Life is a Roller Coaster - Hang on for the ride!

I just took a look at my blog and realized that it has been six months since my last post.

My crazy roller-coaster of a life has gotten in the way of my hobbies and my joy.....

I have been going through some very challenging times lately and that has definately had a severe impact on my creative side. It has been a struggle to find the creative spark to do the things that bring joy to my life.

I even put aside my scrapbooking for a while - that looking at some of the pictures was just too painful to work with. I am starting to be able to work with them again. Trying to remember that at the time the photos where taken that we were in much happier situation and try to journal with that time frame in mind, rather than the current time frame.

I did the same with pictures of my sister - journalling as if it were the very recent past rather than years before. That way I was able to keep the happiness of the photos intact, rather than overshadowing everything with her illness and subsequent death. That is much more how I would rather remember things - her death was only one small part of her life - not her entire life.

And so for my self-imposed moratorium on scrapbooking, I ventured into the world of cardmaking. I have made cards in the past for the odd birthday, and in the last few years Christmas, but only on a very simple level.

I remember when I was at the Ultimate Scrapbook Retreat last October that I saw some women with a huge pile of markers. They seemed to spend the entire weekend doing nothing but colouring.

At the time it totally puzzled me - now, I liked colouring as well as the next kid, but I found it frustrating, I did not like that you were to only use one colour red to colour the apple - don't you know that apples are not just one colour!! And then I tripped into the world of Copic pens..... I saw a video on YouTube one sleepless night and that was it - I was totally hooked!! Now I know what the draw was for the ladies with the millions of pens (or is that just millions of dollars worth of pens!!)!

And so I started colouring - stamped images at first and then I expanded my search to find 'digital stamps' - otherwise known as line art and found some of the cutest images to colour. One of my faves are the images from Mo Manning at Digital Pencil Too - check it out - I just love them.

I took a couple of classes and got the idea of the Copic Method of colouring.

I end up with huge amount of coloured images - I was colouring at scrapbooking nights, I was colouring watching the TV - and, of course, I needed more and more colours - just having 20 to start with was far too limiting and so I had to have more. Just another three to get the yellow greens I wanted, and then another three to get the lavenders I wanted, and so on and so on. I did draw the line (temporarily at least) for a while - I do have a little of most of the colour families now - so I have some options, but I know it will only be a little longer before I feel the need to add to the collection!

So what to do with all the images that I had coloured??? Along came my little scrapbooking pal, Maria - she and another friend were going to sell cards at some local craft fairs and had accidentially double booked for the same weekend - so they needed more stock. Maria had turned her basement suite into a scrapbooking/cardmaking factory. She and Lil had combined all of their cardmaking/stamping/embossing/paper supplies and had a wonderful place set up to make all the cards you could ever want.

And so I joined them with a crazy week of laughter, a little tears and a whole lotta cards!!! I managed to make 80 cards in the week before the craft shows.

And so, here are some of the cards that I made - some with Mo Manning's images....

As much as I love scrapbooking, I had a great time making the cards too. I don't think that I will ever completely stop doing scrapbooking - I will get back into it, but I have been having a lot of fun making the cards.

So in the end, life is still a roller coaster, but as much as there are ups and down, you can find joy in some of the small things and that will help you find the joy in other parts of your life.

Live life and hope that you find joy - even in the small things.

Happy Scrapping,

Brenda