Month: July 2010

{grow with love} day eleven

I’m so happy to bring with you our first Grow With Love post and prompt of Week Three.  If you’re just now finding us, welcome welcome!  Please feel free to dive in whenever and where ever you feel comfortable.

The backstory:  Crystal and I have had it on our hearts for a long time to collaborate on a project that was something more than “just” templates.  But also a project of journaling prompts so that anyone who wanted to delve into a special kind of storytelling could join have place to start.  We were inspired by our own real life musings and reflections into our loves and relationships and so Grow With Love: Marriage Edition was born.  It is a series of 20 templates and 20 journaling prompts that we hope will inspire you to scrap about and improve your own loves and relationships.  You can snag the templates and prompts here or here.

To recap:  We are spending 4 weeks or 20 days exploring the journaling prompts together.  Each day (Monday – Friday) we hop back and forth between my blog and Crystal’s blog, exploring a fresh prompt.  Anyone is welcome to join us any time.  You can tackle all the prompts with us, or just the ones that touch you most.  This is a self-paced project.  And you are welcome to scrap with both the templates and prompts or just the prompts, whatever inspires you most. Though if you’d like to be eligible for the prizes (including a fabulous photo book of your very own Grow With Love project!) you will want to check out the Day One post for details.  You’ll probably want to check that out anyway to learn more about the project.  lol.

And so here we are.  We are starting Week Three.  Woot!  We’ve been loving everyone’s pages so far and we’re so happy to see you joining us on this adventure!  So far we’ve gotten nostalgic, we’ve exlplored our notions of love and relationships, we’ve shared our own love “history”, we’ve given thanks, and we’ve started to consider how we look at our loved ones and at ourselves in the good times and in the bad times.  All of this has been gradually building the foundation for some of the meatier prompts.

And that’s where we land today.  Day Eleven builds on some of the reflective prompts we’ve explored.  And it asks us to recount, in a kind of specific way, a moment of conflict (goodness knows we all have those, right?).  Let’s take a closer look:


This one is tricky.  It was for me.  I suppose that’s because reflecting on these less than sunny moments can be uncomfortable.  Also it can be difficult to really get down to the “he said she said” or it may be difficult to even recall these moments well.  I just knew that I thought and thought and thought about this one for days.  And then I sat and sat and fiddled and fiddled with my page for hours.  In the end I was left with a page that has me “confessing” in a way, my own hand in where things went awry.

It’s easy to remember a conflict in a way where you are the protagonist and all the blame lies at your spouse’s feet.  But when you start to think of it and scrap it for all of posterity and for your family to see one day it becomes more difficult to just stick to “one side of the story”.  And so I scrapped what has become “legend” in my own relationship.  It’s one of those conflicts that we can look back and laugh at now, some 10 years later, and of course we both remember the key snippets of obnoxious behavior and all the details are muddied.  And since my husband is sure to make sure I’ll never forget my own hand in the ridiculousness forevermore (and I his), I figured I may as well memorialize it on paper.  LOL!

Today it all seems so silly, but generally speaking this epic fight was definitely a live and learn moment.  We didn’t fight fair here.  We both behaved badly.  And we can look back and see that both “he” and “she” had a hand in things going so wrongly.  And we can look back and see where we’ve grown as a couple and what we’ve done better since then.

This prompt can really be a powerful one if you let it.  Even if you scrap something a little on the silly side, as I have done.  But you are welcome to just scrap as you feel led..go really deep and reflect on something serious, or something less so.

Remember too, that journaling is often really personal, especially for scrapping moments like these.  So it’s not necessary to share everything when you post unless you are comfortable.

We hope that when you finish this prompt, you feel a sense of letting go or a sense of better understanding.  Just try to have fun with it and pour yourself onto the page and I know you’ll be proud of where you end up.

Don’t forget to hop over to Crystal’s blog tomorrow for Day Twelve.

Until then, enjoy planting your story…

{grow with love} day nine

I’m happy to bring you Day Nine of the Grow With Love project.  I hope you’ve enjoyed following along so far!  We’re nearing the close of week two of the prompts and the halfway mark for the project!  Don’t forget you can join in any time and we hope you do!  Crystal and I have loved seeing your pages so far!  What a heartfelt journey!

So, as per usual, we are hopping back and forth between my blog and Crystal’s blog for the prompts and yesterday Crystal had us considering “all the good things” as we focused on and thought about the positive things our spouses and loved ones do for us and with us.  And that exercise in finding the good sets the stage for today’s prompt:

As I looked over my list and considered my page from yesterday, I noticed a common thread woven in and around the things I love so much about my husband and the things he does for me and for our family: integrity.  And so I reflected on that characteristic and scrapped about it and gave thanks to him for it.

And just look at this gorgeous page by Crystal.  It’s so emotive and you can just feel the love jumping off the page.

You’ll notice we call this an “act” prompt because we hope you will actually let this one touch your life in a more tangible way.  Actually literally give thanks to your loved one..maybe by sharing your page, or maybe in a love note, or just out loud as you notice your spouse doing something positive.

This is something I’ve personally been aiming to do more often…because I certainly feel grateful for all that he is and does, but I don’t always put voice to that.  And when I do, even in those moments when maybe I don’t really feel like it because I’m angry or I’m preoccupied, or because I figure he already knows, it really makes a difference.

We hope that you’ll enjoy reflecting and giving earnest thanks to your spouse or loved one through your scrapping and “in real life”.  And don’t forget to visit Crystal’s blog tomorrow for Day Ten and prompt 10.

And then you’ll see me back here on Monday for the start of week three and Day Eleven.

Until then, Happy Scrapping!

{fresh seeds} 22 July — Fresh Cut: Peony

I hope everyone is having a beautiful day! I will be back later with today's Grow With Love post for Day Nine, but I wanted to share with you today's {fresh seeds}….

Fresh
Cut: Peony
is the latest set of templates from the Fresh Cut series
and it is available in my shoppe for 20% off through Friday 23 July!!

Sgleason_freshcut_peony_preview

I so SO hope you like them! 

Ooh and in case you haven't heard, After Five Designs is having a summer block party!  It's a month full of fun games and contests, photography challenges, and tons and tons of new releases and fun!  Feel free to swing by the forum to see what's happening there this week!  And I'll give you a "you heard it here first" little tidbit:  you'll want to keep your eyes peeled in
the next week for lots of fabulous freebies (including one from me).  Woot!

In other news I'm happily very busy with lots of exciting projects on the horizon that I can't wait to share with you!  I couple fun collaboration projects, including one that is very near and dear to my heart and that is completely blowing my mind.  So stay tuned for more information about all of the goodness that is brewing.

Thank you for all your support and for letting me be a part of your blooming
creativity and storytelling!  I hope you all have a beautiful week!

Happy Scrapping!

Sig

{grow with love} day seven

I’m so happy to bring you Day Seven of the Grow With Love project.  I hope everyone had a beautiful weekend and that you’ve been enjoying the journey so far!  If you’re just finding us, you can read back through my posts, starting with day one for all the details about the project.  We hop back and forth between my blog and Crystal’s blog each day and she got you started with week two/prompt six of the project on my birthday yesterday.

Prompt six gave you a taste of one of the deeper, challenging prompts that we hope really got you thinking not only about scrapping your feelings and reactions to the prompts, but taking action too.

For today’s prompt we take a break from the heavier stuff for a bit as we have fun thinking about songs and lyrics.  Let’s take a look at Day 7:


I had a ton of fun with this prompt because I love love LOVE music and lyrics.  I’ve always been one of those people who expresses herself through music and through words and so many songs speak to me.  I knew right away that I wanted to almost literally catalog the “soundtrack of my love” with my husband.  As I scrapped I listened to all the songs that have held meaning for us in our relationship.  The songs played during our wedding collage/video, songs that I’ve included in the mix Crystal spoke of in yesterday’s post, songs that my husband played for me when we were falling in love…all that gooey stuff.  And I was transported to each time and place.  Music can be so powerful like that, can’t it?

And while I jotted down lyrics here and there and listed our “soundtrack”, another option would be to pick just ONE song and really scrap the emotions associated with it, or even just the lyrics.  You could scrap your wedding song, a favorite song, a song you sang to one another, a song that was powerful during a rough time…whatever your heart leads you to scrap.  No matter what direction you take, we hope you will enjoy getting a little nostalgic and letting the words and music fill you up.

Hope you have fun listening and scrapping!!  And be sure to head over to Crystal’s blog tomorrow for Day 8.

 

{a birthday sale}

I hope everyone is having a beautiful Monday!  We’ve had a rocky few days with our bugga feeling pretty unwell.  But today is my birthday and it puts everything into sharp focus of gratefulness.  So it’s a wonderful day!

Since your support and warm wishes have been a wonderful gift to me, I wanted to celebrate with you a little by having a birthday sale!  And so everything (really, everything) in my shoppe is available for 32% off for three days: Monday 19 July, Tuesday 20 July, and Wednesday 21 July!

Birthday-sale

Ooh and don’t forget to swing by Crystal’s blog today as she gets us started with Week Two of the Grow With Love project.  You can dive in any time, and we hope you do!  We’ve really loved seeing all the beautiful pages so far!

Hope you all have a celebrate the everyday kind of day!

Sig

1 2 3 4