Valentine Coupon Book

Hi Friends!

I made this a few weeks back, but was afraid to post it too soon since I was planning on giving it as a gift to da hubs for Valentine's Day and didn't want to spoil the surprise for him. Cause he reads this blog. Sometimes. When I tell him to. 😉

And so I am giving it to those of you who are scrambling for a last minute gift idea to put together before your sweetie comes home from work. Or for those who are so on it, they are already prepping for next year. If that's you, good on you.

Can we first say that I LOVE VALENTINE'S DAY!?? Cue all the heart emojis Blogger has to offer...aaaaand GO: ❤❣♥♡💓💖💗💘💙💚💛💜💝💟😍💕💞

I really do.

It makes me feel happy inside.

Even in college when I didn't have a S.O. I loved Valentine's Day.

WHO WOULDN'T WANT TO CELEBRATE LOVE??

And to those of you who hate it because "you should be telling the people you love that you love them every day, you don't need a special day, blah blah blah, my name is Eeyore..." I hope you also hate Christmas and Easter, cause same principle applies!

Ah HA! I gotcha there, now didn't I??

ANYWHOOOO... Onto the booklet.

You can download it one of two ways which are as follows:
     ❥  Download only the pages you want. Hand them out as individual Valentines/Coupons, keep
          them all for yourself, etc
     ❥  Download the PDF and print them in duplex mode, making sure not to let Reader resize them,
          cut them out, and bind them however you like to (I just sloooooowly sewed mine together with
          my machine).

Now that that is out of the way, I must warn you; if you don't like terrible love puns about blubbery sea-creatures, then this ain't the book for you...



































Wait for it...

And BEHOLD!

Front Cover | Download here

Butterfly Over Here | Download here

It's Irr-Elephant | Download here

Ugly Duckling | Download here

My Beary Favorite | Download here

Tweet Little Bird | Download here

Long Giraffe Love | Download here

Anatomy | Download here

Rat Here, Rat Now | Download here

Ensnared, Ensailed | Download here

Ring-Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding-Ding | Download here

-OR-

 DOWNLOAD THE WHOLE BOOKLET HERE.

Family Joy is Found in Righteousness

If you've read any of my other posts you've most likely discovered that I'm a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I love my church, and the gospel that I have found within its bounds.
One aspect of my church (differentiating from gospel here) that I have come to love is the concept of Home and Visiting teaching.
Each willing adult member of the church is given an assignment to minister to other families in the congregation (we call it a 'ward'). It's an assignment that can be really difficult for some.
It can be hard to go out of your comfort zone and befriend and try to converse with someone you know nothing about.
The first visit is always the hardest to set up. It's not that you dislike the person you've been assigned to visit with, it's just scary to reach out to someone who might say, "Eh, no. Don't come by and I don't like you."
I've been fortunate to cultivate many relationships through Visiting Teaching, and each time I'm nervous about an assignment it always becomes less of an obligation and more of a desire to actually love, serve, and minister to my assignee.
The church puts out a short message each month that we believe is inspired, and we're asked to share the message with our families.

This months message is "Family Joy is Found in Righteousness" and I love it. My favorite quote from the message this month was as follows:

And while our family members can sometimes drift away from righteousness like the Nephites did, Elder Scott said that a Christ-centered home still “provides the greatest assurance for peace and refuge in our homes.” He acknowledged that “there will still be plenty of challenges or heartaches, but even in the midst of turmoil, we can enjoy inner peace and profound happiness.”

I found this to be true in my home growing up. Every family has their struggles and mine was no exception. But as my siblings and I lost sight of our righteous goals, we always felt the peace and refuge that our home provided. My mother always made our home a place where the spirit could dwell, and I think that's why so many of our friends liked to congregate there - unbeknownst to them, what they were feeling was the presence of the Spirit.

I've seen something similar in my own home since starting my own family. My husband is a student and his classmates often choose our home for social events, even when our home may not be the largest or the most accommodating. It could be that it's just easier since we're the only ones with kids that need to be sleeping while we're playing, but I believe there is an additional element there, that others can feel something different when they enter our home.

My second favorite part of the message that I loved was one of the 'Additional Scriptures', 2 Nephi 5:27 says, "And it came to pass that we lived after the manner of happiness." I love that! I hope that as I continue to try my best to live in righteousness that I, like the Nephites, can live after the manner of happiness! My husband actually shared this quote from Elder Jeffery R. Holland on facebook today, and I thought it fit right along with this message:

"If we give our heart to God, if we love the Lord Jesus Christ, if we do the best we can to live the gospel, then tomorrow—and every other day—is ultimately going to be magnificent, even if we don’t always recognize it as such. Why? Because our Heavenly Father wants it to be! He wants to bless us. A rewarding, abundant, and eternal life is the very object of His merciful plan for His children! It is a plan predicated on the truth “that all things work together for good to them that love God.” So keep loving. Keep trying. Keep trusting. Keep believing. Keep growing. Heaven is cheering you on today, tomorrow, and forever." Elder Jeffrey R Holland.

I made up a few printables with my visiting teaching ladies in mind, and thought I'd share them with you if you'd like to share them with your families (and those you teach) too! They are sized at 16x20, but you can easily print them as 8x10s.

Download the Green one here

Download the yellow one here

Download the chalk one here

I can smell autumn dancing in the breeze

I've been in a design rut.

I have been itching to design something new, but every time I've open up Gimp, I've come up short. I have had no idea what to do. I usually have 100 ideas that I want to try out, or am forcing my designs on my family members as soon as an opportunity arises: "Oh, you're having a baby!? Here's a birth announcement!" or "Congrats on graduating, send-me-some-pictures-and-I'll-get-you-an-announcement-in-2-days."

Not lately, though.

I've thought about designing our family Christmas card but just didn't feel like it.

Then today I just decided to just do it.

I found a quote that I liked about Autumn and I went to work.

I won't lie, every time I look at the finished product I can't help but think that it's not complete...

I'm hoping popping it in a frame will do the trick.

But, I'd like to share it with you, even if I feel it is inadequate.

I hope that you like it, even just a little bit.

Uniform Text - Download the 8x10 here!

Varying text - Download the 8x10 here!

I love the imagery of this quote. autumn dancing and crisp sunburt leaves.

It makes me want to wear leg warmers & boots and sip apple cider, and I've never even worn leg warmers!

I hope that you are all enjoying the cool crisp air (if you've got it where you live yet). I've been enjoying it immensely!

Are there other things that you'd like me to design? I'm really open for any and all ideas!

Thanks for reading!

Wild Moose Chase

After sharing my Primary Newsletter, I got to thinking, I should start sharing my designs I've done over the years.

One that I'm pretty proud of is one I did for Shawn's DPT class. As part of their fundraising efforts, every year the DPT 2nd years put on a Trail Run called the Wild Moose Chase.

Shawn volunteered me to design the flyer, and even if I was a little nervous (wasn't sure what they're expectations would be) I was excited to design again. I subscribed to Creative Market a while back when I bought my blog font (which I don't actually like very much...I should change it), and I get a lot of freebie design elements every week and so I was excited to use some of them that I thought were perfect for this flyer!

Sign up to do the run at runsignup.com/race/wa/mead/wildmoosechase

What do you think?

Primary Newsletter Design

A few months ago I was called to serve as the secretary in my ward's primary. If you're not a member of the LDS faith, that was a whole mess of gobledegook to you.

Ward - congregation of people within a particular geographical area
Primary - organization for Children 1.5 - 11 years old

One of my duties as secretary is to design and distribute a monthly newsletter with assignments for the children; information on that month's theme, scripture, and song; birthday's; activity schedules; etc.

I've had quite a time getting into the swing of these newsletters, sometimes they'd take me more than 10 hours to put together! Originally I wanted it to look 'clean' and professional, but then I realized that this is for kids and decided to spice it up a little bit. I think I've got a pretty decent format going right now and wanted to share it with all of you.

It was designed in google docs, and if any of you have played around in there, you know that some times things can be a little bit frustrating. A few things to point out if you'd like to use the document so you're not pulling your hair out:

1. Tables in Google Docs require a 'carriage return' (enter) before and after them.
2. The doc uses tables within tables, so if you're getting confused as to which table you're in, set all of the borders to a solid black line so you can get an idea of what you're working with.
3. The headers and footers drive me bonkers, too, so if you figure them out let me know.
4. The 'August' at the top is an image that you can replace with text. I happened to receive some cute month lettering that I got to utilize here recently, but you don't have to use an image.

You can make a copy and start editing it up here!

If you're interested in knowing how we track who has participated in opening exercises, I can probably share a template for that as well, though I have to be honest and admit that the original idea wasn't mine.

Good luck to all you hard working newsletter makers out there! Cheers!