Kasey Phillips: Fanciful Fridays

In the past my friends have marveled at some of the creative and thoughtful ideas and gifts that I have come up with. During law school however, my creativity was slightly stifled by my analytical workload and my extreme lack of time. Now however, with all of this extra time on my hands I have found myself tapping into my creative juices like never before.

Over the past few months I have worked on several projects. Some were fairly large projects that took a lot of time and energy, others were smaller projects that took barely any time at all and provided almost an instant gratification.

Since I have so often been asked “how do you come up with this stuff?” I decided to post some of my projects on this blog in the hopes that friends and readers will be inspired to tap into their own creativity. Thus, Fridays will now be “Fanciful Fridays” and posts will showcase past or current creative projects. Let’s get started!

In March I found myself with a ridiculous amount of free time on my hands. I had just taken the CO bar and was not ready to jump into studying for anything else. I spent time at the gym and looking for a job, but still the free hours piled up. I had to find something to occupy my mind and my hands so that I would not go stir crazy. It was time to be creative.

I have been a long time scrapbooker. I have a scrapbook for every year since eighth grade thru my senior year in college. Law school put a halt to my scrapbooking but I still have all the photos and other memorabilia to eventually finish those years as well. The original books are smaller (8.5x11) whereas the college years are bigger (12x12). As I grew up, my skills developed and my books started to look better. As I contemplated what to do with my free time, scrapbooking naturally came to mind fairly quickly.

I was hesitant to tackle the law school years knowing that three years of undocumented photos and items might overwhelm me. So I thought about what else I could work on. Luckily in September 2010 I had taken a trip to Hawaii and had taken so many pictures that the trip would need its own book instead of being lumped inside another year. This provided the perfect project – plenty to do but not overwhelming.

I started by having all the pictures printed. I sent them online to costco because it was the cheapest and the quality is decent. When I got the pictures back I divided them into days that we were on the island – 7 piles in total. I got large ziplock bags and placed each pile in a separate bag, labeling the bag with the date and where we had gone on the island.

After dealing with the pictures, I dug through my boxes of saved items until I found all of the stuff from my Hawaii trip – ticket stubs, brochures, napkins, dried flowers, business cards, etc. I then sorted this stuff into the 7 days as well, placing the items into the corresponding picture bags. Once that was done it was time to start!

I took one bag at a time and figure out the paper and the matting I was going to use for each set of photos. Then I trimmed the main page and started cropping the photos and the matting. I arranged the photos on the page, added a little glue and then moved on to the next page. I know that some people decorate as they go, but I prefer to get all the pictures on pages and then go back and add the details like lettering, journaling, and stickers. But, to each his own!

It took me almost 2 weeks to finish putting the photos on pages. Then it took me a few more days to do the decorating. Most of the pages are completely finished, but I still have to journal about the events of the trip and paste in a few more titles – just the finishing touches!

Scrapbooking takes gumption.

Here are some of the finished pages. Enjoy!