But thanks be to God! He gives us victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. (1 Corinthians 15:57)
I put together a printable shopping/gift guide for the holidays to hopefully help keep things more intentional as Black Friday, Small Business Saturday, and Cyber Monday sales flood our social media accounts and mailboxes.
The first page serves as a simple list to write out each recipient and the obtained or planned gift. I highlighted mine to show who I have completed and who is still missing. **Family members if you zoom into this....I'll respect you.**
The second page is a table to fill in shops and sales you want to check out over the weekend (or whenever) it gives you space to write down a promo code or sale time and then items you're looking at.
Here is mine filled out but with a somewhat obstructed view to make it slightly more difficult for my gift recipients to zoom in. You can save and print the two images below if you'd like to use it for yourself this holiday season!
What would you add to make this work better for you? Happy Thanksgiving and happy intentional and stress-free shopping!
PS digital floral clip art from SmallHouseBigPony check out their beautiful and affordable collection!
After my daughter entered the world I never knew my heart could love so much - but I also did not expect continuing to manage my small business to be as difficult as it was (is). I have a particularly bad sleeper (No thanks, don't need any sleeping advice. Still love ya'll but don't need it!) which has made the naptimes and early evening time that I thought I'd have to myself everyday practically non existent. Or, let's be real when I do get a moment... Naptime = personal time? Nope. Naptime = cleaning the house like a madwoman, preparing food, picking up cheerios that have been practically fully digested then spit up and smushed into the carpet (sorry landlords if you're reading this..............)
Image from InsieMama.
Anyway, I was connected by Heather of Heather Booysen Photography to Danielle of InsieMama. As soon as Heather mentioned that her friend was starting up a business to specifically help mompreneurs (loving this word) think strategically about their business I emailed her. I don't normally talk about my business with anyone else or seek advice, so the fact that I emailed her right away actually caught myself off guard. Well, fast forward and this partnership has been amazing! It was just the right amount of support and encouragement I needed that I could be both a mom and small business owner.
Danielle also runs an online boutique showcasing her clients which I highly suggest taking a look at, and particularly now because I've just launched a holiday line on InsieMama and wanted to give you all the full details!
The items available are pictured below and will only be available through her InsieMama boutique, not through my Etsy shop! They are also limited and will only be around for this Christmas season.
I'm pretty conflicted on how I feel about Black Friday. You know the common statement that it seems so wrong to spend time thinking about how thankful we are for what we have and then rush out to buy what we want only a few hours later. Well, just because everyone says it and you're probably tired of your Facebook friends "taking a virtual stand about it" doesn't mean I'm not partially agreeing. However, I've also scored some amazing Black Friday deals so I can't hate on it too much...
But, I have come to really love Small Business Saturday. As a small business owner myself, I try to shop almost exclusively at other small businesses and especially for holidays and gifts. Throughout the past year I've stopped by quite a few shops and have gotten to know many of the owners behind the scenes. I've rounded up some of my favorites in a full list below and also featured a few specific gift ideas here:
And below you'll find the full list of favorite shops I shopped at this past year. Take time and look through these - so many categories and fun things to find!
Seeing as I work with colorful paper everyday and am constantly looking for wedding color trends, building this wedding mood/imspiration board was an excellent business exercise for me. First of all, can I just say, I am so in love with this color combo. Peach was an accent color at our wedding and is the main color in my business branding - but wow peach + these shades of blue is really just gorgeous - artsy and eclectic, but timeless. I haven't used peach and blue together in any of my paper flower creations in the shop but you can bet you'll see some soon.
Check it out. The details are listed below the image.
Blue Vintage
Jar Centerpiece Inspiration: Pinterest (This doesn’t seem like the original author - if anyone knows the actual direct
source please let me know.)
And now, what if I told you this was a virtual wedding invitation? Paperless Post provides the option to order paper invites as well - but in more interesting news, provides a virtual option. Ask me three years ago as I was planning my wedding and I would have unequivocally told you no, that was not an option for me. However now, I'm 90% sure I would go with a virtual option. Listen, I love stationery (recently pointed out to me that you spell it with an "e" whoops, did you know this?!) but it seems like wedding invitations are stuck on the fridge and then remain there for an awkwardly long time. (For instance: oh my goodness did you hear so and so had a baby?! Wow, it seems like just yesterday we were at their wedding. Oh, wait - look, here it is, the invite from four years ago still on our fridge! It was September 8, 2011, how sweet. Wait, why do we still have that? We should trash that....)
Anyway, I think I'd opt for a small magnet save the date that matches the invitation and then have the formal invitation be delivered electronically. I'm not giving up on a hard invite entirely, that save the date magnet is still there - or maybe a postcard.
But listen friends, you can either save money utilizing this option (about 125 for $90 on this particular card pictured above) or save it and spend instead on your photographers or fresh flowers (my two main priorities). And not just an afterthought, but a serious consideration - you save yourself the headache of collecting and arranging RSVPs. The electronic system Paperless Post has is easy to use and professional. It doesn't make it seem any less like a wedding, in fact, the layout of their system is very formal and aesthetically pleasing and utilizing the system to send and coordinate invites seems like a wedding related task, not like managing a random evite asking your guests to bring their favorite side and a lawn chair.
Oh and let me repeat again about the easy part. Having all of the invitations and guest count listed out right there for you? That's a game changer. Figuring out RSVPs is a last minute task, and listen - last minute bride you is a lot different than the bride who picked out her formal stationery six months prior. You have a lot less patience for the little details, and coordinating the guest list and seating chart is not little details!
Also, consider this - you can still order a printed invitation from them or another printer, maybe just a handful to send to grandparents who aren't real thrilled about this internet craze and give as a momento to parents and for yourself of course.
Like I said before, I'm 90% sure I'd do it this way if I could do it again. What do you think?! And what do you think about this color combo? What other combos would you like to see inspiration boards for?
I'm not sure if you are an Etsy or Instagram shopper, but several times a week I find myself interested in yet another art print that is usually a digital download (aka print it at home yourself). We are definitely out of wall space in our home which means I never gave these awesome prints a second thought, until now.
Recently I found a few that I just couldn't say no too and had to figure out a way to do something with them. I came up with three ideas: notecards, a dry-erase to-do list, and a non-traditional picture frame collage.
First, notecards are a fantastic way to use printables! You can purchase two or three different printables and create a whole set of cards. If someone in your family is an avid card-giver you could really get serious with this idea finding printables for various occasions and creating a whole set of these. I grabbed a printable from one of my favorite go-to shops for cute and inexpensive printables, Pretty Print Shop. Once you have the image I inserted it into a Microsoft Word document. I changed the margins of the page to "narrow" at .5" all around and then resized the image until two would fit on one page on the right side of the document.
Now I usually prefer Microfost Publisher for these kind of projects but went with Word here as I think that is what most readers are comfortable with.
I printed four pages of this document. Two on cream cardstock and two on white cardstock. If you think you might start doing this often keep an eye out for the sale at Michaels when their packs of cardstock go on sale for 5 for $10. I've never seen a better sale and it actually happens quite frequently!
Alternating white and cream gave it a fun look:
Second idea can really be adapted in quite a few ways. This is for a dry erase list board. This is really as simple as buying a clear glass frame, or any frame really, and putting a printable alongside a plain lined piece of paper.
I love the idea to potentially use this as a way to memorize scripture as well. If you're looking at a to-do list daily, glancing at scripture each time is a great way to ground yourself when those tasks start piling up. I didn't glue anything down in these frames so it would be easy to change out every so often. The picture below shows one of my all-time favorite printables from Vine & Branch Design.
What I did do is place a piece of white cardstock behind my lined paper to make it appear less transparent. You could use this for a grocery list, prayer list, to-do list, birthday list, etc.
And you can always put paper flowers on anything!! ;)
Last, but potentially my favorite because of the adorable baby making an appearance, is a way to make a more personalized and less traditional picture frame gift.
First of all, I am so in love with that baby and that print about motherhood from Echoes of Mercy. So what better than to put them together? You could look for prints about particular family members, locations, bible verses, special occasions, etc. A few other ideas that come to mind is a picture of a cityscape or landscape paired with an engagement picture or graduation picture at that location, a printable about what a name means paired with a newborn picture, a printable with a bible verse about family and a family picture, etc. See?! The possibilities are endless! I put this in the same type of frame as the second idea here, but you could find any frame you desired to dress this up a bit more if you wanted to.
This time last year I was 16 weeks pregnant and anxiously awaiting the 20 week appointment on October 24th where we would find out if baby L was a girl or boy! We went back and forth about the idea of a "gender reveal party." I'm the girl who literally melts in a puddle at work when the office has a cake for birthdays (not just my birthday - but the entire month of March birthdays) yeah, so drawing a lot of attention to myself wasn't something I was totally interseted in.
And then once we had decided that gender reveals were kind of silly and just asking for attention, I rolled over in bed one night (I was still able to roll side to side, unlike my later beached whale of a self) and said "HI, so, remember how we don't want a gender reveal? I think we DO want a gender reveal!" And then I never looked back. The planning began that night as I laid awake.
Since we are displaced right now and living out of state while the husband attends law school, this was a perfect reason to get to see a few friends and family.
We had our ultrasound appointment on 10/24/14 and then the reveal was scheduled for 11/1/14. Talk about a week of madness!! I put together this box for a friend and asked her to open the envelope, use the clip, write on the chalkboard, and lace up the hockey skates with pink or blue!! You might remember the hockey skates from our pregnancy announcement here.
Finding out on the 24th and waiting a full 8 days until November 1st was easy about 5% of the time and difficult the other 95% of the time. However, at this point in my heart I was almost completely sure baby L was a girl. We even had our name picked out and occasionally called her by her name before the official reveal. And no, I swear we didn't peek.
I would be lying if I said we didn't think about opening up the envelope and finding out ourselves before the actual gender reveal in front of our families...but ultimately we stuck with the game plan and waited until the first.
One of the toughest moments was getting this text from our friends who wrapped up our box, knowing they had seen the confirmation of our little peanut's gender and knew before we did!!! In this picture the skates are all laced up and the box is full of the pink or blue goodness!
The friends we asked to help us with this were a couple, where the guy attends law school with my husband. His fiance-now WIFE-(how cool! and confirmation again that I wait too long to blog) sent him in with the box. No one in torts, or civil procedure, or whatever legal class it was had any idea that the silver box with the big white bow on it sitting in the aisle held the biggest secret about our new addition!
Instead of keeping it with him, my husband brought the box out and left it with me while I waited for him to finish class.
I then had to sit there in the cafe staring at the box for the entire duration of the class and consider that I could definitely, most certainly, peek and it would be fine - in fact I think I even justified that it could be funny since I always unwrap all of my Christmas presents early and then wrap them back up. But I didn't. (Or did I?.......???)
So for the decorations, the second best part to actually finding out! Because we were finding out the day after Halloween we didn't want to completely ignore the season and go with decor in bright florals as is my usual go to, but instead decided to go with fall neutral colors and pumpkins. We went to a great pumpkin patch near us that had unique colored pumpkins in pale shades of almost pink and blue and white!
We first picked out 30 small pumpkins for each guest to write their name on and place on the table next to either a girl or boy sign to show their guess. Here's our trunk full of white pumpkins. They are cute right?! A good blend of integrating the season but not being stuck with orange everywhere.
And here's how the table came out with two pumpkins - one a baby girl, and one a baby boy that we asked guests to sit their mini pumpkins by. We cut the tips off of the pacifiers and then glued what was left of the pacifier to the pumpkin. Now, although I knew, knew, KNEW in my heart it was a girl I couldn't risk being wrong in front of the whole crowd - so I put my pumpkin on the boy side. My husband was honest and put his by the girl pumpkin.
I also made the chalkboard signs below to hold up once we figured out what he or she is and then a chalkboard sign that listed some of the wives tales. I tell you, I didn't get too much advice when pregnant, but boy did I get quite a few guesses about the gender with very serious explanations as to why they were 100% sure they were right based on how I was carrying, my attitude, complexion, sickness, etc. I think 9 out of 10 people guessed boy. And at the gender reveal almost all of the pumpkins except for 6 were on the boy side!
Here's how the table where we stood to find out ended up coming out. We also brought one of the canvases from the paper flower wall take 2 that is now currently housed in the nursery! Also take a look at those pumpkins - they definitely look pink and blue, right!?
Just dropping in to write a quick line about something that happened yesterday. My husband and I were in the kitchen woefully discussing how we have all been sick this past week and hopefully how little L's lack of sleep was related to her illness and would soon be back to "normal."
L was sitting happily in her bumbo chair drooling and boogering all over the place while sucking furiously on the bumbo seat safety strap. Right then in the middle of our mess my husband starts dancing with me in the kitchen like we used to every day before my belly grew too large to move, much less dance.
We were laughing at L and her slobbering mess, commenting on how we used to dance like this all the time and we missed it and then just kept dancing away. It was adorable. He's adorable. He used to always hum the song we danced to at our wedding when we danced. But this time it sounded a bit different. I listened closely and realized that the romantic tune I was gliding around our miniature kitchen to was....
The first page serves as a simple list to write out each recipient and the obtained or planned gift. I highlighted mine to show who I have completed and who is still missing. **Family members if you zoom into this....I'll respect you.**
