Julie Ann Shahin's Inspiration For Generation C

Layout is for the Squares Challenge at Scrapbookeronline.com

I am in a different place this year than last year when the CK Hall of Fame contest was announced. I was starting my second year of scrapbooking then. I didn't tell anyone other than my closest scrapping friends at SBO that I was entering. I didn't even make up my mind to enter and start my entries until three weeks before the deadline, months and months after the rules were announced. I entered knowing I would not win, but that maybe my name might start to get recognized. To date, three out of ten layouts for that contest have now been published.

This year, I knew before the rules were announced that I'd try again. Getting some of my entry published not by Creating Keepsakes but by other magazines has definitely increased my confidence. I am, obviously, no longer shy to say that I am entering again. And I am going to start my entry now. Today I looked over each of the assignments very carefully at the CK website, downloaded the entry form, and looked over their online tips.

Assignment A: Inventive technique Create a layout that showcases an original, innovative technique. Near to the layout, explain in a step-by-step format how you performed the technique.

(This is a required assignment.) Share a technique you’ve come up with—a new way to adhere items, a trick with paint or ribbon, maybe a unique way to embellish flower accents. Write it up in a series of steps so someone else could read your instructions and duplicate your technique. Source: CK Website

I am not the best at coming up with my own techniques. I have lately though been studying different techniques that have been published. I'm definitely not a stranger to writing "how-to instructions." So I can do this. I just have to get my "clever cap" on. :)

There has been discussion on message boards about whether there are truly any "original" ideas/ techniques left anymore. The answer is no. I've heard that you have to see something in order to imagine it.

I found a discussion about this question "Can we imagine something new that is completely different?" at quite the appropriate place: a science fiction message board. The OP asks, "Can we imagine something new which is completely different from our previous knowledge?" They also discuss whether one can describe a color? A member named Absane sounds quite logical in his argument that nothing is new: "As far as I know, everything in reality can be represented in some fashion by mathematics... and as we all know, mathematics is a system setup by a short list of simple rules, called axioms. We just build the complexity off these rules....Can we form new axioms? Sure... but in all likelyhood these new axioms are just generalizations of other axioms or that these new axioms were just previously unknown, but there." Member Satyr sounds quite wise contributing:

Uniqueness is one of those myths we like to believe in.
There is never anything completely new.
There are new, unique combinations of what is old and known already.
We can trace back ideas and inventions to previous ideas and inventions.
The sense of newness comes when enough re-combinations of older things have occurred and we can look back far enough into the past where what is and what was are so different that they appear alien to one another.
In truth they are no so different.
The new contains the old within it.

Truthseeker supports this by saying "Knowledge is the essence of imagination." Of course, I've posted here quotes that support my own belief, although no one in that thread of discussion disagreed with these posters either.

Tomorrow: thoughts about Assignment B