Happy January 19, everyone! Can you believe it's been a week since we all embarked on the Take Twelve photography challenge? Each month on the 19th I'll feature some completed Take Twelve layouts from our team and draw names of lucky recipients of the month's giveaway.

Speaking of the monthly giveaway... you'll find the link submission information at the end of each 12th-of-the-month post (see January's here); from now on, we'll extend the entry deadline to midnight EST on the evening of the 18th. That's an extra day to turn those twelve photos into something magical (a blog post, a layout, or whatever your heart desires!). We also encourage you to continue adding your photos and layouts to the Ella Publishing Co. 2012 Take Twelve Project Flickr Group (whew! Say that five times fast!) all month long—we'll feature a few photos/layouts here at The Daily Trumpet on February 12!

 

Let's get to it, shall we?

I decided to use one of Donna Jannuzzi's fantastic sketches from the Take Twelve Guided Inspiration Kit for my photos—while I'm going to make an honest effort to use some of the less linear sketches she created, I couldn't resist beginning with the clean lines of this one. My photos weren't all landscape orientation; I just resized and cropped them so they'd fit the sketch measurements. I added a few simple details (including that super-fun letterpress camera I cut out of a card—there are four more on the card so I might use a different one next month!) and summarized my notes that I wrote up for my blog on January 12.

Next up: Take Twelve Team member Margie Scarpignato. I wanted to include her digital layout today to prove a point: you can fit in twelve photos and a layout even if you're really, really busy. Margie did—on a flight with her boys from California to China. Amazing!! She simply focused on one event (albeit a GIANT event for most of us) and snapped away. Her journaling takes the form of a descriptive list—not complicated at all.

I absolutely loved the spin Take Twelve Team member Van Nguyen put on her twelve photos: her resolution for 2012 is to work on finding balance in her life, so she's going to use her involvement with the Take Twelve Project to check in with how that's going. Whether you approach your photos in a random, haphazard way (ahem—like me, this month) or in a reflective way as Van did, you're still on your way to capturing 144 unique memories through your camera's lens. Make this project your own!

Take Twelve Team member Angela Gutshall's page is bright and happy—and the perfect blend of order (square photos) and whimsy (embellishments). She lopped her List-It in half (printed from the Take Twelve Guided Inspiration Kit) for a unique look that saves space and provides balance.

Last up for today is team member Monica Bradford. Look familiar? Look closely—we used the same sketch to create our layouts! The beauty of sketches is that they are infinitely customizable; no two layouts based on the same sketch will ever turn out exactly alike. Our layouts are both focused on the everyday moments that occurred on January 12, but she took an hourly approach to capturing them.

 

Want even more ideas? Be sure to visit the following Take Twelve Team members' blogs to see how they approached the challenge!

 

Valerie

Jennie

Stephanie

Aliza

Lisa D.

Check out some great ideas from some of our staff and Ella Friends, too:

Bobbi-Jo

Christa

Missy

Angie

 

Now... how about that giveaway? Up for grabs: a seat in Cathy Zielske's Ten Tips for Better Type and a seat in May Flaum's The Curious Scrapbooker's Field Guide. Thanks to Big Picture Classes for their generous sponsorship of this month's Take Twelve Project giveaway!

 

[drumroll please][the accidental latecomers to the link party were included in the integer spread]

Congratulations to #11 (Fay) and #35 (Michelle Evans). We'll have our people contact your people very soon to work out the details!

 

Thanks to everyone who participated this month. And for those of you who haven't jumped in yet... it's not too late!

It's January 12, and you know what that means—the official kick-off of Ella Publishing Co.'s 2012 Take Twelve Project! It's a project with a simple commitment: take twelve photos (or narrow down to twelve, who am I kidding?) on the 12th of each month throughout 2012.

 

 

Hundreds of scrapbookers, photographers, and bloggers from around the world will be clicking away today, and we sure hope you're one of them! The best part: this is a project that is 100% doable and 100% finish-able, especially with the inspiration you'll find in the Take Twelve Guided Inspiration Kit and the ease of use you'll experience with the Take Twelve Templates.

 

Can I just tell you how awesome it feels to have completed a project in December that you began in January? Take my word for it—it's Awesome. With a capital "A."

 

Here's a quick overview of some important Take Twelve information:

 

+ There are no rules. Use whatever camera—or combination of cameras—you like. If you happen to miss the 12th of the month, don't give up! Just take your pictures on the 13th. Or the 18th. No one will ever know. It will be much harder to forget with Ella on your side, though, because once you purchase a Take Twelve Guided Inspiration Kit you can sign up for handy reminder emails. As everyone knows, elephants never forget!

 

+ The 2012 Take Twelve Team will be at your service to inspire and encourage you every step of the way! Ella would never let you Take Twelve alone. Speaking of which, bookmark the 2012 Take Twelve Flickr Group so you can upload your photos and layouts to share with other participants all year long!

 

+ Want to quickly connect with other Take Twelve participants? Use the hashtag #take12 on Twitter or Instagram to easily connect with others playing along.

 

+ Not ready to join in just yet? You can jump in at any time and simply continue for 11 more months. (Or go February to February or March to March. It would be super fun to start on your birthday month!) This is a flexible project, and we invite you to participate in the way that makes most sense to you! The Take Twelve Guided Inspiration Kit and digital templates will return to full price tomorrow, but you'll be able to snag a discount on the 12th of each month if you decide to jump in later. Bargain!

 

+ If you are ready, you'll be eligible for prizes! That's right, each month we'll be randomly choosing participants for terrific prizes just for showing up (and linking your visuals below). This month's Take Twelve giveaway sponsor is Big Picture Classes:

 

How about a spot in Cathy Zielske's new typography class, Ten Tips for Better Type? Or May Flaum's new creative layout class, The Curious Scrapbooker's Field Guide? All you have to do is stop back at this post and link us to your visual by January 18 for your chance to be eligible to receive a class pass.

 

2012 is a clean slate, friends—let's all go out there and document it together!

 

Enter This Month's Giveaway

We're so excited at Ella Publishing Co. about the 2012 Take Twelve Project that we've created a brand new team to inspire, guide, and encourage you all year long! In addition to the 2012 Ella Friends, check out this amazing team of scrapbookers:

 

You'll see their Take Twelve pages featured frequently here on The Daily Trumpet and you'll want to bookmark their blogs to visit regularly. They hail from around the world—the U.S., Canada, Sweden, China (by way of the U.S.), and Australia. They are super-excited and ready to go for the first round of Take Twelve picture-taking tomorrow! Recognize any familiar faces? They are, from left to right:

Aliza Deutsch
Amy Prior
Angela Gutshall
Jennie McGarvey
Lisa Ottosson
Stephanie Medley-Rath
Van Nguyen
Margie Scarpignato
Valerie Bishop
Monica Bradford
Lisa Day
Janette Kincaid

Take a minute to say hello! And don't worry, there's still plenty of time to join in the fun. Check out our Take Twelve Guided Inpsiration Kit today.

The week after Christmas is always a tiny bit complicated for me; on one hand, that amazing sense of anticipation that behaves much the same way as adrenaline is over for another year, leaving me happy but a little—OK, a lot—worn out.

 

But on the other hand, I start to think about projects. Oh, I love projects. While so many people are busy writing New Year’s Resolutions, I’m scheming about my next project for the upcoming year. You already know you’re in luck because Ella Publishing Co. has designed an amazing project for you to participate over the course of 2012 and beyond! Today I want to share just one more thing I love about the 2012 Take Twelve photography and scrapbooking challenge.

 

I’ve told this story so many times I feel like a broken record sometimes, but it’s so important to me that I want to be sure every creative person hears it!

 

Once upon a time a scrapbooker named Shelby Valadez changed my life—I’ve told her this before and I’m not entirely sure she believed me, but it’s true. I was oohing and ahhing (but not yet scrapbooking) on twopeasinabucket.com one day about ten years ago when I stumbled across a challenge group she hosted called Art Inspiration.

 

I watched every week for a few months as people would post a completed layout based on some piece of artwork she would email them. The cycle was so perfect: the email would be sent, a few days would pass, the completed project would appear. I worked up my nerve to ask if I could join the group and was super excited to receive my first inspiration email. I could do this! And guess what? I did. I was hooked.

 

Week after week, challenge after challenge: I eagerly anticipated the excitement of seeing what was in store for the upcoming week. I participated until the Art Inspiration challenge closed its doors, but I’ve maintained my affinity for challenges to this day. Here’s what I love about them:

 

Challenges hold you accountable: especially when you’re part of a group. Check out my post from last week to read more about accountability!

 

Challenges help you narrow your focus: it is so easy to become helplessly overwhelmed by ideas that have no parameters, because you can add and tweak and add some more until you’ve created a beast that cannot be tamed. A challenge usually has a simple boundary—no more, no less. Simple.

 

Finally, challenges are fun: there’s no pressure, only an invitation to get your creative wheels turning.

Check out what 144 distinct memories look like all together from the first year I played along in a “12 on 12” photo challenge. I blogged about my photos every month and scrapbooked them later. This year I’ll scrapbook my twelve photos each month in real time!

 

Now of course the Take Twelve photography challenge will operate a little differently than the Art Inspiration challenge did, but you can count on receiving the same “challenge benefits.” By participating in the challenge you’ll receive reminders to take your monthly photographs, scrapbook layout ideas from Ella Friends, and even opportunities to win giveaways for linking your own layouts for all to see each month!

 

There is nothing quite so sweet as accepting a challenge and succeeding. On behalf of everyone at Ella Publishing Co., we’d like to issue that challenge again today—what do you say?

Good morning!

 

I’m excited to bring you a series of blog posts about the 2012 Take Twelve Project over the next few weeks—to get you as excited as I am about this upcoming photography project!

 

 

Our Guided Inspiration Kit is chock-full of ideas and tools to keep you motivated throughout the project, and you can read about it here if you haven’t already purchased it. Today, however, let's chat about the concept of accountability as it relates to Take Twelve. I know, I know, scrapbooking is supposed to be fun, so what’s with the serious word? Just hear me out, though.

 

Accountability is a concept we learn early in our lives. We’re expected to follow the rules and be held accountable for the consequences if we don’t. We’re expected to learn a thousand and one things throughout our school years and be held accountable for the evidence of that knowledge. And we’re held accountable for behavior, decisions, and responsibilities every minute of our grown-up days, whether we like it or not.

 

In scrapbooking, though, accountability is less about rules and consequences and more about sheer FUN and EXCITEMENT—the choice to be accountable to a hobby that makes us happy. It implies that we’re in it together, setting ourselves up for success with our creative friends cheering us along every step of the way.

 

Here’s the thing: we humans are more likely to achieve great things when there’s cheering. And camaraderie. And chocolate. But I digress.

 

I entered a few words at wordle.net that came to mind when I thought about the Take Twelve Project, and I love the visual reminder that resulted!

 

Is it possible to embark on this project alone and see it through successfully? Absolutely. But memory-keeping is more fun when shared with friends and family; the excitement we feel when we create is powerful stuff, and the anticipation we feel before we share is powerful, too.

 

 

We here at Ella Publishing Co. want you to have a super-fun time participating in the Take Twelve Project, and we whole-heartedly urge you to grab a friend (or a group of friends) near or far and participate in the Take Twelve Project together!

 

This week I had the opportunity to hear from Christine Bastian, a relatively new digital scrapbooker with a daughter who lives in Europe. I was moved by her excitement about the 2012 Take Twelve Project:

 

When I learned about the Take Twelve Project I immediately thought how much fun this would be to do together with Lydia, my daughter. She looking for a new hobby and of course she has a great subject, her baby boy, but I told her that the Take Twelve project was not going to be 12 months of baby pictures. That would be just a baby scrapbook. The Take Twelve is supposed to be about her. Her inspiration, creativity, dreams etc. Because besides being a mom she is still that wonderful creative person and I wanted her to remember that. ;-)

 

Because she is starting with digital scrapbooking/art I thought this would be an excellent opportunity to do this together. We could help each other, I can help her with translations if needed. Sometimes technical stuff is more difficult to understand in a foreign language. And she and I could connect on another level. She is very much looking forward to it and so am I. I think it will be doable for her even though she has a busy life, it's much more manageable than a 365 project… I'm a true believer in scrapping also the small stuff, the real life stuff and of course journaling with that all.

 

The support and excitement that Christine and Lydia will share over the course of the Take Twelve Project is what scrapbooking accountability is all about.

 

We’ll provide the inspiration, you provide the chocolate, and we hope you’ll be clicking away on January 12!
 

For an upcoming Scrapbook Ellaments article by yours truly (co-author of the upcoming March eBook!), we're soliciting layouts from readers like you to put in the spotlight! Every designer who's chosen will receive a coupon code for a free eBook.

The article topic: Everyday Life Scrapbooking

Your assignment: Create a Photo-an-Hour Layout

The due date: March 17, St. Patrick's Day!

The details: Pick a day, any day, and take one photo each hour from the hour you get up 'til the hour you go to bed. Turn the photos into a layout! Set a reminder to keep you on task—a post-it note on the mirror, an alarm on your cell phone, the kitchen timer, a little sign for the counter, whatever. Photos can be turned into a single page or double-page layout or a mini-album. Your choice!

Send layouts to: Email a scan or a photograph of your project to submissions@ellapublishing.com with "Photo Every Hour" in the subject line. Size all images to 800 pixels tall. For tips about getting a good photo of your layout, visit our Submissions Page.

Good luck!

One night last summer I was playing my usual Hansel and Gretel game online,you know the one, where you start clicking on an interesting link only to find five more interesting links, plus an amazing portfolio of photography followed by a whole slew of craft tutorials you've always wanted to try. And suddenly you're so far into the internet forest you can't figure out how you arrived at Point Z from Point A. To make matters worse, I had forgotten my bread crumbs. Of course, this is easily solved on the spot by carefully preserving one's browser history, if easy and efficient solutions are your thing, that is. I lean toward the sloppy habit of realizing much later that I can't for the life of me remember where it was that I saw the Most Amazing Idea of All Time.

One way to solve this problem, of course, is to bookmark all the Most Amazing Ideas of All Time in your web browser. Eventually your bookmark list is going to take so long to scroll through, though, that you won't even notice that you can't identify half (90%?) of what you saved in the first place.



Yikes. I'm going to go ahead and admit right here that this is but one of many long, disorganized bookmarks list on my computer. You would be correct in your assumption that my system of bookmarking ideas, sites, recipes, tutorials, pages, etc. was broken.

This particular summer night took a different turn, however, and I somehow ended up on the blog of a complete stranger named Rachel Cox (how I arrived there I'll never know) and read a post that began with four life-changing words: "Have you guys Tumbled?" Well, I'd definitely tumbled both down and up stairs (once in middle school, most recently in 2008 in my house in Virginia) but I didn't know another usage for the word. Interest piqued, I read on to find that it (Tumblr) was a place to store images you fall in love with online, and it's great for making sure you cite your sources because it saves URLs as part of the post.

The angels sang for me at that moment.

Let me be clear: I have never lacked for a place to store images and ideas I fall in love with. I have binders filled to the brim with page-protected tear sheets from magazines, sketchbooks, post-it-notes, scribbled lists, mysterious websites and business cards from stores I don't remember visiting... all with the intention of doing something with them eventually. And, sometimes I do. But my ratio of action vs. inaction is rather embarrassing if you count the sheer volume of things I save (evidenced by my bookmarks lists). So discovering a service that provides a visual archive of good ideas and images from the internet? Intriguing.

It's March now, and I actively contribute to three Tumblrs,and feel like I've been more productive and more creative tin the last seven months than I've been in a long, long time. I maintain my own Tumblr where I virtually stash all sorts of random things, a Tumblr with my sisters who live far away (but feel much closer when we share our exciting finds with each other), and a Tumblr through Write. Click. Scrapbook. filled with all sorts of things of interest to scrapbookers. There is something about the format that just clicks for me; it's the same mysterious phenomena that allows me to write regularly on my blog  even though I could never seem to get motivated to put pen to paper in any number of beautiful blank journals in my possession.



Though there are many ways to utilize this free service, I always try to post a photo of the idea I want to save so I can easily find it when I look at the archive screen. It's easy to tag entries, too, so if you're looking for a particular item or craft (i.e. I save lots of images and information about mobiles then tag them for easy reference later) you can do that quickly and effortlessly. Clicking on an image returns you to the original source, whether it's on a blog or some other website.

Three Ways Tumblr Has Made Me More Creative and More Productive

1. Because I am saving items that appealed to me on some level,color, design, content, or whatever,I am far more likely to want to use those items as inspiration, and can do so far more quickly since I don't have to go digging through binder after binder, or worse, through stacks of folded up paper stuffed inside my address book, to find what I was looking for.



Angie and Wendy came to Wyoming for a visit last fall, and we had a great time scrapbooking together. We challenged each other to make layouts on a budget, with a time limit, and based on a theme; a quick scan through my Tumblr archives reminded me of a layout idea I really wanted to try. I love the challenge of turning one good idea into something entirely different and personal to me, and even more so when it takes a half an hour from beginning to end as this page did.

2. I feel like I'm much better at seeing patterns and interpreting them for myself. Though I don't exactly consider myself to be an up-to-the-minute trend-watcher, I do enjoy seeing how a trend I especially love bursts onto the stage and manifests itself among diverse groups of creative people. Take banners, for instance:



Using pennant banners isn't really a new trend,car salesmen have been utilizing this decoration on their car lots for decades,but somehow, it exploded onto the scrapbooking and craft world scene. Suddenly, pennant banners are everywhere. I might look back one day and shake my head at my overuse of this trend, but for now? I'm simply excited to have my finger on the pulse of a trend I absolutely love.




3. I've rediscovered my love of creative efficiency, and have become increasingly better at it because I've been practicing more. Years ago, I faithfully scrapbooked pages inspired by the sketches Becky Higgins created in Creating Keepsakes magazine each month; these remain some of my favorite pages that I've ever made. Somewhere along the line, I stopped saving sketches, though,both hers and, later, my own. I've been paying far more attention to design principles in the last year, however, and Tumblr has motivated me to pick up this old habit once again.







Both the page and the card were inspired by this work I saw at L Palese; I already have two more ideas of how to utilize this basic design into something else entirely. Because I've made it a point to frequently look at my Tumblr images, they stick around in my head longer; this makes it more likely that I'll think up multiple ways to adapt them.

A word of caution, however: inspiration gathering, like eating chocolate, is exhilarating but can ultimately be overdone. An internet friend of mine, Missy Kemp, posted a poignant essay on her blog earlier this year about her quest for the perfect roast chicken recipe despite the fact that she already had a favorite, much beloved at her family's dinner table. The excitement of the search for something better, something more creative, or something else was actually paralyzing her productivity. The goal isn't to collect as many ideas as possible, but to collect ideas that can be internalized and acted upon in a completely unique manner; ideas that help us tell our stories and express our creativity, not ideas that simply collect dust or waste our time.

So with this gentle warning in mind,that idea-collecting isn't all about the quest for more and better, but rather inspiration and action,I've developed a system that is working for me. Will I act on every single thing I save to my visual bulletin board at Tumblr? Of course not. But I am tapping into the very best features for me, and I can honestly say I haven't been so excited to make things in a long time. Why not give it a try and see how it works for you, too?

You can set up your own Tumblr by visiting www.tumblr.com and signing up for a free account in just minutes. Customize your Tumblr homepage or use the default settings,either way you'll be up and running in no time at all. Be sure to check out the 'goodies' section, including the bookmarklet that allows for faster posting from within a website without shuffling back to the main Tumblr dashboard.