Inspiration Books

My love for reading is not limited to books - I'm also a bit addicted to magazines. Besides art & craft magazines, I love fashion, home dec, gardening, architecture, lifestyle and any magazine printed on recycled, non-clay coated, paper.

A couple of my favorite non-art/craft magazines are Boho and Flower. Boho is a lifestyle magazine loved both for its content and its paper. It is a fabulous source for collage images & text and I've been having great fun cutting it up for my work. Flower is a floral design magazine with terrific photography and an endless source of floral design ideas. I'm not in the flower business any more but I still love keeping up with the industry design trends.

In any given month, I get at least twenty-five magazines (we are avid recyclers of old magazines, promise!). Besides all of the art/craft ones, Elle, Vogue, Town & Country, Bazaar, Marie Claire, Architectural Digest, Uppercase, Smithsonian, Boho & Flower are the ones I love the best. It is a lot of info to take in and, honestly, only a couple of articles in each magazine really capture my attention. What I really love to do is tear them apart!

I go through the pages, tearing out images that speak to me. Sometimes it is the sleeve of a dress, sometimes a color combination or texture. Other times it is just because the image caught my eye and I want to keep it to refer to later. After an afternoon of going through a pile of magazines, I wind up with a pretty big pile of torn out pages.

The pile got totally out of control quickly and it became impossible to find what I was looking for. I wanted to organize the images so I bought a few speckled composition books - I thought they would be sturdy since the pages are sewn in and the covers are pretty thick. I just trim the images & use a glue stick to adhere them to the pages. It's not fancy but it has worked out great. I started with one book and quickly realized that I needed to have a book for each "subject".

Subjects include Collage, Quilts, Beading, Fashion, and Home. I've filled several books and have started another book for the same subject.

I enjoy looking through the books before starting a new project - it helps to wake up my creative side and often gives me ideas that I use as a jumping off point for my project. It isn't about copying what I've put in my books, it is about inspiration.

Collaging the covers of the books is fun to do and is a great way to use scraps and to play with colors. I've got a nice little collection of books with thousands of images, my little library of ideas, ever growing as I continue tearing up magazines & gluing them in my books. During busy times, like now, when I'm working long hours due to tax season, I love looking through my books and dreaming of projects I'll make after the April 15th deadline passes. Mmmm. Quite delicious, eally.