I’ve mentioned before that I’ve been working on digital scrapbook pages again. That’s still true, and–based on my experience as a part of the Gauche Alchemy team (which I will be continuing for the foreseeable future, I love working with them!)–have been wanting to find a spot on a digital design/creative team. This means I’ve been submitting applications and had to put up a gallery of my pages so the team leaders could take a look at my work.

That last part had proved the biggest pain  in my ass. I’ve tried numerous plugins only to have one not allow multiple galleries on a single page, another that I tried had a nasty habit of hijacking ANY images I uploaded to this blog the next time I’d go to upload a layout (so if you ever came here and saw a lot of broken image links over the last month, that was why), meaning I had to re-upload and remap each and every picture in the affected posts. And y’all know how many pictures some of my posts use. So I kept looking for a better plugin. A better addition to this blog.

Turns out, WordPress has a native gallery feature that does pretty much what I need without bloating the install with any more plugins. I just didn’t know it.

Sure, I had to do some minor code tweaks to get everything the way I wanted it, but I’ve become good at reverse engineering WP themes, so it wasn’t the end of the world. And I still have to re-upload, tag, and credit a couple dozen layouts before it’s all said and done, but that’s minor.

In the end, I will have just the gallery that I want without having someone else’s programming to deal with, update, or rely on.

Now, what does this have to do with the price of tea in China? Or our day-to-day creative spirit?

How many times have you put off that fun idea because you didn’t have just the right type of paper/fabric/bead? How much money have you spent on specialty tools when the basic ones, with a little ingenuity would have done fine? How many times do we get hung up on the what and forget the why?

If you’re anything like me–and I’ll bet we have a lot in common–you’re nodding your head to those questions. You’ve been there. We all have.

Living creatively isn’t just about following a set of directions to make the same crafts and tchotchkes that everyone else has. It’s about taking an idea and running with it in our own direction. Sure, sometimes you want to do exactly what they did, because you like their end result, but we always put our own mark on our projects because we’re human beings, not crafting robots.

So have some fun with it–whether that IT is a craft project, a meal, or just getting from point A to point B.

And don’t get hung up on the details.

(Except when the details are important, of course. Things like your safety, meeting obligations, and stuff like that are details totally worth getting hung up on!)

Now, if any of you have been curious about digital scrapbooking and wanting to try your hands at it, I’ve put together a little mini-kit perfect for October that I’m going to share with you: for free!

I actually started this kit a few years ago, and I used it to make the invitations for that year’s BYOP party (which was the year of the Halloween brunch, hence the fruit images), but never got around to finishing it or sharing it. Now that it’s done, it’ll be available for download until October 31st or 500 downloads, whichever comes first. (And if, by some strange luck, we hit those 500 downloads really early in the month, I’ll put up a secondary link.)

The mini-kit includes 6 papers, 4 fruit images, 2 tags, a piece of organza-style ribbon, and a twine bow. All images are 300 dpi, the papers are jpeg files and the embellishments are png files with transparent backgrounds. Drop-shadows are on the previews, only. Enjoy!

[button link=”https://www.yousendit.com/directDownload?phi_action=app/directDownload&fl=SWhZekZqY1NvQnMxZW9LSFJsRHVnVE9yZWt5UmdteDRsUjJuWENHRzVZbz0&experience=bas” color=”#b00″ size=”3″ style=”3″ dark=”1″ square=”1″ ] Download [/button]