Free for All Fridays - My Opinion on Scraplifting and Giving Credit

I said to myself that I was not going to comment on it because of the draining effect of negativity but it has been nagging at me and I wanted to express my opinion and see how others felt. So without going into a ton of detail and naming names (some of you are already familiar with this controversy) there is a bit of a blog battle of words going on between two very talented ladies over scraplifting. Let me be fair because it is a little deeper than that. These ladies are on design teams and you can tell by the quality of their work they put a lot of time and effort in their designs. I think that part of the dissent is the fact that one lady seems to be even emulating the other's style of decorating her home, photography, and blog style. Now it is true imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but I have to wonder where is the line drawn?

I don't think I have a particular "style" of scrapbooking. When I look back on my layouts and cards they seem to run a gamut of styles to me and there are other scrappers that I think are like me like Gemiel (I see a lot of my style in her layouts), my bestie Mika (although I believe she definitely thinks more out of the box than I do), My West Coast sister Tricia and many others. I am influenced by other peoples layouts but it may be something simple like a flower they used, am I suppose to give them credit for that?

But on the other hand there are scrappers whose work I would recognize instantly like Thomisia - her layout pages are unmistakably creative, she uses a lot of photos and usually does two pagers and has been doing so for a while (back to the african-american scrappers website - remember that?, lol). Ms Kat Blue is another person who generally uses white space and embellies to make her layouts pop and has developed a certain style. And then there is Miss Essense , a scrapper with a clean artistic style that I think she has developed into her own over the years and I tend to know her work instantly so if I "copied or scraplifted" a layout to the point that I was using their style I would definitely give them credit.

I can't profess to know what is proper ettiquette in scrapbooking but for me it all boils down to this just being paper and glue. Either way it is not that deep. There are so many other ills of the world I would be ashamed to make a big deal out of someone scraplifting my work and if I felt like someone crossed the line into my personal world I would probably just come off of the internet and share my craft only with those close to me. The only thing that would actually make me angry would be if someone copied a picture of my layout, with my family in the photos and claimed them as their own, that is just too much. I really don't do this for the glory, just for the love of crafting, the social part is a perk to me.

Disclaimer: this is just my opinion. I am not taking sides in the above mentioned dispute as it is not for me to say who is wrong or right.