Where Shall We Store Inspiration?

There is no reason why you should be bored when you can be otherwise. But if you find yourself sitting in the hedgerow with nothing but weeds, there is no reason for shutting your eyes and seeing nothing, instead of finding what beauty you may in the weeds. To put it cynically, life is too short to waste it in drawing blanks. Therefore, it is up to you to find as many pictures to put on your blank pages as possible.

--Emily Post

Greetings again, my dear readers! Miss Emily here another day. Yesterday we discussed scraplifting etiquette, and a few of you commented that sometimes we don't realize we may be lifting another's idea because we see SO VERY MUCH inspiration all around. I whole heartedly agree with that statement.

I used to pull things off the web and store them on my computer, ads for design inspiration, color combos, art pieces, photos that spoke to me. I kept them in a folder called "Inspiration." But I didn't have a way to properly site the source. Then my friend Elizabeth directed me to tumblr.com. It's quick and easy to set up an account, all you need is an email address, password, and a name for your account. You may customize it, lots of backgrounds and display options are available.

Tumblr is a virtual bulletin board of sorts. Think of it as your online notebook of inspiration, just like the one you paste, staple, or sketch those ripped out magazine pages, color swatches, and design ideas into. Now instead of saving an inspiration piece to my desktop folder, I can now click on the copy the image location, load it to my tumblr account, then add a click through link to the original source. This allows me to always be able to cite my inspiration, and that dear friends is rather valuable to me as an artist.

I'll walk you through the basic process of posting an inspiration piece. Once you set up an account and log in, you will be on your dashboard. See in the upper left corner, under the word "tumblr" there's a picture of a filing system and the first letter is E? That's me.

Right next to the picture of "me" there are icons for the various things you can add, those being: text, photo, quote, link, chat, audio, and video. I only utilize the photo and link options, to be honest, I haven't explored further. When I'm out surfing the web for inspiration, say I'm on this site:


and I want to store an image from this post in my tumbler account, say, this photo of the banners:


I would click on that photo and a new screen pops up with just that photo.

I have a Mac so I hit the CONTROL key on my keyboard, and then click on the image. A window pops up like this:

I select "Copy Image Location" (For a PC, thanks to Miss Joy I suggest you RIGHT CLICK on the image, then COPY IMAGE URL) then I go to my tumblr account and click on the "Photo" icon. This window opens up:


From here you can browse your hard drive and load a picture, but the whole reason I use tumblr is so I don't have to keep things on my hard drive. Just below the "Browse" window you can see the words, "Use a URL instead" (it's underlined). I click on that, and this is what shows up:


It's SLIGHTLY different, instead of being able to browse your computer, there's now a spot for you to paste a URL. I'll now paste that URL I copied.


You can then add a caption or description in the appropriate box. Just below that box is another underlined sentence that says, "Set a click-through link." This is how I can link back to my source. I click on that, go back to the source, in this case it is http://simpleblueprint.typepad.com/blog/2010/05/brionesco.html, I copy that and paste it into that space.

Then I hit "Create Post," tumblr saves it and immediately takes me to my dashboard and voila! my post is now there. A dashboard is kind of your behind the scenes, nuts and bolts part of tumblr. If you want the pretty, neat and clean version, look over to the right, just under my name, is my web address: emilygpitts.tumblr.com


If you click on that, you get to my tumblr blog, the pretty version :)


Another fun thing about Tumblr is the "follow" feature. You can follow other inspiration seekers and find even more inspiration. The people I follow are not all scrapbookers, I get inspiration for home decor, stitchery, art posters, photography, sewing projects, bookbinding, and more. Here are some fellow SCers' accounts to check out while you are setting up your own account:

• emilygpitts.tumblr.com
• gluestickgirl.tumblr.com/
• stephaniehowell.tumblr.com/
• davinie.tumblr.com/
• hannalong.tumblr.com/
• moonlightgrrl.tumblr.com/
• kimberlyneddo.tumblr.com/
• jenniferjohner.tumblr.com/
• erinbenaim.tumblr.com/
• vanessameryl.tumblr.com/
• i-am-unique.tumblr.com/
• kristahenson.tumblr.com/
• the-jessica-numbers.tumblr.com/
• kellynoel.tumblr.com/
• joymadison.tumblr.com/
• amyharle.tumblr.com
• for more sites, see this thread
  

Once you start following other people, their posts show up on your dashboard as well and you can reblog them to your personal account. You can "heart" them. If you find something you LOVE that someone reposted from someone they follow, you can go to the original poster and start following them. It's a virtual web of inspiration. It's rather humorous when 5 or 6 people that I follow all post the same thing to their blogs, you can see we all have similar tastes :)

So all this talk about giving credit where it's due, and even more discussion of the scads of inspiration available to us, I suggest you check out Tumblr. The learning curve is rather slight, it's pretty self-explanatory.

Hopefully this post will be of great help to you in figuring it out.

Until tomorrow dear readers,
Miss Emily