Sometimes we all need a little encouragement, and in His Word, God actually tells us encourage one another.
Therefore encourage one another and build one another up, just as you are doing.
1 Thessalonians 5:11
Sometimes it’s hard to find the words to encourage those around us. It can be hard, too, to find others to encourage us.
With this idea in mind, I’ve created cards to encourage you (my job) and to help you encourage yourselves and those around you.
Use them as daily reminders, tuck them in as a bookmark, leave them for others to find at work, school, or around the house. There are so many ways to use these. Use them as Bible study or journal prompts. Tuck the whole set of them in a Christmas stocking or wrap them as a gift. Print as many as you need! How would you use them? Let me know in the comments.
I’ll be working on some other styles for those of you who may like the idea of these, but not the look. Maybe a Christmas theme for the advent season? What do you think? I really love when you guys have ideas for me. 🙂
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This new Harvest Journal Bundle is just one of a few items I have listed recently in my shop. I love to keep track of how many pounds of this vegetable I bring in or how many pints of that fruit.
Though I’ve been away from the blog for a few weeks, I have been working when I can and have some new things in my shop. With the arrival of spring comes a lot more time working outside in the yard and garden. We’ve been digging, planting, raking, and even harvesting already! Asparagus is the plant that keeps giving year after year!!! (anyone with me?)
With the addition of outside projects, there is not much time left over for blogging… especially with my new Etsy shop. So it isn’t hard to understand that I’ve gotten behind in the blogging department. I do want to share with you, though, some of the new things in my shop.
From the beginning, this blog has been about sharing the things I am creating, putting myself out there for you all to see. I want to keep doing that, and if you should want to purchase something… well, I won’t complain about that either. 🙂 (wink, wink) So I’m going to try get some posts written up to share what I’ve been doing, all while continuing to create some more. 🙂 Thank you all for your support on this creative journey! (Coupon codes to come!)
I designed most of these pages to coordinate with my Chicken Egg Counting Sheets. They will fit nicely in the same journal or binder. The artwork on some of the pages are specific to one crop (like this strawberry page), but really, you could use any page for any crop.
Others have room for several crops on one page (as seen at the top).
With spring officially begun, we are full into the beginning of garden season! How better to celebrate, than with a cute Carrot Patch sign!
This is the part of the year that I still like gardening. Ask me again come July or August when it’s too hot to be outside and the weeds and pests have taken over and my opinion is often different. But for now… for now I’m all about the planning and the prepping and the seed starting. Yes, and even the decorating!
So… I designed this cute sign specifically for my sister who is loving all things carrots these days! I wanted to have something for her when she arrived for her visit this week, but I couldn’t help but print myself one and frame it up! It’s sitting on my kitchen counter waiting for me to figure out a good place for it. 🙂 I couldn’t stop there, though! I’ve also added it to my Etsy shop so you can have a copy too!
My sign reads, “Welcome to our Carrot Patch”, but my sister lives alone, so that isn’t going to work for her. Hers says ,”Welcome to my Carrot Patch.”
I designed this sign both ways, so, whether you need this sign in your family home or want to use it in your own space, I’ve got you covered! This sign would be great framed as an 8×10 or 5×7 on an entry table or in a dorm room, or framed as an 11×14 on the mantle in your living room. You can also choose to print the pdf of the 8.5×11 size to put in the front cover of your homestead, household, or school notebook!
This project has been a long time coming, and a lot of original artwork was created to make these extra special! I’ve been wanting to create these Egg Counting Sheets for a few years (ever since I made one for for the month of April a few years back), and the drawing tablet I got for my birthday last fall was just the push I needed! I’ve been working on them for several months and I’m super excited to have them done and ready for your farm or homestead needs!
UPDATE 2023: You can also find these egg counting sheets in my Whole Coop Chicken Mega Bundle with my other chicken products. Click here to find that.
Each page has chicken themed artwork that matches the season. You may recognize the chickens from a fabric design I shared lately (available for sale here.) The chickens from that fabric were originally from these egg counting sheets.
You can keep track of how many eggs you collect each day, any expenses from the month and your gross and net sales (if you sell your eggs.) There is also a section for writing any notes about your chickens or things you need to do or buy.
This week’s theme at Spoonflower was Weeds. I thought and thought about how I could uniquely represent that theme, but I kept coming back to dandelions. Well, I thought, maybe I can at least use a different angle on them.
Different or not, I ended up creating this sweet print of children with dandelions. She is blowing the fuzz off a spent bloom and he is offering her a fresh one.
I don’t usually dabble in people, so this was a challenge for me. I changed my design half a dozen times over a weeks time. Then, the night before, my husband made some suggestions that turned my design on its head once more. (My designs are always better for his input!)
Tuesday morning found me working on it still. I finished it with only a couple hours to spare. As it turns out, there was a flaw in the copy I submitted. The flower he is holding in this pic was on the wrong side of his hand (Stem showing). Oops! I guess I’ll never know whether it would have been more popular without that mistake. Oh well. I’ve fixed it up in time to share it with you. Dandelions at play! What do you think?
If you like my Dandelions at Play design, would you please pin the image below or share it on other social media!
The verse is decorated with grasses, flowers and ladybugs. She loves ladybugs and adored this piece. Sometime in the last couple years the painting went missing and she was so upset. Her face just lit up tonight when I printed out this new version for her to hang next to her bed. The artwork has been reworked digitally for distribution and is ready to be downloaded and printed by your favorite printer or at home for immediate display or gifting!
My part is to make the weekend special. To make it beautiful. To make each lady feel like they’ve truly stepped into a retreat space!
This past weekend was our church’s annual women’s retreat (thus less posting last week as we were getting things ready and this week because I’m catching up around here.)
Our theme was “Come to the Garden”… basically, a garden theme women’s retreat! I came up with the idea last year as we were setting up for that retreat. The weather was gloomy and I really wanted to be putting flowers everywhere. Poof, the garden theme women’s retreat was born!
This actually turned into a budget friendly theme for us, decoration wise anyway. I expected to have to buy a lot of flowers to get the feel I was looking for, and that was going to be expensive. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to pull it off. Then I visited the decorations closet at the church (if you’re church doesn’t have one of these, it really should! I use ours all the time for party planning, retreats and other events at the church.) If you don’t have one of these rooms, ask around for ladies in the church who may have flowers or other details they don’t use anymore or are willing to share.
Many of the flowers in these pictures are from the decoration storage closet, others are mine from home. I made some signs, like the “let us grow” sign here. The wood beads are also mine, but so easy to make in any color.
This is the downstairs space that we used mostly for gathering in the evenings. I asked a wonderful group of helpers to just sort through the totes and make it all pretty! They did a great job. I literally couldn’t have done it without them. I had just under 2 hours from the time we could get into the facility to when our program started.
I picked up some free pillows someone was getting rid of and my mom made cases for them out of the green check print. Then we covered my couch pillows with a yard or so of fabric each from my stash, and tied them on so they would be temporary.
In the middle picture you can kind of see two other signs I made. One says “herbs” and the other says “prune and grow”. I also snagged my daughter’s summer hat to add to the mix.
The bunting is something I helped my oldest daughter make several years ago for her Little House birthday. I’ve used them so many time. I think they are made from some Figtree and Co. fabric. I use them all the time for baby showers, bridal showers, etc. This year I am going to hang them in the kitchen for spring.
There is a kitchenette downstairs in the lodge we used for the retreat this year. I love to turn it into a pretty coffee/tea/cocoa bar with pretty cups and plates and such. I always stow the coffee organizers they have out on the counter and bring my own pretty ones. This space is simple, but effective!
Behind it is this little cafe like seating area. It was so easy to place cute cloth napkins out with a bouquet of flowers on each. Again, super simple, but super effective!
We decided this year to set up a second drink station in the upstairs room where most of our sessions were taking place. The tea collection both upstairs and down belong the head of the retreat planning committee. She loves to share and this year has all matching jars. It made me so happy! 🙂 We brought the white carafes from church to keep things pretty and light. That is a white paper table cloth with plastic backing I have on top of the pink cloth. It prevented the spilled coffee and tea from staining the pink.
That is another sign I made for the weekend too… the “but first COFFEE”. I love how it fit in with the whole look. All the signs were made using my Cricut to make vinyl stencils.
The lace looking bunting was from last year’s tea party retreat. My sweet mama made all those for me last year using this tutorial. I was thrilled to use them again. She couldn’t be with us this year but was super excited to use them used again when I sent pics.
I tried to keep the tables simple this year. Once 8 ladies are squeezed around a 6 foot table with all their stuff, there isn’t much room in the middle. 🙂 I bought 7 of those cute flowers and garden tins from Dollar Tree and painted them white. They scratch easy (be warned) but they were super cute with the flowers in them. I decided to put these together ahead of time and bring them pre-made so that we could just put them on the tables. We used a bunch of the flowers at the church and poked them into some of the green flower foam (also in our decor closet). I use the word “we” lightly. One of the teens at church helped me out by doing all the arranging. She did a much better job than I would have in a fraction of the time. 🙂 I was thrilled she was there to help. I then scattered left over blooms and greens along the tables and placed a couple mini garden tools we had with them. Super easy!
The event turned out beautiful and had it’s intended affect. The ladies were loving the feel of the surroundings and were blessed by both the fellowship and the teaching throughout the weekend. I always say, my part of the events are far from the most important, but I enjoy showing love to the ladies who come by making their surroundings special!
If you enjoyed this garden theme women’s retreat, please pin the following image or share it on other social media!
I mentioned a couple weeks ago that I would be using my flower pots design for the upcoming women’s retreat. (That retreat is this weekend, by the way and the main reason I haven’t posted this week.) At the time, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do, and in reality, I expected to do more, but other projects took over.
In the end, I decided to make this Flower Pot Note Pad with them. It wasn’t practical to make a note pad for each of the 50-something ladies who are planning to join us, but I could include one in each of the gift baskets (pots, really) I’m putting together for the door prize. So that’s what I did.
I basically followed these direction for making the notepad, though, if I’d done it exactly this way (I did last time), it would have worked even better. One difference… I couldn’t find my padding compound. We looked everywhere I can think of. Nothing. I read somewhere that Modge Podge works too, so I tried it. (We always have lots of that around.) And it worked!
If you like my Flower Pot Note Pad, would you please pin the image below or share it on other social media!
This is my first official completed project in Adobe Illustrator.
In my journey as a budding artist, one of the walls I keep running up against in sharing my work digitally is Adobe Illustrator. I learned how to use Photoshop years ago (though numerous new editions leave me still figuring things out), but I’ve never had any training in Illustrator. I just sort of fake it to do what I need. Watch a YouTube video for this or that and make it work well enough. But it is a frustration when I want to do something and don’t know how.
I’d like to be able to use it to further my artistic endeavors, not be hindered by it. So I’ve decided to learn. As there is nothing in the budget for this sort of thing, I’ve turned to the internet as my teacher. This is hit or miss as I’m sure you know, but I’ve already learned several things I didn’t know before and, therefore, can now do several things I could never have done before. I’ve been working through other peoples project tutorials, but I keep getting stuck before finishing anything all the way. So I took what I’ve learned so far and I made my own project.
I started with this quick sketch on regular paper. It isn’t perfect and I didn’t bother fixing the mistakes. I took a picture of it with my phone, uploaded it and brought it into Illustrator. The main skill I was trying to work on was using the pen tool, so I created a new layer over top the one with the photo and began using the pen tool to trace over my lines and leaves. It’s going to take some further practice, but already I can see a difference over the last couple days. Mostly it’s just fun to see something I created in Illustrator.
It’s not perfect, but the project served it’s purpose. I’ve gotten some practice and I’ve learned where I need some further instruction.
