tine sparkles

Inside Inspiration: Ali Edwards
By Lain Chroust Ehmann
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Anyone familiar with the scrapbooking industry is familiar with Ali Edwards. Anyone who’s familiar with Ali Edwards knows her style – a popular blend of clean graphics with fresh color combinations, warm photography, and Ali’s signature handwritten journaling. And if they’re real fans – as thousands are – they will have visited her blog where she writes candidly about the challenges of downsizing, keeping things “real,” and combining parenting a special-needs child with pursuing your own dream.

The author of numerous articles and a design book (“A Designer’s Eye for Scrapbooking”)and teacher of workshops around the world, Ali says her success in the multi-billion-dollar field of scrapbooking was a surprise, one she still marvels at. “It’s totally bizarre,” she says. “It’s not anything I ever planned or anticipated.”

In hindsight, though, the path to where she is now doesn’t seem totally unexpected. “I have always been very visual,” she says. “I used to cut out spreads from magazines (I loved magazines then just as much as I do now) and hang them up around my bedroom.” Despite this love of design, she went to college with the intent of becoming a marine biologist and working with orca whales at Sea World. When a couple of chemistry classes laid her low, she moved toward English and history, and, after graduating, got a degree in graphic design.

A few years ago, she began scrapbooking, entered the prestigious Creating Keepsakes Hall of Fame contest, and won. Since then, her career exploded, occasionally taking her away from her boys (son Simon and husband Chris) and home in Oregon and sending her off to the Netherlands or to Utah – sometimes in the same week.

Despite her celebrity, Ali has a casualness and openness that make everyone who’s seen her work or read her blog feel they know her, even if they’ve only “met” her through technology. But this assumed familiarity doesn’t throw her. In fact, when someone in Kentucky greets her with hugs and jumps into a commentary on how alike their lives are, she enjoys it. “I’m the kind of person who can go somewhere and feel comfortable starting up a conversation,” she says. So if her students already know that they both have husbands named Chris or kids with autism or were competitive swimmers, Ali has no problem keeping up with the exchange, and, in fact, appreciates the jumpstart to familiarity.

So if having thousands of strangers consider her their new best friend doesn’t bother her, what does? The pressure of having your art be your work is always there, she says. There’s also an expectation from the editors and from the audience that you produce a certain kind of work that can keep you somewhat limited. For instance, more free forms of creative expression that she enjoys – art journals, for instance, or the “cool little collages” that Keri Smith creates – aren’t what’s being published in the scrapbooking magazines. “That’s probably what I’d be playing with. But it doesn’t translate for most scrapbookers,” she explains. So, for the time being, those pursuits may be sidelined in favor of more “traditional” creations.  

Ali finds inspiration among other scrapbookers, paper artists, magazines, books, ads, product – everywhere. “I’m such a visual person that my inclination is to take it all in,” she says. But taking in so much means she can go into overload – too many images, too many ideas, too much everything. “I can feel it in myself [when I’m in overload.] That’s when I just stop.” She’ll shift to the written word which provides a lower level of stimuli.

When the ideas do come, Ali doesn’t have any one way of capturing them. “I have a notebook I write things down in, but a lot of things I don’t write down,” in order to make sure what she comes up with in the end is a product of her creativity, not someone else’s.

Ali tries not to worry too much about where the next idea is going to come from and let go of the push to develop The Next Big Thing. “I believe that I am a creative person,” Ali says. “I know there’s something inherently creative inside of me, and I just have to let that out.” That lesson is one that she wants to convey to her students and admirers. “I think that most people doubt their own creativity. I doubt mine at times as well. It is totally natural,” she explains. “I really try to encourage people to embrace themselves, whatever it is within them, their own stories and their own way of telling those stories – because we are all creative. I would love to see people taking the stress and the pressure out of the creative process. Let themselves go more. Sometimes all people need is a little permission to access the creativity they hold within.”

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Visit Ali's blog at: www.aliedwards.typepad.com
Visit Ali's Website at: www.aliedwardsdesign.com