A fun way for me to prompt creative ideas is to challenge myself to make projects using a limited amount of supplies. Painting a background page with a limited color palette or using one rubber stamp in a variety of applications are a couple of ways I challenge myself creatively.
One of my favorite project challenges is what I call my ‘harvest technique’. I toss an assortment of collage clips and papers in a cigar box and use only those items to make cards or to collage a journal page.
If you do not already do so, start gathering small colorful and not so colorful bits of paper in a small box. You can collect candy wrappers, tea bags, junk mail envelopes, cancelled postage, images and verbiage torn from catalogs or magazines, seed packages, soap wrappers, scraps of ribbon or fabric… It is good to use a small box so that the selection is kept limited and not overwhelming.
Start your project when you have a few items collected. You can add rubber stamping, ink, or paint to enhance your design. The cards shown here are made from various odds and ends that I ‘harvested’ from my cigar box and combined with rubber stamping. I especially like these little projects because they give me ideas for making larger ones.
There is no right or wrong way for you to lay out your items. Go with what looks good to you and as I always say, enjoy the process. Allow your mind to ‘rest’ in the process rather than only looking ahead to an end result.
Let me know in the comments what you found to include in your collection.