Best Blog Find of 2009

I am catching up on the Best of 2009 blog prompts.

In some sort of voyeuristic way, I like to read blogs, but the truth is that it's too easy to spend countless hours reading about someone else's life rather than living my own. So in general, I avoid them.

Then I found this blog: Creative Therapy. It's a blog where they post a weekly challenge to create art about a personal topic. It's largely for scrapbookers, but there are all kinds of mixed media artists who participate.

The blog serves more than one purpose for me. To begin with, it feeds into that voyeuristic side of me, that part of me that likes to see what people are watching on TV when I drive past their homes, the part of me that likes to browse through random people's Flikr postings and imagine what each person must be like and what her life must be like, that part of me that likes to listen to conversations around me - in restaurants, in lines, in stores while they're on cell phones. On Creative Therapy, I can read about one woman's anger toward her mother-in-law and another's desire to learn to fly. I totally dig that kind of thing.

I also get to see great and different kinds of mixed media art, which intrigues me. I'm a scrapbooker, but I can appreciate the work I see on this web page. They highlight a different artist every week, too, which means I get to find new sources of inspiration for my crafts, which is always fun.

I also like the idea that scrapbooking doesn't always have to be about events (birthdays, holidays and recitals) and that they don't always have to be about the happy elements of life (how great my kids are, how cute they are, how I love my dogs). I scrapbook about my kids for my kids (and for me), but I have recently started a Book of Me so that my kids can one day know me as a person, not just as their mom. These challenges give me ideas to include in that album. And it won't always be pretty and happy.

But I also like the prompts they give, which get me thinking about myself in ways I sometimes haven't thought about myself. Like what is something I want to do before my next birthday, for example. I haven't actually created a page off these prompts, yet, but I plan to for my book of me album.