Inspiration and the Un-Challenge Challenge

I’ve been thinking a lot about inspiration lately. Recently I’ve found myself super inspired by paper scrapbookers. Like, a lot. I think it might be partially due to still not having a “home” in the digital community since SDD closed. And my RSS feeder is more full of paper scrappers than digi.

I’ve always been a “challenge scrapper” I cannot pass up a good challenge! Ever since I started scrapping I would say 95% of all the LO’s I’ve done have been for an online challenge. They are still my photos and stories obviously, but I am clearly super motivated by other peoples’ challenges.

This thought process has lead me to wonder… what would my scrapbooking look like if I were just scrapping for ME, with no challenge points to add up, no product requirements, no deadlines? What stories would I tell? What products would I use? Would I be able to get anything done without a deadline??

These thoughts feel extremely uncomfortable to me. My scrapbooking budget is virtually nonexistent. (I’m using it all up on printing) I pay for this hobby by CT’ing and doing challenges for gift certificates each month. How can I afford to support my habit without gift certificates?? The simple answer is, I can’t, but I don’t need to. I have YEARS worth of supplies built up. I have three fantastic designers who give me free reign over their stores. I’m certainly not hurting for product!

I’m ready to shake things up. I’m giving myself an “Un-Challenge challenge”. I want to see if I can scrap for a whole month without doing current challenges. I say “current challenges” because I have a backlog of older challenges that can be jumping off points for stories that I didn’t have time to complete. I save those in Evernote and come back to them if I need ideas. I have lists and lists of pages that I want to make that I could never fit into my challenge-centric schedule. I want to knock some of those out. I want to mix kits and not worry about which designer is working in which store this month. I want to take inspiration from the fabulous paper scrappers I’ve been pinning for months.

I want to see how my pages will look if I’m free to scrap what I want.

I can’t wait to see where this month takes me!

*I will continue to fulfill my CT requirements, including the Document Life Workshop, which is a challenge blog. The great thing about Doc Life is that the challenges are very open-ended and open to interpretation. And they have absolutely no product requirements, so I can pretty much make anything I want, which is the whole point of this self imposed challenge. 🙂