Beauty and Inspiration

I am a magazine lover.  I'm not always big on reading them, but I AM big on looking at them.  And in looking at them I find many beautiful, inspiring things in them...pictures, quotes, passages of wording.  The bad thing is that I find good stuff in almost every magazine I look at, which makes me want to keep them all.  As our house isn't that big, I can't do that (our house would look like one of those hoarder's homes...yikes!).   So, to appease the girl inside that simply can't throw those things away, I have become a clipper.

I am also a fairly organized person (well, mostly...I am finding that as I age, I am becoming less and less organized, a bad sign for a small home :-) ), so I don't like to see the gallon-sized storage bags with these clippings in them with no rhyme or reason to them.  So, I have started to organize those clippings in small binders.  They look like this:

The pages are filled with the pretty things, quotes, and passages of wording that I found.  I use the small scrapbook papers I find at craft stores (and yes, even Walmart) to make backgrounds for some of the pages, making them even more beautiful to me. And all it took to create these pages was a glue stick (or one of those glue tape gizmos), some clippings, sheet protectors (to keep the clippings safe once I have glued them on the page), and scrapbook papers.

I love to look at these books...they never cease to inspire me to either feel good or want to create something else beautiful whether it is my artwork or more pages in these books.  I have taken something I thought was beautiful, combined it with other things I thought were beautiful, and made them all accessible.  It is as easy as picking up a book and in an instant, I am inspired and happy.

So if you are holding onto magazines, pamphlets, papers, etc. that you love, think about combining them in this way or other ways that speak to you to make them more accessible and relieve some of the space stress in your home.  You never know what interesting combinations you can come up with that are even greater than the originals on their own.

Until next time, stay warm and happy!