The Process

Woke up late AGAIN this morning and once more, missed getting to my morning pages…how many days is that in a row now? 3, I think, but could be 4. I’m disappointing myself. But I am happy with the outcome of this week’s assignment from the BPS class (for more context view this post). That was the cause of my late rising – I was up until 2 in the morning working on our first layout assignment.

I’m really happy with the end result. It’s our first layout assignment of the year, but already I’ve learned so much and most of it, not even directly scrapping related. Here's what I came to realize during the process:

• You won’t necessarily like all the assignments you receive. But you can look deeper, and try to find or define something for yourself within that assignment that you can better relate to, while still accomplishing the task at hand. Whatever you don’t like can be spun until you DO like it, love it even. This is totally within your power and control.
• You don’t have to rely entirely/solely on external inspiration. It may be more meaningful to use that external source as a springboard to inspire yourself.
• You can start a project with lots of independent elements that not necessarily drive you wild at first, but by applying creativity, you can bring those elements together into a more appealing/meaningful whole.
• You don’t have to have a clear picture of the end product before you begin, in order to produce something good. The point is to just begin, be decisive and stick by your intuition no matter how unsure you are of where it’s leading you.
• The minor screw ups (e.g., smudged my stamping, handwriting was not as good as it could’ve been, accidentally cropped off the bottom half of the magnifying glass) don’t matter and are barely noticeable in the larger scheme of things.
• It doesn’t matter if no one else sees what you see when they look at what you’ve done [that’s actually not possible since no one will come at it from the exact same context]. But as long as it’s got meaning for YOU and you’re happy with the end result, it’s got meaning and it’s a good thing.

Yep, this layout really calls/speaks to me. I propped it up so I could see it while I straightened out my office upon completing it. I stared at it while I brushed my teeth before going to bed last night. I carried in to work with me because I wanted to journal all this and have it on hand to jar my memory. And it’s not because the layout itself is particularly appealing visually, or by any means what I would consider the greatest thing I’ve ever made, but because I learned so much during the process of creating it, and therefore it carries so much more MEANING for me. Glenn (my dh) even noted that I seemed to LIVE THE MOMENTS OF THE PROCESS with this layout more than any other. [That man is way more intuitive and a much deeper thinker than I give him credit for! I’m blessed, truly :).]

Nothing else I’ve made to date has made it out of my home office/studio. This is the first thing that I’ve connected with so much that I wanted to have it with me after it was done. With everything else, I was so focused on finishing the project that after it was done, that was it, it was just done, and I would prop it somewhere on a shelf or shove it in my mostly empty scrapbooks. With this project, I’ve finally gotten myself to experience the meaning of the phrase “it is the journey that matters, in the end.”

For anyone interested in the full details:

To be honest, I wasn’t jazzed about the assignment originally because it didn’t really get my juices flowing or anything. And as much as I love Heidi’s work (and her products!), not even her layout inspired me at first. So I decided to take a deeper dive into the transcript of Heidi’s audio for the week. In it, she explained in a little more detail the reasoning behind each of the challenge elements.

This deeper interpretation resounded more strongly with me. I thought about it in detail on the ride home. Glenn even helped me to brainstorm a mind map to represent a clean slate or starting new. He came up with some really cool stuff! I ended up copying parts of the mind map into the layout because it hit home so strongly for me.

When I got home, I picked out a patterned paper that had been in my stash for the longest time because I couldn’t figure out how to use it – it was a photo-real background of a bunch of magnifying glasses. The magnifying glasses seemed appropriate since I expect to do a lot of close introspection. I practiced writing out the quote I was going to use for my goal and then ended up writing it in the middle of all of the magnifying lenses. Then I cut out the one that seemed to work the best and stuck it to the background paper. I built the target around the magnifying lens since it was already circular and had my goal written in the middle. It also worked out nicely as a way to place may goal in the center of the bullseye.

For the light background I used another lighter patterned paper that used those old-school, computer punch cards as a pattern in the background. It was a little too dark for me to write over, so I sanded it and distressed it a little. Symbolically, I felt that was very representative of my quest to minimize the parts of work that don’t totally psyche me and turn them into things that better fit my needs. On the sanded areas, I ended up copying the mind maps Glenn and I created. So, I feel like I really accomplished making the background mine.

Before I copied the mind maps on the page, I pasted down my pictures and embellished them with my reasons and some other stuff I found in my stash. I wasn’t totally crazy about these pictures when I started and wasn’t sure about where I had placed them initially, but I went with it and now I’m really happy with the way they turned out on the page.

For daily motivation, I wrote my favorite quote around the edges of the page. It’s a quote by Marianne Williamson that begins “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure…” It’s one that really hits home with me and sets my mind in the right mode when I read it.

My purpose in capturing this detailed account of my thought process is not to share my method necessarily (because at this point, who am i?), but to share how I came to the realizations I did from this exercise, that are directly applicable to my goal and taking me closer to achieving it. When my enthusiasm starts to wane (as I suspect it inevitably will), and the layout starts to appear so common that it begins to lose its meaning/power for me, I'll have this post to remind me of the process and all that I learned from it.

--AGR