Ali's December Daily

Yesterday I mentioned the December Daily, by Ali Edwards.  Let me just say Wow!  What a fantabulous idea!  I love it!


BUT


Now let me say......yikes, I think I am already way behind on this one, and I'll have to do a bit more figuring out to see if I am going to be able to pull this one off.  Not only is is completely outside of my box creatively since I rarely prepare pages in advance of actually having the photos etc to go on them, but it's going to take some time (which is at a premium right now) just to get the bones of the album assembled.


The cool thing about it is that for the most part I think I could use stuff I have on hand already and don't need to purchase additional supplies - so that's a bonus.  I always need an excuse to use up supplies on hand!


I think I'll let this simmer for a day or two before I make a firm decision either way.


Check it out for yourself.  There is a ton of info on her blog from the current year, as well as loads of links to her past year's albums and a Flickr group for sharing.

Boosting Your Creative Confidence

I'm not sure how it happened exactly - but somehow I followed a series of links on the world wide web, and stumbled across the "aezine life artist newsletter" (Volume One, Issue 5 to be exact). It wasn't immediately clear to me, but I once I got to the bottom of the page, I realized that what I was reading was written by none other than Ali Edwards, author of A Designer's Eye for Scrapbooking and A Designer's Eye for Scrapbooking with Patterned Paper, and Creative Editor of Creating Keepsakes magazine. Now I've been a reader of Ali's blog for some time now, but this ezine was new to me - I see now that there is a link to the ezine on her blog, which I must never have noticed before. So....why am I telling you this? Well, that's simple. Ali's article "Creative Confidence. Do You Have It?" is a must read. As an instructor, I hear the phrase "I'm not creative!" all the time, and even experienced crafters will suffer from a creative block from time to time. What Ali has done in her article is put these feelings into perspective and has offered her readers some great advice on how to overcome the obstacles to your creativity. Everyone is or can be creative - you just have to 'decide' that you are.