Hi there! August is here and the time is right for… The 50th instalment of Inspired by!!!

I guess you know the story by now: Inspired by is a blog series by my friend Riikka and I. We decide on a theme (and that theme can be anything from a film, a book, a painting, to an item, colour scheme or material) and then we create something with that theme or thing in mind.

We keep what we’re making a secret until reveal day on the 10th, when we show you and each other our creations.

50+ projects and counting

We started this project in juli 2012 and I am still so grateful that we did! Without it I would not have created these projects:

Many of these are still all time favourites!

I actually did more than 50 projects. Sometimes I’m not happy with a result and I do another take on it. Other times I am really happy and so inspired that I just can’t stop creating.

I’ve learned so much whilst doing Inspired by. I watched films I never would have watched, read books I never would have picked, I learned about new-to-me musicians and artists and I tried out so many things I wouldn’t have tried. I even sewed a couple of times!

This series is my playground and I love that we’ve managed to keep it up for so long!

This month’s theme

For this month, we decided to go back and revisit one of our earlier themes. But because just choosing one was way to hard, we decided to each pick one at random.

The first number I got was 4. Inspired by no. 4 was a theme where Riikka had sent me an inspirational package to work with. It would not be impossible to revisit this theme, but I decided to give the Random Number Generator another go. It then gave me this:

Inspired by no. 21 coincidentally also involved an inspirational package, but this time I had sent it to Riikka and the package had a theme… Paris! And because Paris is a reoccurring theme that goes back to the very beginning, I found it a rather fitting choice.

I immediately knew I would not go back to Inspired by no. 21. I didn’t have to, because I visited Paris again this Spring and… I had all this photo and video footage that I hadn’t edited yet. So I was thinking a long the lines of scrapbooking, making a video or a photo book.

The reason I now have no video to show you is that I dropped my external hard drive last week… and it has unfortunately stopped working. I did not have the raw footage anywhere else… Consider this your cue: please back up your files!

This is such a bummer for me, but I don’t think anything super precious is lost, so… Let’s move on!

My photos live on another drive, so I’m happy to report that I still have all the photos I took!

I started to work on a (digital) photo book. I completed and sent it in this weekend. Which means that it will not be here in time for me to show you in this Inspired by post. It isn’t that special anyway, though I do intend to handwrite my journaling in the printed book and I might add some bits and bobs to make it more personal.

No harm done, because whilst I was editing and sorting photos, I remembered of all the AMAZING art I had seen during the trip.

I spent a looooong time at Centre Pompidou. One of the exhibits I saw there was Paul Klee – “L’ironie à l’oeuvre”. I could not believe my luck and I was so excited to see his work in real life. There was so much of it on display too!

I wanted to create something with the art inspiration I got at Centre Pompidou and… I was dead set on using some of the supplies I took home from this trip. Because the reason why I was in Paris, was that I accompanied my friend Birgit, who taught workshops at the Version Scrap fair.

At the fair I met the sweet ladies from 13 Arts and Aida gave me a zip-lock bag full of 13 Arts products to try. Of course I’ve already used some of them on projects here and there, but I haven’t had the chance to really explore them and use them all together on one project. So that’s what I wanted to do!

And this is what I ended up with:

The metallic paint and glitter is hard to capture on photo:

Conclusion
This was fun! Exploring products, using limited supplies, exploring the work of one particular artist, documenting memories in the process. I got all I could wish for!

Now… This has become a very long post and I’m sure you are as curious as I am to see which theme Riikka picked and what she created with that theme in mind! Don’t let me keep you any longer! Visit her blog here: Paperiliitin.