Inspiration Elevator- First Year COMPLETE! *giveaway*

From the IE Group:

Welcome to another Inspiration Elevator reveal! We are thrilled to celebrate the end of our first year of Inspiration Elevator challenges and are anticipating that the second year will see that creative growth continue to go UP! To celebrate our first anniversary and our fabulous designers, Christa and Ann decided to challenge our designers to take an in-depth look at a fellow designer's artistic portfolio via her blog, choose elements from that designers creations,and incorporate them into her own work. In other words, we are encouraging a scrapLIFT! Rather than a mere copy of someone else’s work, this is a stylistic scraplift that should inspire each designer to grow creatively as she is inspired, yet remain true to her own style.

As the second year of this creative journey begins, and as the popularity of Inspiration Elevator increases, we have created a new blog for our Inspiration Elevator Challenges. So, if you want to play along you can find the challenges and links to the inspiration all in one place! To celebrate our first year, our hopping will incorporate RAKs along the way – how exciting! Now, before you go hopping along, we want to let you know of a few personnel changes.

While, we are so excited to welcome back most of our original design team members for year two, we are saddened to be saying goodbye to Audrey Yeager. Audrey has creatively embraced every challenge over the past year, and has been a super part of our design team over the past 12 months. We hope your will continue to stop by her blog and see her gorgeous creations. Thank you Audrey for sharing our journey – we are grateful for you!

Audrey here.  I just wanted to say that I LOVE where IE has taken me this last year!  It was such a pleasure to work with everyone in this group and to grow and support each other as "artists".  I have loved watching everyone evolve over the year and had so much fun tackling these challenges!

We are very pleased to announce a new member to our design team. Join us as we welcome Jodi Wilton. Jodi's design style is happy and whimsical and we are looking forward to sharing this new year of growth with her and seeing how her creative muse is tickled by our challenges.

We mentioned RAKs or giveaways at each designer’s blog this month,since we’re celebrating our first year. Please read each designer’s instructions regarding the giveaway as they will vary. We will post a final list of winners on April 24^th on the Inspiration Elevator blog, so be sure to pop back, and if you create something based on this month’s challenge, please link it up on the blog!

I got to lift: Lisa Spiegel

I have known Lisa for quite some time in the scrappy world, but I can honestly say I don't remember where or when we "met"!  I'm sure it was a long time ago on some club team or message board!

I loved looking through Lisa's blog at her recent work.  Actually, I scrolled through her blog all the way back to just a little over a year ago.  One thing I noticed is that her scrapping has become some much more detailed and she has added a lot more layers to her pages!  Just going through the first couple of recent pages on her blog, I found these layouts that caught my eye:

Do you notice a pattern?  :)  What caught my eye was the doilies on each page.  With 3 girls, I am sure she loves "girly" things!  Also, the basic design of these pages is a large, single photo with layers of papers and embellies, and then a smaller cluster off to the side somewhere on the edge of the page.  Three out of four of these pages have butterflies and they all have flowers.

So instead of lifting a particular layout of Lisa's, I lifted her style and came up with this:

I started by pulling out a doily and then fussy cutting the bright pink flowers.I dug through some old Scrapbook Circle kits and pulled out some aqua, beige, and pink elements to work with.

I just started layering papers and embellishment with my photo, working with the flowers and doilies, too.  I stuck with one main cluster of layering around my photo, like Lisa does, and then added an "off the page" element on the lower left corner.

To add some "me" to this page, I used a stencil with some Art Anthology paint and also splattered some white paint as well.  I noticed that Lisa also outlines her layouts a lot, or frames them with another piece of paper, so I stitched a black frame around the outside with my machine.

Then I needed to find a butterfly for my page and this one from the Crate Paper Maggie Holmes die cuts was perfect!  The black in it really drew out the black in my photo.  Then the black title creates a visual triangle.  Voila!

I really really loved this challenge!  I can't tell you how quickly this page came together, and I loved getting in touch with my girly side and using doilies and butterflies!  Thank you LISA for the inspiration!

*GIVEAWAY*

Now, for my blog hop PRIZE, I will choose one random FOLLOWER who comments on this post.  In addition, you must also follow the new Inspiration Elevator blog and leave a comment there, too.  Up for grabs is this hod podge of duplicate scrappy stuff that I have!  It kinda makes a nice kit!

Winner will be announced April 22 here and on the IE blog.

Stop by and see what the designers on this adventure have created:

Christa Uttley

Laura Whitaker

Audrey Yeager

Lisa Moen

Laurel Seabrook

Ann Jobes

Cathy Harper

Sue Sykes

Lisa Spiegel

Joanne Burton

Jodi Wilton

Inspiration Elevator