Welcome to Inspiration Elevator! What a thrilling day! Today is the launch of Inspiration Elevator (IE), a challenge blog created by my dear friend Christa Uttley and me. We chose the name Inspiration Elevator because it is our intent to raise our creativity to heights through challenges issued every month. We want to raise our designs from the ordinary to the extraordinary. We hope you'll join us on our journey!
IE is a group of like minded scrappy friends who want to raise the bar in their own creative process through unique challenges that we issue to each other once a month. These won't be run of the mill challenges and we hope you'll join us each month and be inspired by the creative designs we've created.
This is not a blog hop, and there are no prizes, but we would love it if you’d take a few minutes to see what the rest of the Inspiration Elevator team created. We are sure you will feel inspired to get creative:
Ann (that's me! So thrilled to be among these talented women!)
The first challenge, issued by Christa, is two-fold: to create a new design that reflects your style, and to use a new product or technique that you find inspiring right now.
Things that make this a quintessentially Ann Jobes layout are: a long, multi-font title, inking & distressing, journaling.
I often dabble with handmade embellishments, so there's some of that on here too.
My response to the second part of the challenge, to include a technique or product that you are currently being inspired by, is not all that obvious now that the layout is done... but it is part of the journey in completing the layout. I wanted a tone on tone pattern that didn't take away from the blue woodgrain, so laid the butterfly template over the blue woodgrain paper and spritzed with a denim mist. I wanted the pattern to be subtle, and it gleams in person, but is very not obvious - next time, I'll pick a slightly darker! But isn't that blue woodgrain perfect with the blue background behind her feet? Yes, this MME line worked perfectly for this layout, I think.
Here's a shot of the multi-font title. I played on the old Nancy Sinatra title, These Boots Were Made for Walking and switched it up to These Feet were Meant for Dancing. The journaling reads: When you were given the Language Arts assignment to write something about something you had to overcome, you took the project seriously and crated a wonderful foot-shaped mini album about being born with metarsal adducturs. Who would believe looking at those feet now, that when they handed my brand new baby girl to me they told me she was healthy, scored fine on the Agpar, but would probably need surgery to correct a problem with her feet? We averted the surgery through massage, stretches, physiotherapy, and supportive shoes. To the untrained eye, your feet look just fine. This year, in dance, you started to realize that this condition affects your dancing, especially your form. By working harder, you are forming good points with your toes. You concluded your mini book with a quote one of your dance teachers posted on Facebook that reads, "Hard work beats talent, when talent doesn't work hard." You added, "I want to to be hardworking and talented." My sweet girl, you are both and I couldn't be more proud of you! You have worked so hard this year and it shows! Love, Mom xo
The circle garland is something I just came up with. When I was playing with all the LYB Paradise stuff a month ago, they sold a garland embellishment that I didn't purchase because I'm cheap frugal. For this layout, I remembered the garland and made my own.
I used my brown ink over the red glitter letters because they were a little too red, like ruby slipper red, and the ink mellowed them into a shade that works with the stripes in the patterned paper.
If you play along this month with the challenge, please let me know - I'd love to visit your blog and see what you made. Take a few minutes, too, to visit my team mates/friends to see what they made in response to this challenge - I KNOW you will be inspired and impressed! Let me know what you think by leaving a comment - it would make my day!
