{grow with love} day one

Welcome to the Grow With Love project!  Crystal and I are thrilled to dive into this adventure with you!  We’ve I’ve been jibbering jabbering excitedly about it for a few days now (Crystal has been much more calm and restrained and completely less goofy). But we’re both looking forward to challenging ourselves, getting reflective and having fun as we “grow with love” together.  Most of all we hope that, at the end of the project you will have a series of heartfelt pages you’re proud of and that this process reaches out beyond the pages a bit and into your lives in a real way.   We can’t wait to get started!

Whether you’ll be using the templates (you can snag them here and here) or not, we hope that you’ll be inspired to share your heart and stories and delve in to new creative territory along side us!

We will be posting each weekday for four weeks –covering all 20 prompts in our Grow with Love project.

Week One: Monday 12 July – Friday 16 July

Week Two: Monday 19 July – Friday 23 July

Week Three: Monday 26 July – Friday 30 July

Week Four: Monday 3 August – Friday 6 August

Each day we will post a prompt and delve into it a bit more, sharing our own inspirations and pages and hopefully giving you a bit of a creative push for your own pages.  You can follow along at your own pace, or if you’d like to participate for the prizes, post your pages by the project deadline, Friday 13 August, 2010, which is one full week after the project closes.

Either way, we encourage you to share your pages with us and hope you’ll have fun and feel inspired and challenged.

The prizes include one 20 page photo book for one lucky participant (who uses both the templates and the prompts) and gift certificates to zinnias and swallowtails and Designs by Crystal Livesay!!

So let’s dive into Day One, shall we?

Today’s prompt is:

When you’re thinking of your “one word” you want to really delve to the core of how you view your relationship now and your hopes for the future of your marriage.  Think of it as a kind of compass directing your steps each day, each week, each month, each year.  It can be a word that is a foundation you and your spouse hold together or one you hope to focus on for yourself.

This kind of foundation and compass is something that Crystal and I have discussed quite a lot.  And since we often share similar thoughts and beliefs it was no surprise that we were both drawn to the same “one word”.  Here is Crystal’s beautiful page:

And here is my page:

As you can see, we were both drawn to create photoless pages for this prompt, but you can easily incorporate any photo(s) that inspire you.

The most important thing as you select your word, which you can do on your own, or with your spouse, is to really reflect.  This will be a word that can be really powerful for you in your relationships.

For me, I felt pulled to “respect” as a word I hope to personally guide my own steps in my marriage.  One that is rooted in my faith and that symbolizes a foundation in faith for me and my husband.  It is meant to be a daily reminder to myself of what I hope to give my husband in my actions and words and thoughts.

We can’t wait to see what words you feel drawn to.  And we look forward to each new day!!

Remember to be eligible for the prizes, please be sure to share your own pages in the comments section of each day at any time before Friday 13 August, 2010. For example, link us to your Day One page in the comments of this Day One post.  Day Two, for Day Two, etc.  You can use both our templates and prompts, or just the prompts, or neither and just follow along in the spirit of the project (and we hope you do!) but in order to be eligible for the shutterfly album we ask that you use both the templates and prompts.  Everyone is eligible for the gift certificates.  Woot!

update: through the course of the project we realized that asking participants (who were joining along with the hope of winning the prizes) to use only our templates was a little limiting.  Creativity doesn’t always work that way and with such a personal process and personal prompts we really just want to encourage everyone to express and explore themselves in whatever way best suits them and their own story.  SOOOO…we made a change during the process to say: that anyone playing along for the prizes would be eligible..no matter if they used the templates or not.  We love to see pages with our templates, but the most important thing to us is the journey and the story.  Thanks for bearing with us..this is our first time doing something so huge and it’s a bit of a learning process for us too too.

We can’t wait to see your pages and we are looking forward to “growing with love” with you!  Crystal will be hosting Day Two tomorrow on her blog so be sure to hop on over there for a deeper look at prompt two.

Happy Scrapping and Happy Growing!

ooh p.s.  if you missed out on snagging the templates during Happy Hour at After Five Design this weekend or because of the downtime at Oscraps, Crystal has extended her sale and you can snag the templates at her shop for 20% today and tomorrow.