Inspiration Elevator Challenge- Letter to your Teen Self.

Hello happy people!!!

I've been sooo busy avoiding any and all crafty pursuits. My mojo is gone fishing for the moment.

This latest Inspiration Elevator challenge freed me up a bit.

I started thinking about what I would write, how to make it relevant to my life today and to my primary audience (always Miss Lola) when suddenly the page's design mattered less.

This is a good thing as I usually get so wound up making an "original" design, my story (the whole point of making a page) takes a back seat.

AHA!!!! Here is how the page appears when I link up to my Flickr! 

You can also see everything else in my Flickr account... excuse me as I learn the internet.. again.

Here I'm using an iPod Touch and the AfterLight app to shoot and retouch my pages.
Blogger seems to be compressing the files and rendering them incorrectly.
You can try clicking on it to get a clear look- my apologies.
I started off with the 2 A Flair For Buttons flair and a Crate Paper background.
I didn't want the page to look like one of my usual scrapbook projects so I resisted
adding a photo at first but I have a bunch of these under exposed Instax Mini shots
lying around- each of those prints costs a dollar so you better believe I'm using them all!

Basically the text reads- don't sweat the failures- you get one thing right and it's the most important thing of all. 

I was talking to a past and even MORE resistant version of me so I get pretty stark in my words.

If you think I'm overly pessimistic and broody at 40 you would have LOVED me at 16.

The teen years are hard for everyone, your moral values and ideals are mostly set in place but you fall all over yourself either trying to prove you are independent and grown up or running away from doing so.

So without getting bogged down in the details (which my teen ear would have rejected anyway) I decided to give my past self some comfort. I'm not the walking error machine I was convinced I was. 

I was -am- pretty freaking great at figuring things out.

I'm almost ready to give up the hunt for perfect design and just keep doing this in all my other pages.
Scrapbooking has gotten too complicated.

And now a word from our sponsor:

You may recall that the purpose of this challenge group is to take our scrapbooking to the next level, to stretch our creative process and to grow as artists by embracing challenges that make us think, work and extend ourselves. You can view all of the challenges at our Inspiration Elevator Blog, here. 

Our challenge this month was posed by the very talented Ann Jobes. Here's how she expressed this month's challenge:

My daughter subscribes to Dance Spirit magazine and I sometimes browse through it, too. One of my favourite monthly features is an article that features a different dancer each month, some photos of that dancer, and a description of their current work, and (the best part!) a letter. The theme is a Letter to My Teenage Self. The content ranges, depending on the dancer and his/her experience, morals, ideals, etc. So this month's assignment is to write a letter to your teenage self. You can take any approach you'd like to this - scrapbook page, art journal page, canvas. However the prompt inspires you. And your content is of course up to you, as well. Some topics might be: what would you try to teach yourself? Or, what would you counsel yourself to do or not do? This does not have to be a page about regrets. It could be about congratulating yourself on something you did right that has contributed to who you've become today. 

Here is a photo of a recent magazine feature, if it inspires you:

Please visit the other Inspiration Elevator designers' blogs and see how they solved Ann's challenge:

Ann Jobes 

Laura Whitaker

Lisa Moen

Cathy Harper

Joanne Burton

Jodi Wilton

Michelle Hernandez

We would LOVE to see you take up Ann's challenge this month, so if you do, please share it at our linkup on the Inspiration Elevator blog.

Get writing mi gente!

Pumpkin picking madness.