Welcome to Creative Adventure #2 of 30, where I share my adventure with the hot app of the moment…Instagram!

This Instagram-themed creative adventure all started when the lovely and talented Kristin over at Sweet Shoppe Designs asked if I’d be willing to make some Instagram-inspired digital scrapbooking templates.

I’ll admit at that point I had used Instagram a few times but I didn’t really get why people were so crazy in love with it. But since I love squares and grids and had seen a lot of really cool scrapbooking layouts featuring Instagram photos, I figured designing some templates for small square photos would be a fun challenge.

So I designed these…

And then these…

But it wasn’t until I was creating a sample layout for the Insta-Love templates that my Instagram creative adventure really began.

You see, I’d designed this template with a crazy number of photos, which I LOVED…

But I was pretty sure the crazy number of photos might scare away the lovely ladies of my Team Awesome Creative Team because well, that’s a whole lot of photos to crop and edit, haha.

So I decided to brush the dust off my scrapbooking skills and create a sample layout for it myself. And because Adam and I been working on spiffying up our rental home (or Operation Home Sweet Home as I like to call it, haha) I thought it’d be fun to walk around with my iPhone and snap a bunch of photos of the progress we’d made so far.

So I put my iPhone into Airplane mode so as not to flood my Instagram feed and went around snapping photos…lots and lots of photos…until I eventually ended up with enough photos for this layout…

And it was in that moment that the I-heart-Instagram lightbulb went off.

You see, I’ve always considered myself a bit of a lazy photo editor.

While I love taking photos and love the look of a well-edited photo, photo editing has never been my favorite part of the digital scrapbooking process. It’s always been more of a means to an awesome looking end which is why I rely heavily on Totally Rad actions and Rad Lab to make the process super easy for me.

So the fact that I could snap a photo, run a fun Totally Rad-esque filter on it and, thanks to the magic of Apple’s iCloud, have the Instagram photo uploaded directly via Photo Stream into Aperture, totally rocked my lazy photo editing & organizing world.

Sure the photos may not be quite as high quality as if I’d taken them all with my DSLR (although the camera in my iPhone 4S is pretty sweet). But a layout that would have normally taken me hours to create after all the uploading, sorting and photo editing I would normally have to do, took maybe an hour thanks to the template and Instagram.

An hour people!

Which is like light-speed in my digi scrapping’ world.

Since that fateful day, my love for Instagram has continued to grow. From a creative standpoint, I love the challenge that comes with composing square photos. It forces me to think outside my rectangular photo taking box and see the world in a different way.  which is exactly what I want to get out of this 30 Creative Adventures project.

But I also love seeing all the everyday bits & pieces of life people are capturing in their Instagram feeds and it’s become one of my favorite ways to share our travels and adventures with family and friends. Being a military family and living 1000s of miles away from family and friends can be a bit lonely at times so I love that thanks to modern day technology, Facebook and a little app like Instagram, I can ask for advice while shopping or share a 17-years-in-the-making accomplishment right in that very moment.

It makes my tech-lovin’ heart happy.

My Top 4 Instagram Tips 

While I definitely consider myself more of an Instagram newbie than a pro, here are a few tips I picked up during my Instagram adventure:

1) If you use an iPhone and want your Instagram photos to be automatically added to your Photo Library and/or your Photo Stream, here’s what you do:

Find the Instagram app settings in the Settings app. on your phone. Set one or both of the Save to Photo Library sliders to On. I have both of mine set to On so that if I take a photo using Instagram, I get both a filtered and non-filtered version of the photo in case I want to use it differently (like on a layout) later.

The cool thing about this is if you use Apple’s Aperture or iPhoto and you enable iCloud, all of the photos from your Photo Stream (including your Instagram photos) will be added automatically into the program. No more fighting with iTunes to get the photos off your phone!

2) If you want to take a bunch of photos at once but don’t want to flood your followers’ feeds with photos, put your phone into Airplane mode before you take your photos with Instagram. The lack of internet will keep the photos from uploading automatically to your Instagram feed (you’ll be able to add your faves later) but they’ll still be saved to your Photo Library and/or Photo Stream as long as you’ve configured your Instagram app settings like I mentioned above.

3) My fave filters are Amaro, Rise, X-pro II & Valencia. I love the vintage look they add to the photos.

4) If you want to add an extra punch to your photos, try pairing Instagram with another iPhone app. Some of my favorites include the iPhone camera app, Camera+, Camera Awesome (because who doesn’t want to awesomenize their photos), TimerCam (for self-portraits) and PicFrame (for photo collages).

And of course, if you’d like to follow me on Instagram, you can find my feed here.

Well that about wraps up Creative Adventure #2! Two down, 28 adventures still to go…ooo boy, this is going to be fun.

What about you? Any other Instagram lovers out there? Anyone else slow to jump on the Instagram bandwagon like I was? Got an awesome Instagram tip of your own? Share your own Instagram adventure in the comments below!

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ABOUT THIS PROJECT

In honor of my 30th birthday, I’m challenging myself to go on 30 creative adventures before I turn 31 on 05.24.2013. This is Creative Adventure 2 of 30. You can read all the details behind this project here and find links to all my completed adventures here.

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Welcome to Creative Adventure Number One of Thirty.

If you missed my intro post about my 30th birthday goal to complete 30 “creative adventures” before I turn 31 next May, you can read all about the details here.

I’ll admit seeing that number 30 kind of scared me at first. I mean, thirty? That’s kind of a lot. But now that I have Creative Adventure #1 under my belt I’m feeling really really excited about this birthday goal. It’s going to be awesome.

Which brings me to my first Creative Adventure…

Creative Adventure #1: Succulents

Now I know what you might be thinking…

Plants? Really??

But these aren’t just any plants. They’re succulents. Which is a whole different creative ballgame in my book.

It all started with this DIY wreath from Prudent Baby I pinned awhile back on Pinterest…

Did you have any idea succulents could have that much variety in color and texture? Because I sure didn’t.

Even though I live in the very desert-y and therefore succulent-friendly state of Texas, they aren’t actually something I see in our area very often – at least not on that small size and scale.

But given my rather large black thumb (few house plants have survived longer than a few months in our care), I knew the odds of me keeping an entire wreath of plants alive was probably slim. And well it seemed like one of those DIY projects that probably looked easier than it actually was. (Visions of plants randomly falling off came to mind.) So I chose to put it on the back burner for the time being.

But then spring arrived and this happened at our local Lowe’s…

An entire two-thirds of an aisle in the garden section (plus some standing racks) devoted entirely to succulents.

But not just any succulents, the most adorable little ones you’ve ever seen.

Every time we’d go I’d stop and admire them. I mean, how can you not? Look at this mix of color and texture:

They’re like the perfect balance of nature meets geometric shapes. Which hello, is totally right up my alley.

Even when you take color out of the equation, the variety of shape and texture of the succulents is still so cool…

I knew I had to bring some of these little babies home. So I decided to start with something simple – filling up some old Ikea pots have had since college – and came home from Lowe’s with this…

My strategy for picking succulents was essentially the same as for any designing I do. I paid attention to three key things:

• Color
• Size & Shape
• Overall Composition (or how nicely they played together)

While in the store, I started by browsing the table and picking a few succulents I loved. Then I looked for ones that contrasted or complimented those.

In the end I brought home a good mix of both medium and small scale plants in a variety of shapes and colors that I knew would all look good together no matter how I mixed and matched them.

I also brought home this bag of succulent-friendly soil to give my plants the best chance of survival against my black thumb…

Then I started planting which was a bit of a messy affair…

But eventually I ended up with these four good-lookin’ guys:

Each pot included three different succulents – one medium succulent and two smaller plants that complimented the larger one. To get the right composition, I basically grouped all four sets of 3 together at once, moving things around until I felt like all four pots would work. Then I planted all of them.

I LOVED how they turned out. But since all this happened between my birthday and when we left for two weeks of vacation, I was a little nervous about how my new plants would do while we were gone.

But for the most part they looked pretty good once we returned.

Well except for this guy who’d had a little bit of a shrivel casualty…

And this guy who was clearly looking a bit squished in his pot…

Plus I’d picked up another awesome succulent planter at the Renegade Craft Fair which was in need of a plant.

So I headed to Lowe’s for Succulents: The Sequel.

This time I came home with these lovely fellows…(and yes apparently all my plants are male)

I went a bit more bold this time and chose a few shapes that had scared me I had passed over previously, as well as some colors I thought would add extra interest to the plants I already had.  I especially love the coral-looking plant on the top right and the spiky aloe plant on the bottom left. Although Adam didn’t seem to agree we needed a plastic Nemo-fish to add to the coral…

I also picked up a couple of extra planters as well as some rock covering too add a little pop.

My design process was the same this time around. I grouped the plants I liked together and moved them around until I settled on a composition I liked:

And then planted them:

On this black square planter, I also added some of the small rocks. I loved the extra contrast the rocks added against the black planter.

But when I tried adding the rocks to my largest white planter I didn’t love it as much.

It looks good in the photo but in person, it felt busy and the colors of the plants didn’t seem to pop as much as they did with the dark brown soil contrasting the white pot. Like this…

So I did what any designer would do and removed the rocks from the pot…carefully because despite their tough look, the leaves fall off these plants at the drop of a hat…

And yes this was the exact moment when I was thinking Cmd+Z, Cmd+Z!

But this moment is also exactly why I chose to name this project “30 Creative Adventures” instead of 30 Creative Projects or something. Because I know there will be moments when things didn’t exactly has planned and that’s all part of the process. It’s an adventure, right?

Once I sorted out the rocks situation (which thankfully only took a few minutes), I was left with these six awesome guys who I totally LOVE…

The three white and one yellow pots are all from Ikea, the black square planter is from Lowe’s and the wooden square planter was handmade by a local artist in Austin, BDJ Craft Works. You can find a similar one in his etsy shop here.

Here’s another overhead look so you can really see the composition and mix of plants:

I really love the way this adventure has me thinking not only about how I can take more inspiration from nature, but also about different ways to mix textures, colors and shapes together. I’m excited to find a way to use these shapes as inspiration for my scrapbooking designs.

One final photo for good measure. *Sigh* I love these guys.

One down, 29 to go. I can’t wait to see where this adventure takes me. 

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ABOUT THIS PROJECT

In honor of my 30th birthday, I’m challenging myself to go on 30 creative adventures before I turn 31 on 05.24.2013. This is Creative Adventure 1 of 30. You can read all the details behind this project here.

Fraudulent Drugs Are A Huge Global Problem