Several years ago my husband and I took our daughters to the pumpkin patch. I had recently purchased a new camera and I was quite excited to use it. My husband (who didn't like the new camera) brought our old camera along as well. So, there we were at the pumpkin patch, each of us with a camera in hand.
The pumpkin patch is a great place to take pictures. Children, dressed in denim, surrounded by vibrant orange pumpkins, "beg" for the cameras attention. In a wink and a flash our fingers had clicked through several rolls of film. I thought I had some great pictures, and a few pumpkins to dress up our holiday, little did I know where that day would actually take me.
When I got my pictures back I laid them out trying to decide which ones I would use to make a scrapbook page. There were so many fun moments! How could I decide? Here I was, trying to capture an hour of movement and activity on a 12x12 page. I remembered a film I had watched in college about a photographer who had taken a bunch of pictures over a certain period of time in a defined space (like a room or a back yard.) He then displayed the photos in order as one would view the entire space. I thought it was very intriguing how it showed the movement of people/subjects over the space of time. That was my inspiration for making the first Mosaic Moment.
Unlike my source of inspiration I was trying to display my photos in a small space. I decided to cut my photos to blend them instead of overlapping and layering them. Mosaic Moments grid paper did not exist; so, I drew a grid onto a 12x12 sheet of paper. I based the grid on 1 inch squares because it was a simple size to cut and gave me adequate flexibility for blending my photos together.
I worked on my photo mosaic at my small scrapbook studio (fondly known of as Snapping Turtle.) When I finished I discovered a flock of employees and customers who wanted me to show them how to make their own photo mosaic. So, the classes began.
About a year later, after sadly closing Snapping Turtle and happily diving head first into Wish in the Wind and the manufacturing side of the scrapbook industry, I decided that if I was going to continue to make photo mosaics it would be a lot easier if I didn't always have to draw the grid on the paper.
My husband thought I was a little crazy, planning to have grid paper printed and ordering what seemed like a ton of custom designed, self healing mats from Taiwan. He must of asked me 100 times, "are you sure?" But, he came around quickly. We took our Mosaic Moments line, which consisted of our self -healing mat and four colors of grid paper (black, white, cactus and squash) to the New Jersey Memories Expo. We put up a few samples, demonstrated the process, and we sold out of paper the first day. Kevin drove to New Jersey, brought us more grid paper and we sold out again the next day.
My vision for Mosaic Moments has grown and changed over the past 5 years. I started by filling entire 12x12 pages with 1 inch photo squares. It wasn't long before I began adding a variety of sizes of squares and rectangles, mixing in titles and journaling blocks, and thinking there are unlimited possibilities for what can be done with a sheet of grid paper.
One of the fun new monthly articles we are working on is our Creative Challenge. We would like to see what you are up to and we want to challenge you to try new ways to use your Mosaic Moments grid paper. So, get geared up to participate and watch for an upcoming Newsletter announcing our first Creative Challenge. 
