#21daysofgratitudepractice2018

From November 1st we are going to start practising gratitude. Each day there will be a suggested action that you can take. You could make a Gratitude Journal or you can include some art on the way if you wish. I originally set up a separate blog called The Art of Practising Gratitude in 2014 which included suggestions for art journaling. I have removed the suggested art techniques this time round but if you want to use them then click on the link to the original blog.

Please read this blog post Practising Gratitude to see why I set up suggested actions rather than just having an attitude of gratitude.

So how will this work?
Each day for 21 days in November there will be a blog post with links and prompts. To ensure you get each post sign up for emails by putting your email address in the subscription box. Or follow along in whichever way you normally follow blogs.

Each post will include:

A Theme
Rather than just leaving you to think up 3 or 5 things that you're grateful for on that day I have chosen a daily theme. Each theme is a verb so it involves an action of some kind.

A Quote
There will be a quote either related to gratitude or more likely related to the day's theme. Some will be serious and some will be a bit off-beat.

A Bible Verse
As a Christian myself I want my Gratitude Journal to be about thanking God and so I have included a Bible verse each day. However just ignore it if it doesn't mean anything to you.

Inspiration
Where possible I have found videos, blogs or websites to provide inspiration for the day's theme. Some might be a bit silly.

A Gratitude Link
This will be a link to a blog or a website about gratitude.

A 'To thin about' Prompt
There will be questions for you to think about on the day's theme. You can answer them or just use them to get you thinking.

An Action
Each day there will be a suggested action for us to take to practise gratitude.

Facebook Group
There is a group on Facebook (which was set up in 2012) where you can share your work or ask questions. Or if you are a member of EveryDay Journals and Living Your Word of the Year please share any pages you do or thoughts you have there.

PDF
There will be a PDF each day to download (and print) with all the day's information and links so that you don't have to be continually looking at the blog.


For information about how you might make your Gratitude Journal click on the link below to see my previous post. It can be as simple as getting a small notebook and writing down things that come to mind as you read the blog. It need be no more than that. Or you can get involved in the techniques and challenges.

Make Your Own Art Journal

Remember the only rule is: this is your journal and you do it the way you want to. Other than that there are no rules.

If you are sharing your gratitude practice on social media please use this hashtag: #21daysofgratitudepractice2018

I do hope you will join me on November 1st.
Bernice

A time for ....

In the EveryDay Journal group on Facebook our theme for September is 'A Time for ...'.  As Mary wrote: 'We want to take some time in September and examine our word of the year as well as look at seasons and change using Ecclesiastes 3 as our guide. So get ready to spend some time reflecting on your word and how you have seen God use it so far this year.'

 

My word for the year is gratitude.   I have been sharing the pages from my journal each month and you may have noticed that you haven't seen any pages since the end of May.  This, as you may know, is because I fell over on Friday 8th June and smashed two fingers on my right hand.  As I am right handed this meant I was unable to do much creatively.  I couldn't write or use scissors or sew.

Thankfully I could dress myself (hooray for elastic waistbands) and wipe my own bottom (TMI?).

I struggled during the first couple of weeks with being grateful.  There was a lot of 'why me?', 'where were you God?', 'why haven't you miraculously healed me? and other similar questions.

I am much better now although three fingers on my right hand still don't bend properly but I have been able to go back to my journal and using the photos I have taken since June 8th fill in my pages.  And in doing so have been able to contemplate on what happened, where God was and the place of gratitude.

I can't remember what I planned to put on these pages for the beginning of June so I stuck in photos of a fabric book I made in May.

The saga begins.  I didn't share the photos of my face on Facebook because I looked dreadful and I only went out of the house for hospital appointments.  The whole summer seems to have been one long dentist and hospital appointment but actually doing this photo journal has made me realise it wasn't.

So where was God when  I fell over?  He was there although I didn't recognise him at the time.  He was there in the people who rushed to help me.  In the off-duty ambulance support officer who looked after me.  In the friends who came and were praying.  In the Minor Injury Unit where there were hardly any other patients and so I was seen very rapidly.  He was there in the abilities of the Doctor and the nurses who straight away referred me to the Hand Trauma Clinic at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and got me an appointment there for the following Tuesday.   And I am so grateful for all those people.

I am thankful for the people who came to visit me at home and the flowers and cards I received. And the lovely folks in my Lifegroup who were praying.   As you can see in the photo above I had to cancel a lot of workshops.  One I lost money on but that was the nature of the booking.  I am thankful that the bruising on my face disappeared fairly quickly.  It didn't feel like it at the time but when I see the photos together I can see that it did.

I am thankful for the doctors at the hospital who worked on my fingers.  It turned out that the doctor I thought was a Registrar was a Consultant in South Africa and is in the UK on an exchange.  So I had two Consultants.  Very unusual - thank you God.   The doctor was unable to pin or plate my fingers because the bones were smashed rather than fractured.  The broken fingers were manipulated and then strapped to the unbroken middle finger.  A large plaster cast was put over my hand and the whole thing was bandaged up.

Thankfully, we didn't need to cancel the Traverse weekend but I was somewhat hampered in what I could do.  I had signed up for Karen Stamper's Online Sketchbook Course so I had a go using my left hand.

I didn't cancel the Julia Triston workshop which I have already blogged about.

And so we come to July. Sorry, some of my photos are a bit iffy - I'm still having problems holding the camera.

We had an unusally hot summer this year.  I don't like really hot but it was useful in that I didn't need to put on too many clothes and could wear sandals.  I spent most of three weeks in July sitting in the chair reading detective fiction on my Kindle - thank you Kindle Unlimited - and watching Le Tour de France on the television.

In the fall I had broken the tooth underneath the crown so had to have the tooth removed and a temporary denture put in.  I also had the plaster removed this week and was handed over to the Hand Therapy department to get my immobile fingers working.   I hadn't realised that 5 weeks of immobilisation would result in not being able to bend my fingers.  This resulted in another pity party and questioning God about it all.  Where was the healing my friends had prayed for?

Not only had I had to cancel workshops that I was attending but I had to close The Studio at church - so no Mixed Media Mondays and no Studio PlayDays.  This really frustrated me as I felt I was letting people down.

The Hand Therapy was going well and I was doing the exercises at home.  Part of the reason for taking so many photos was to record progress because sometimes I didn't feel as though there was much.  I was given a splint to wear at night.  In the day time I do exercises to bend the fingers and at night wear the splint to straighten them!

I was thankful that I could attend Richard & Becky's wedding without wearing a plaster cast or a splint.  I've left the gap to be able to put a photo of Roger & I at the wedding.

Which leads me neatly to the greatest support I've had over the weeks since June 8th.  Roger has been the chief cook (yes there was one good thing to come out of it - I didn't have to cook for several weeks!), chauffeur and house husband.  To be truthful, he was already doing most of the washing and all of the supermarket shopping pre June 8th.  But I don't know where I would have been without him these last weeks.  So my biggest thank you goes to him.

Next time we'll catch up with August and September.

Thanks for joining me today
Bernice

Join Our Inspirational Facebook Group

Mary Brack, Valerie Sjodin and I are using one journal to record events, experiences and relationships and to explore our word’s meaning in visual and fun ways. We are each blogging about our experiences and our art. If you would like to connect with others about creatively organising your word, your ideas, thoughts, prayers, events, or your projects all in one journal, you are invited to join our Facebook group: Everyday Journals – Living Your Word of the Year.

Hashtags on Instagram: #everydayjournals2018, #livingyourword2018

Check out the other blogs:
Mary: www.foundonbrighton.com
Valerie: www.valeriesjodin.com/blog

Being Continually Thankful

This post first appeared on the Jubilee Church blog yesterday.

We are a few days into the New Year and already many of the resolutions people made on January 1st will have been broken. I don’t make resolutions. I choose a word for the year that describes what I want to see more of in my life. Last year’s word was ‘connect’ because I wanted to have more connection to my family and friends, to my creative work and to God.

This year’s word is gratitude or thankfulness.

In the United States, Thanksgiving is celebrated on the last Thursday of November. Recently the whole month of November has become synonymous with thankfulness and people have been encouraged to keep a gratitude journal. But thankfulness should be a year-long habit – a lifestyle – not something we keep on one day or for one month.

There have been many studies done on the value of being thankful. It turns out that gratitude is good for our mental health.

We don’t need to keep a gratitude journal although writing things down always helps. (There are also Apps available.) One thing we can all do at the end of the day is think of 3 things that we are thankful for. We could start the day that way too. And having thought of the things, we can thank God for them.

Thanking God in prayer is powerful. We can thank him for what he has given us already and we can thank him for things he has yet to do in our lives. We can thank him for the promises he has made us that are not yet fulfilled.

You might like to do a study of the words thank, thanks, or thanksgiving in the Bible. There are many examples. Let’s ‘Enter his gates with thanksgiving and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name’. Psalm 100:4

New Year’s resolutions or contemplation of lifestyle changes almost always consist of activities we must do or change usually around diet and exercise. We say to ourselves: ‘This is THE year when we will lose that weight or improve our core strength’! But thankfulness is a habit we can easily incorporate into our lives. And instead of rushing to add even more activities to our hectic lives why not quiet down and be thankful. Becky Webb recently shared with us about incorporating rest into our lives - here's the link to the podcast.

We can be thankful as we rest. Let’s make 2018 the year we learn to be continually thankful.

Thanks for joining me today.  And thank you for your support last year.  I hope you will keep visiting my blog through 2018.
Bernice

PS: You can follow my journey with my word of the year here on my blog.  If God gives you a word for 2018 why not join us in the Everyday Journals # Living Your Word of the Year Facebook group.

Ready for 2018

Happy New Year!

 

Does a new year fill you with excitement of what is to come?  Or a sense of same old, same old?  Time passes and we have no control over its passing.  But we do have control of what we spend the time doing.

Last year I spent a lot of time thinking (or is that procrastinating?) and a lot of time on Facebook and other websites.   I've watched lots of creative videos on YouTube, a few clips from The Ellen Show  and a fair number of dog rescue videos.  (Hope for Paws do some great work!)

What I found myself thinking quite often at the end of a day was how little I had accomplished.  I realised (derr!) that I felt like that because I don't have a plan for the day.  I think this is partly to do with when I was a teacher and then working as a church administrator that days were full and planned.  I wanted to break away from that feeling of over-structure.  But what has happened is that I'm at the other extreme now with no structure.  And to be honest it's just as stressful - but a different kind of stress.

So really, in terms of what I wanted from an Everyday Journal, was an ability to put some structure into my days, weeks and months and to be able to look back and say 'Yes.  I did this!  I achieved that!'  I asked myself questions about what I wanted to have in this journal and originally I wasn't going to have weekly pages but quickly realised that was exactly what I DID need.

So I have come up with pages like this above, where there are 3 boxes for each day.  By the side of the boxes I shall write 3 things to do that day and then be able to put a tick in the little turquoise box on completion.  At the end of January I shall review how this has worked for me and may come up with a different way to work through February.

I have completed general pages in my Leuchtturm1917 journal and prepared for January.

The index page

2018 and 2019 at a glance

Month by month commitments.  I also have a calendar on my phone but it helps me to see it written down as well.

I don't want to have many lists in my journal but I did think it would be useful to know what I've signed up for (right) and what technique videos are available to me (left) rather than keeping the list in my head.  Writing all this down frees up space in my brain!

During 2017 I decided I shouldn't sign up for so many online courses (hah - like that worked!) and it would be better to do in-person workshops.  I have put the details of the courses here.  And have realised that I have missed off the Art Cloth workshop I'm doing at Littleheath Barn.

I belong to a textile group and we have two exhibitions coming up in March and April so I have set up pages to record what I am making and what is left to be done.  The photos on the left hand page are the finished pieces.  They are only attached at the top of the photo so that I can write on the page underneath.

The next page in the journal is the January calendar

And then my pages for January.  Between each week I have left a blank double page spread for notes and journaling or whatever comes to mind!

Every two weeks I have put a page like this.  My plan is to write down 3 things everyday that I am thankful for.  This is one way of being able to keep my word of the year - gratitude - in sharp focus.

It has occurred to me that maybe there's not enough room for any journaling but we'll see.  Perhaps I only need a single page rather than a double page for a week.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

February

In January I told you how I am combining my One Little Word, 'I am' tags and my Unplanner all in one binder.

I managed to keep up with February although some days I didn't do anything other than art so at the end of the month I printed out some small photos of the pages of my February Challenge Sketchbook.

February Divider
I planned to put a large photo of snowdrops on this page and at one point thought I might have to find a photo from a previous year.  However we eventually did go out and find some.

Week 1
The theme for the I am statements for February was  'Made in the image of God'.  I don't usually include photos of peoplein my art but managed to do it this time on each tag.

Week 2

The List Ten for this month was about things I shouldn't have done and one of the art challenges was Gratitude so I decided to list 10 things I'm thankful for.

Week 3

Week 4

One Little Word
The assignment for February was to practice something everyday and record it.  I used my February sketchbook as my art practice everyday.

I damaged my back at the beginning of the month and wasn't able to do the Salsa exercise I had planned to do.  I was eventually able to do short walks.  The back is ok now so hopefully in March I will be able to exercise more frequently.  Just have to find the motivation!

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

Gratitude

Today in the United States it is Thanksgiving.  Happy Thanksgiving to all my US readers.

Over the past few years I have run Gratitude art challenges.  The first one was in November 2012: An Attitude of Gratitude.

 

The second in 2013 was also An Attitude of Gratitude challenge.

However by 2014 I realised it was no good just having the attitude you needed to take action.  And because I wanted to promote the idea that we should be thankful all the year round I posted the challenge in May: The Art of Practising Gratitude.

Each of these challenge blogs is still available and you can work through them at your own rate.  They have prompts, technique challenges and quotes and bible verses to use on your pages.

Have you ever made a gratitude journal?  Leave a comment or better still, you can link your blog page, Instagram photo or flickr photo using the Linky below.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice

Gratitude and Thanksgiving

On the last Thursday in November people in the United States celebrate Thanksgiving.  In the crafting world in particular, November has become synonymous with giving thanks.  I have organised art challenge blogs in the past to produce Gratitude Journals.  You can find links to them by clicking on the Art Challenge Blogs link at the top of the page.

After being away in Australia for over 3 weeks and the recovery time since I had not done anything creative and just as I was wondering what I could do to kickstart my creativity Shonna released a new class at His Kingdom Come.  I hadn't planned on making a gratitude journal this year but Shonna was using techniques I don't usually use so I thought I would give it a go.

The journal is 7 inches square and as I don't draw I used various of my autumnal stamps and used watercolour paints to colour the pages and the stamps.

The cover

The pages

Some of the stamping didn't come as well as it might.  Here are some diappearing dandelion heads.

And finally, assembled with the book rings and some fibres.

Now it's ready for me to use.  If you are thinking of making a gratitude journal you might like to check out my Pinterest board where you will find quotes, journals and pages.

Thanks for stopping by.
Bernice