#166 - be inspired by Paris

Inspired by my wonderful online friend Clair, I set up a spreadsheet to monitor which prompts I've completed here at Whimsical Musings - it shows that I need to do better! However, I was shocked to see that I hadn't actually made a layout specifically for my WM#166 - be inspired by Paris. How is that possible? It's one of my favourite cities in the world and I have a gazillion photos from many, many trips. Time to fix that.

This is another layout that was also made for my Simple Scrapper Creative Team assignments using a new sketch as well as a recent Story Starter™. Simple Scrapper offers a premium subscription membership where you can find hundreds of sketches and Story Starters™ as well as many further resources inspiring you to create beautiful pages and tell meaningful stories in a supportive, communicative community environment. You can find out more information here.

My sweet friend Kathy told me she was headed across the ocean to visit Paris for the first time and should we meet up? I don't have to be asked twice to go to Paris so I headed over by train and we had a fun four days together. As she'd done a lot of the big ticket sights before I met up with her, I tried to come up with a good mix of some "not to be missed" places such as the Musée de L'Orangerie where we sat in awe of the Monet water lily pond paintings, my favourite place to eat whenever I'm in Paris (Bofinger) and wandering around, just taking in the atmosphere!

On our last morning together, we decided to head inside the Opéra and I was thrilled to find that she was more than impressed with this incredible building. I have a bunch of beautiful photos from this short trip but I knew that these deserved immediate attention.

This time around, I needed to use a current sketch with an older Story Starter™ so I went with the sketch that had multiple photos and tracked down a topic that spoke to me - in this case it was a time that I was speechless. I interpreted that as being speechless from the beauty of a place and the Opéra was the first place that came to mind!

Again, I sat and wrote out the story I wanted to tell before I looked for photos. The original sketch was 8 1/2 x 11 so I stretched it out to 12x12 which gave me a lot more spaces on my grid for both photos and journalling. Using a very recent Carta Bella travel themed purchase made this page come together so quickly and the design needed just a hint of embellishing - I was delighted to find a space to use the 3x4 Eiffel Tower card.

I loved the strip down the left hand side on the sketch which I adapted into a pastel sequin filled pocket underneath one of my favourite pieces of paper of all time - the star printed vellum from Studio Calico. I bought all the sheets I could get my hands on at the time and my supply is slowly reducing :-(. I use every single scrap of it and wish so much that I had a whole pack of them - it's a perfect design for so many pages.

As always, I love it when you share too and if you've been inspired to create, don't forget that you can add your own creations to our Facebook group here. Please don't be shy! Tag your entry with #WMXX so we know exactly which inspiration you've taken. 

Or simply tell us in the comments where to find you... :-)

** This post includes promotion for Simple Scrapper's premium subscription membership for which I am on the Creative Team.