never got back to it. :) More creative snippets to follow soon...)