Inspiration for a Resource Notebook

MarveLes Art Studios Blogs, Tutorial 3 Comments

More from my ‘spring cleaning’ – it’s never-ending, really!  Anyway, besides keeping a notebook of my drawings and sketches, I also keep a separate resource notebook full of inspiration I find.  It contains pages from magazines, quilting patterns, photographs, clothing, miscellaneous ads or anything that grabs my attention. As I’m sure many of you are aware… inspiration is everywhere!

It usually causes my hubby’s head to turn when he hears me ripping out those catalog pages!  And they are full of the latest colors, seasonal palettes and inspiration galore. 

I keep them in plastic sleeves, and or cut/paste them onto white sheets of paper and then tuck into the sleeves.
Have you noticed the creative designs and colors from tissue boxes these days?  I can’t bear to throw them out… so they get tucked into plastic protector sheets, and placed in my notebook.  They are great patterns in and of themselves, not to mention free motion ideas!

Home decorating and quilting fabrics are closely related, and often go hand-in-hand with the fashion world, too.  Applique… felting… color play combinations…it’s endless!

My “Resource Notebooks” help me manage the bulk and storage of favorite patterns and color ideas, keeping the cost of doing so to a bare minimum.  I simply cannot keep all the magazines from year to year …. and if I have to go through a big stack of them to find something I thought I saw ‘awhile ago’ – I simply won’t. I just don’t have the time luxury and it’s frustrating when I can’t  find what I want when I want it.

However, that doesn’t mean there aren’t some mags that I do like to keep completely intact, like Quilting Arts.  

Now, they also offer free downloads of lots of terrific projects.  So I’ve begun a new notebook started just for my QA project downloads which feature everything from binding techniques to painting, embellishing and more.

So I tear out my favorites — whether I’ll do them or not is another story… but that way I can organize them .. and thumb through them for ideas when I feel a bit low on inspiration. 

 

Comments 3

  1. I love this idea. I've been saving some projects too, but I never seem to get around to making anything 🙁

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