Drowning in a Sea of Magazines........

Since starting to scrap I think I have become quite the collector...patterned paper, buttons, flowers, stickers to name a bit...but by far one of the collections that takes up a lot of space is magazines. There is fast becoming loads of different magazines each offering a project or product review I cannot refuse! The pile I have is starting to resemble the leaning tower of Pisa and I was thinking of all the money I have spent on them....$10 a mag over 100....thats a lot of scrapping paper but the real thing is I am not sure I have been using my magazines to their full potential! I buy with good intention I flick through and admire and thats about it....there is a wealth of inspiration in each magazine that I could use but I just never get back to it because by this time there is another issue out!

Recently I was rereading my Elise Flannigan 52 Scrapbooking Challenges book and it dawned on me how you could use a few of the challenges in this book to get some real value out of your magazine...

So I challenge you to go and grab your latest scrapbooking magazine purchase...using the principles below I am going to show you how you can be inspired to scrap 7 layouts out of this magazines...

Here we go...

1) Challenge 11 of Elsie's book - Challenges you to scraplift a Colour combination - find a layout and copy the colour combination!

2) Challenge 14 - Challenges you to scraplift a technique - see a technique you would like to try in a mag...scraplift it!

3) Challenge 15 - Challenges you to scraplift a layout idea - see an idea on a layout you love - scraplift it!

4) Challenge 16 - Challenges you to scraplift a topic - the world is full of brilliant scrap artists...why not scraplift a topic they have used for a page.

5) Challenge 17 - Challenges you to scraplift and Alphabetical approach - scan the magazine to see how people have used alphas's on thier alphabet. It is interesting to see how some of mixed random fonts and get it so right!

6) Challenge 19 - Challenges you to scraplift a Layout shape - find a layout you love and copy the shape by using the original layout as you would a page sketch

7) Challenge 22 - Challenges you to scraplift a journalling style - find a layout that you love how the journalling is done and impliment the journalling style on your layout

Easy! One of our lovely forum members challenged us in scraptherapy to scraplift a layout from a magazine...you can see it here the results were gorgeous!

Now if all else fails another idea is of course to find your nearest scrapping friend and buy one magazine each and swap each fortnight!

This saves you money and more money means more scrapping supplies....it really is a win win situation!!