Intention and Elsie's challenge {wk. #1}

I feel like I'm kind-of putting things into place for the new year. Organizing my thoughts and priorities, deciding what's important. One thing that's at the heart of it all is Ali's challenge to pick one word for the year. A word to sum up what you want for yourself in 2007. After reading this, the word create immediately popped into my head. I'm always striving to challenge myself to create whenever possible. Then after reading this post, the phrase honor my creativity, whenever it comes, whatever form it takes jumped off the page at me. So it's official, my word is CREATE! It doesn't necessarily mean I have to make a layout everyday or do some sort of art (but it could), it could mean creating more healthful meals for my family, creating stronger friendships, creating more free time (don't I wish!).

After reading the book Living Artfully my definition of living a creative life has expanded tenfold. Has anyone else gotten a hold of this book and read it? I'd love to hear what you think. The layout above was made to honor my word for 2007 and state my intention. The picture is of me working alongside other artists (my favorite way to create) at Silver Bella. This year I have big plans to create LOTS of art. I am more than thrilled to be going to ArtFest at the end of March. I hope to create lots of fun little gifties to trade there and also participate in the art show-and-tell that will be taking place and of course bring a handmade journal with me to scrapbook my weekend! It will be a dream come true for me to create with such amazing teachers and fellow artists. Can't wait!! Anyone else out there going?

Part of what I would love to accomplish is creating layouts to keep up with all the photos that I take. To help with this I'm going to use Elsie's book 52 Scrapbooking Challenges and post a challenge here, on my blog, every Sunday if you'd like to play along with me. Since there's 52, this will last a whole year! So let's get started...

Challenge {number one} work with words. From the book: Whether it's a quote, a list of your favorite adjectives or computer generated phrases, journaling on strips of cardstock is a great way to add visual excitement to your page. So here's mine (above). If you choose to play along and post your layout on your blog, please post a comment with a link here so we can all check it out.

One final (very exciting!) note is that one of my favorite, new found blogger artists beshka is going to start posting challenges from the fabulous book Caffeine for the Creative Mind on her blog starting the 15th. She will post a challenge every 2 weeks. Come join us, it will be fun!!!!

Here's to a fabulous year of ~*creating*~