To imitate or innovate?

I have to admit that most of the time I imitate rather than innovate when it comes to craft projects. I think that in part this stems from a little bit of performance anxiety combined with 'project envy' and a more general lack of inspiration from within. Sometimes I have days when I am well and truly inspired, but I spend many others sifting through back issues of Scrapbook Inspirations and Creating Keepsakes looking for layout ideas and sketches. More often than not I try to adapt ideas that I particularly like so that the end result bears my own little stamp of creativity, but I would love to channel my inner creative flair so that I can create some of the innovative and amazingly original ideas that appear every month in these magazines (and others). I say this because for Halloween this year I have decided to make my own decorations, and after browsing the internet for a good many hours I have found four projects which I really want to recreate. So, although I did the cutting and the sticking, the credit for these projects definitely lies elsewhere!

This Halloween frame was inspired by Carole Janson over at the Bo Bunny Blog. Ironically I can't find the original post, but you can view Carole's own Halloween frame here. It is made almost entirely out of the super cute Bo Bunny Boo Crew collection (Stripe, Here's Looking at U, Ghoul Friends, Dot and Boo Crew) which I bought online from Crafts U Love. The fence, cat, bats, 'Booooo' writing and spiders/spider's web stickers are by Stampendous, which I bought locally along with the googly eyes. I used some 3D foam pads to give the montage along the bottom of the frame a little bit of dimension, and I distressed some of the grass with a black ink pad to make it pop.

I was also so excited to receive a great big pizza box of new stash from the Craft Emporium and an EK Success punch from Art Cards which I have been coveting for the last few months. I have banned myself from buying patterned paper for the foreseeable future, but I did get the Pink Paislee Twilight collection and the Spooky Town collection by Imaginisce for my next three Halloween projects. The Prima flowers and clear stamps in the bottom left hand corner are also for a Halloween project, this time for one that was featured in the October issue of Scrapbook Inspirations by Morag Cutts (which you can find here). I absolutely LOVE the 'Spooky House' and particularly the embossed chandeliers with the bling embellishments - gorgeous!

Happy Friday!