Scrapbooking Classes & Meeting my Scrappy Idol

Ahead of this weeks Brisbane Scrapbooking Expo, I want to share my first experience of Scrapbooking Classes and meeting my scrapbooking Idol.  I know if you are lucky enough to be in Brisbane next weekend, there will be heaps of opportunities for you all to cross paths with some you admire. Make sure you take a photo and if you have the time do a class.  You will love it and it will reignite a love of the craft ten fold.

This is my experience of my first ever scrapbooking class. I have never been slightly interested in doing classes.  I like the idea of hanging out with like minded people but I hate the idea of being told what to do.  This is the day I realised you can do classes and put your own spin on them.  You don’t have to reproduce their layout if you don’t want to.  No one cares and no one with shun you because of it.

This is why I did a class: FIONA PALTRIDGE. I will be honest, I like a lot of “Scrappy” people and their styles but there are very few I LOVE.  And by love I mean that no matter what they do I am just in awe of their talent.  It’s no secret Fiona Paltridge is one of those ladies for me.

I LOVE her work and I love her ecclectic artsy style.  Back in April, I got an opportunity to spend a day doing 3 of Fiona’s Fiona’s classes – back to back!  I was so freaking excited and since those classes I have developed an unnatural obsession with Hessian.  Creepy and weird I know, but I try to add it to all my layouts now, I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.  Thanks Fiona!

I was totally star struck.  I really loved each class. I honestly learnt more new things in some classes than others but I didn’t care.  I was sucking in the creative energy in the room.  I really didn’t even look at what the class was about when I booked.  I just saw the name and the location (38 minutes from my house) and said to my husband “I’m going – you will have to look after the kids that day” and handed over my credit card details.

This is Fionas Layout:

And this is my take on it:

This is the second layout:

And my take:

The final layout was all about using stencils.  For some reason I didn’t get a photo of the sample layout – probably because Sue Plumb was a bad influence encouraged a few drinks half way through the second layout.

For the final layout, I volunteered my paper as a demo piece.  Fiona was a bit apologitic at the “mess” she made of it but I took it as a challenge to make it work.  I really like the way it turned out.

This is Fiona at work – NOTE the bare feet:

This is the mess she made of my paper:

And this is my finished layout:

I have been hanging on to these photos on my phone for ages and its time to free up some space and share them.

One thing Fiona said that has really stuck with me and made me love her even more is, “I don’t scrapbook for the memory keeping side of it, I do it for the ART”.  While I love the memory keeping side of Scrapbooking, I didn’t really find myself until I realised I could make it about the art more than the memory.  I don’t scrap chronologically and I am not concerned how they all go together in an album.  I just want to make nice stuff for me.  It’s a digital day and age.  If my kids want a chronological day to day of their lives they can go and print off any of the 1000000 photos I have.  This stuff is for me!

If you ever have the opportunity to do one of Fiona’sFiona’s classes do it.  You won’t regret it.  Next on my bucket list is one of Fiona’s wire classes at Artified.  At the moment I am counting down to the Brisbane Scrapbooking Expo where I have signed up to another classs of Fiona’s – this makes my insides SQUEE with excitement.  This and the fact that I can be creative without a little Miss 3 year old insisiting on “helping” me because she “likes scrapbooking too”.  I have also signed up to a few other “Masters” classes that being Natalie May and Beck Beattie so I am really excited to learn some new stuff and meet these ladies. I will share my experience sometime in the next few weeks.

Who is your scrappy idol?  Who’s work should we all be looking at for inspiration?