Pre-Challenge to get you started

Hi everyone!
I am so excited to meet you all and create with you. Twelve followers so far is awesome if you ask me. I thought I would share a bit about how I came up with the idea for this blog and the name. I am a teacher so it is in my blood to want to impart knowledge on everyone I meet and I hope I can share what I know with you and you all can share things with me. I wanted to start a challenge blog because I was getting tired of seeing the same people win the challenges on other sites. I don't think creating should be about popularity. We all have something to share through our creativity and we should celebrate that. I plan on having DT members but it will be constantly changing because we all have different strengths and I want to bring out those strengths in each of you. I hope you will enjoy the interactivity (is that even a word?) and I hope we can all encourage and inspire each other.
When I talk to people and tell them about the site they usually ask me, "How did you come up with the name?" Well that is easy to explain I had, had this blog idea in my mind for a while but when I was home in California visiting my mom we were taking about my hopes and dreams beyond the right now. I told her how I love teaching but am fed up with the politics and wish I could just teach people who wanted to learn and create things every day. I told her how I would love to be part of the scrapbook industry and design, market, and live in it. Just to be around so many creative people would be so amazing. Well she did her part as a mom and said that I need to stick it out but that I need to be creative and do what makes me happy (thanks mom). I knew then that I needed to take the first step and ideas started flying. I felt I needed to capture part of my mom into the whole process and so I introduce you to my Blue Velvet Muse: Suzan Martinez.

She was a single mother of two, who taught me to be creative. She worked 2 jobs for 10 years to make sure we had opportunities and fun. We worked together for several years at House of Fabrics which is now Joann's. She taught me to crochet, cross stitch, quilt, and the list goes on. I am in the process of getting her to scrapbook. I hope to share more of her creativity with you like the prom dress she made me and literally sewed me into seconds before I walked out the door. Oh and by the way she loved the name her first comment to me was, "How did you come up with that name?"
Alright so now for the Pre-launch challenge:
Create something inspired by one of the things on your list from the first post. If you haven't seen the first post scroll down and introduce yourself, tell us 3 things that inspire you and how you heard about the site. (Do that now there are prizes!!!) There is only one other thing your creation must have...Your project must include the color blue (my mom's favorite). If you look at the layout above you will see my mom who inspires me and obviously the color blue. This layout was created for Page Maps last summer so it is not new. However, I will be creating one for this challenge as well. I have set up a group over at Flicker so when you finish your project please upload it to the Blue Velvet Muse Flicker Group so we can leave some love and you can be entered to win an RAK for participating. Entries are due by the end of the day your time, what ever that may be, on Sept. 23rd, 2010. That gives you 10 days so what are you waiting for go be creative!
Melissa