*taste the snowflakes*

Here's a card you might recognize from last week's A Muse News. Sorry I don't have anything new to share. It's been a crazy summer for me. I spent a number of weeks helping my sister get her house ready to rent. Then I took on a decorating project at my house which involved re-painting my living room and dining room. It took me three tries to get the right color, which was a bit frustrating, but nothing was more frustrating than saving and saving to have my couch, ottoman, and love seat reupholstered only to get the couch back and realize that she upholstered it INSIDE OUT!!! It has been quite a fiasco, to say the least, and it's not over yet. Now I'm painting the outside of my house. It's been 10 years since it's been painted, and I've quickly discovered 3 things. 1.) Scraping is a horrible job. 2.) If primer sticks to the siding half as well as it sticks to my fingers, I should never have to paint this house again! 3.) I've gotten myself into a lot of work! But once you start a project of this magnitude, there's no turning back. Working out in the heat all day pretty much zaps my creativity, so I'm afraid that until this project is over, I won't have much to share.

Thanks for stopping by!

A Muse U: Finding Inspiration

It's time for another session of A Muse U! This time it's all about finding inspiration.

Whenever I'm running low on inspiration, I sit down with a cup of coffee and browse a few of my favorite blogs or thumb through the pages of the latest issue of Paper Crafts, and in no time I'm inspired to create. Blogs, online galleries, and stamping magazines are full of great ideas that can help get your creative juices flowing. But sometimes it's fun to find inspiration in the not-so-obvious places.

I found this quilt in an advertisement from Younkers.

I was immediately drawn to it's colors, probably because they were such beautiful, muted shades with a vintage look to them. They weren't really colors I would have thought of putting together, but their combination was beautiful. I couldn't resist. I caved and bought the quilt. After it was on my bed, I kept looking at the colors. I started wondering if I had inks in similar colors. Wouldn't that make a beautiful card? Sages, browns, golds, rosy pinks, and a deep, almost eggplant purple. Why not stick with florals and use my Everything's Rosy stamps? And out of nowhere, I found myself inspired to create this card.

I found inspiration for the next card after watching my little girl, Livi, play with her tea set. I love polka dots, and those sweet little tea cups were all it took to inspire me to dig out my neglected cup and saucer stamp. I loved the colors of the tea cups and used similar colors on my card.

Inspiration comes when something catches your eye, even when that something is quite simple or just a tiny part of what caught your eye in the first place. It's all about what inspires YOU! Is it the colors? the style? Maybe it's a shape or the way something is put together.

You never know when inspiration will strike, so keep your eyes open. Who knows... you might find a fresh and fun new color combination, an idea for mixing up patterns, a new way of using an old stamp, or inspiration to dig out something you almost forgot you had!