Embrace the Imperfection

This weekend my sisters and I headed to Canmore for a girl's weekend, complete with scrapbooking. Now when it comes to scrapbooking, I'm definitely a hybrid scrapper. My computer, printer and cutter are a huge part of my creative process. Needless to say, they all had to stay behind. So the first part of the day was somewhat less than productive. I was trying to scrap around what I thought I needed to finish with technology. I don't like my handwriting so I was avoiding journaling. And if my handwriting isn't good enough for journaling, it definitely isn't good enough for doing titles! But partway though the day a lightbulb went on. Not everything has to be perfect! If you are a digital scrapper or have ever looked at any digital kits (particularly the elements) you've probably noticed that lots of designers really try to create real looking pieces. And how do they do that? By making them imperfect! Stitching is crooked (sometimes the odd stitch is missing altogether), stamped elements are slightly smudged, staples and tape are off kilter and sometimes things are even wrinkled or have a curled corner. So if that's what makes something digital look real, why do we stress so much about making our "real" pages so perfect? Once I realized that, let go of my perfection hang-ups and just focused on telling the stories I wanted to tell with my pages, the whole process got a lot more relaxing, and I started getting more done too. Want to see a few examples? I made these little tickets by cutting rectangles of cardstock and then punching out the corners and inking around the edges. To stamp them, I used one of those old-style library stamps where you turn a little dial to crank rubber strips around to line up whatever letters and numbers you want to stamp. The downside is its hard to see exactly where you're stamping, and sometimes ink gets on the edge and you get smudges, as you can plainly see on mine. It would have taken forever to get three perfectly stamped tickets so I just plopped them on the page and moved on. I don't like my handwriting. How many of you can relate to that? But have you ever noticed how many handwriting fonts there are out there? I bet lots of them are based on the penmanship of people who don't like their handwriting, and yet other people are downloading those fonts and using them on scrapbook pages. How ironic is that? Now normally I would have created this title on my computer, printed it off and attached it to my page. But I didn't want to wait until I got home to finish the page, so I tool a deep breath, picked up a pen and made a title. It's not perfect, but so be it. This is another example of a title, if you look you can see the bottom of the T is a bit shaky, but who's to say I didn't plan it that way? :-) Now does this mean I'm giving up my technology toys? Absolutely not! And sometimes there are special projects that mean a lot and you really do want them to be perfect. But when I'm working on a project where the story is more important than perfection, I'm going to jump I'm with both feet, have fun with it, and embrace the imperfection! How about you?