G is for Goals

In our Living Your Word of the Year group we are using a fortnightly (bi-weekly) A-Z challenge throughout the year to help us focus on our word and live it out.

Because of the way I have made my journal it's a case of going with the flow of what background the pages have when I turn to them.  Here are the pages for G.

My word for the year is Commitment, but no matter how committed you are or how focused you are, unless you lay out your goals you won't actually get anywhere.

I looked back to my page on Commitment to see what I had wanted to see more of in 2019.

• Read the Bible more frequently
• Pray more regularly
• Trust God more
• Move every day (walk, exercise etc)
• Create everyday
• Finish things

All of the above are great but they are fairly vague.  And that's the point of goals - they work better if they are SMART. Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely.  I decided I would set SMART goals for two of the above.  I found a suitable Bible verse and printed it out along with the goals.  I tried various placements on the page until I was happy to glue them down.

I printed the photo out again that I used in my vision board.  I really don't like putting people in my artwork but I need to keep the photo of me when I was slimmer to motivate me that it can be done.  I love Valerie's idea of using some of my washi tape stash so I made arrows with them.  Arrows represent direction.  Then I drew the dashed line to represent walking.

I drew the dashed lines around the typed words.

The pages together.

I'll let you know how I get on with achieving these goals.  I shall start working on them next week.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

Join Our Inspirational Facebook Group: Living Your Word of the Year

Join Mary Brack, Valerie Sjodin and I in our Facebook group where we are giving participants the opportunity to live out an A-Z of their own word throughout 2019.  Mary explains what we are doing in her blog post.  We don't like a lot of rules, so we will have suggestions and options to spark creativity, and to help in recording and exploring our word’s meaning in visual and fun ways. We will each blog about our experiences and our art.

 Living Your Word of the Year 2019

Hashtags on Instagram:  #livingyourword2019

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

To ensure you get updates from Valerie, Mary & I why not subscribe to our blogs.

Journal Cover

You may remember that I put together a journal for Word of the Year but didn't put a cover on it.

Valerie is doing a series on her blog called Washi Tape Adventures which gives ideas for using all that lovely washi tape you have squirrelled away.   I have such a lot of washi tape so I thought I would use it to decorate the cover of my journal.   First I glued wallpaper lining paper onto my journal using Golden Soft Gel Medium.

I put it under a weight while the glue dried and then trimmed the edges.  I put an extra wide tape down the spine.

I put stripes of washi tape across the front.  I was going to do it with small bits of washi tape - so that there might be 2 or 3 patterns on one line but decided it was too complicated!

I trimmed the edges and put vertical strips.  I folded over the tape on the outside edge.

And then I did the back.  I deliberately didn't match it to the front.

And here it is.  If the tape starts peeling a bit - and it might with handling - I shall Gel Medium over it.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice

Join Our Inspirational Facebook Group: Living Your Word of the Year

Join Mary Brack, Valerie Sjodin and I in our Facebook group where we are giving participants the opportunity to live out an A-Z of their own word throughout 2019.  Mary explains what we are doing in her blog post.  We don't like a lot of rules, so we will have suggestions and options to spark creativity, and to help in recording and exploring our word’s meaning in visual and fun ways. We will each blog about our experiences and our art.

 Living Your Word of the Year 2019

Hashtags on Instagram:  #livingyourword2019

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

To ensure you get updates from Valerie, Mary & I why not subscribe to our blogs.

A new project

I am doing a Seasons based course at Littleheath Barn which I realise I haven't shared here but I will do soon.  One of the things that Liske has been suggesting is making a different style of book for each season.  Her Winter book has been a Wabi-Sabi book.   Whilst this style of book doesn't fit with what I am doing for the four seasons, I loved the idea of making such a book.

I have bought lots of rust dyed fabrics and decided I would use those and I stamped and printed circles onto the fabric.  I cut the fabric to the size I wanted them to make a book.

At this point I was just playing with fabric and not really having a plan.  And then the light bulb moment!

I wrote about how I played with some ideas at Committed to Cloth in this blog post. At C2C I was working on the theme of Senses and in particular Taste and oranges and lemons.  The week of play produced this amongst other pieces.

I could see the influence of the work above on the printing I had done on the rust dyed fabric.  Great - I have a theme for the book.

I sorted out the fabrics into pages and was sure I had made 12 pages.  However it turned out to be 11 and then decided rather than have one book, I would make 2 books.

I cut circles and wedges from other fabrics I had and bondawebbed them to the pages.  I had also realised that the book needed some contrast and bought some hand-dyed fabric from Leah Higgins.  I started some free-machining on these pages but soon realised that it's not really my thing - insufficient practise really!   So I am now going to hand stitch on the pages for now.

This is the larger book.  The photos show both sides of the page.  When you sew on one side, the stitching shows up on the other side which is interesting.  But as you can see I'm not good at free machining circles!

I'll show you how I get on with these books in later posts.

Thanks for joining me today.
Bernice