A lot of my friends joke about it, but I have to admit that it’s true. I  love being on design teams and often, I end up working for a quite a few of them at a time. I get a lot of questions ranging from how I manage the work load to how/why I decided to join a design team. I have told the story before but as these questions come up repeatedly, I thought that perhaps it was time to share it all in one spot. Just like that, the idea for a new series of articles was born.

There is a lot to cover and it’s going to take time for me to get it all down. I have been brainstorming and writing notes about what to share with you and trying to figure out the best order.(I am not sure there is a right order.) I also felt that this series was a pertinent place to discuss my plans for the My Scrapbook Evolution Website. After all, many design teams like to see active blogs. I will be sharing how I am working on developing the website as I learn new things. And yes,  I am always getting myself into new things. Many of my endeavors have started out with me jumping in feet first and then learning to tread water along the way. I am not perfect. I am not an expert. What I am is a person with a desire to learn new things and that includes website design. I hope that, as I share this series from you, you will get to know me a little better as well as being able to learn from my mishaps along the way.

So now that you have a basic idea of what this series is about, let’s get started. The best place is always the beginning. When I started scrapbooking, the concept of a design team was never on the radar. In fact, I don’t even know if they had design teams in 2001. I began just shy of my son’s 1st birthday. A friend asked me to attend her Creative Memories party. I was skeptical but I went. I have tried a lot of crafts over the years: embroidery, painting, ceramics, beadwork, etc. None ever resonated enough with me to stick for very long. Scrapbooking was different. It had a purpose I could embrace. I could share the story of my son’s life and house the multitude of photos that I was taking of him in a creative way.

Even back then, I was experimenting with hybrid designs. There wasn’t a ton of  unique scrapbooking supplies available and we didn’t have a lot of money for supplies anyway. I used greeting card programs to create titles for my albums, like the page shown above.Sometimes, I found patterns on the web that I could print and use just like patterned paper. I felt I wanted something more but I also felt pretty content to just cut paper and place photos on the page. I had no clue about design aesthetics nor was I interested in finding out. I simply wanted everything to be acid free and a two page layout.

Fast forward to 2010. Scrapbooking changed a lot for me when I joined the Club Creating Keepsakes community. There were games and challenges. I learned about sketches and found that I now had a desire to improve the way I created my pages. I also wanted to share my work. I founded a blog with the sole reason of posting pages to scrapbook challenge sites. My posts were short and to the point. I hadn’t yet found my voice and mostly, I talked about each of the pages I made. This layout about my cat is  the very first ever page that I posted on my blog.

It was from one of these scrapbook challenges through which I got my very first taste of being on a design team. I won a guest spot at Scrap Your Stash Challenge. Shortly after, I was asked to join the team. I loved it! I wanted to join other teams and so, I began putting a bit more work into my blog and layouts. It was fun to share and quite honestly, for a girl on a budget, it was awesome to win stuff!

As with anything, not all of my endeavors were successful. I have had lots of rejections but I learned to pick myself up and move on. The funny thing is that I have a favorite rejection. Yep, you read that right. I had just joined Masterful Scrapbook Design at Get It Scrapped. Masterful Scrapbook Design was brand new back then and Debbie Hodge was considering putting a team together. I emailed her and she gently told me no in such a way that it encouraged me to keep trying to improve my skills. Quite honestly, I wasn’t ready back then,at least not for a team in which design and curating a story with thoughtful intent were concerned. I pushed myself to learn more about design and when Debbie decided to put a team together a few years ago, she accepted my application to join. You know I was thrilled! It was a huge achievement for me but it also had a result I wasn’t expecting. Working on Get It Scrapped team helped my work to improve even more. I learned more about myself and my own style, becoming more confident and prolific with my work.

So where does that leave me now? I am happily working away on several design teams. I know that, in many cases, a term will end and it will be time for me to move forward. You can believe that I will continue to apply to new teams when that happens. I will make some and I won’t make others.   The biggest takeaway that I can give you right now is sort of a cliche. You never know until you try. Take that first step.

Rejection is going to happen and sometimes, the team you are applying to has so many applications on their hands that they won’t even be able to tell you why you didn’t make it. That’s ok. Take a look at what your are doing both with your work and with your blog. Have you found your written voice? Do you have a direction in which you want your blog to go? What exactly do you want to share and why?

Speaking of direction, let me leave you with a few ideas of article topics I will be sharing in the Memoirs of a Design Team Addict Series. Please feel free to email me with any questions or suggestions. I would love to know what you are interested in regarding maintaining a blog/website and being part of a creative team.

Upcoming Topics Include: Documenting your supplies, My thoughts About Affiliate Links, Scheduling Posts,How to Find the Calls, Handling the Workload and Finding Time to Handle Social Media. These are just a few and I can’t attest to which order you might see them in. You’ll find out why that is when I talk more about scheduling posts.

Meanwhile, here are a few resources you can check out:

the MSE Blog Post Planning Pinterest Board: I have started pinning useful articles to help me improve my posts and the design of the website overall.

I shared my metamorphosis as a Get It Scrapped design team member as well as thoughts regarding my design team addiction in an article at RuKristin.com.