29-Day Giving Challenge

This week I joined a group called 29-Day Giving Challenge. Check it out here: http://givingchallenge.ning.com/

The idea is to give something away every day for 29 days. There are lots of caring people on the site and many of them (as do I) have blogs of their "gives" for each day which range from spending special time with their family, sending a card to a friend, or doing a Random Act of Kindness to a stranger. It's full of great ideas and of course the whole idea behind it is to change the world by changing people.

Some of the members are on their fourth round of 29 days of giving! It's been real fun for me and it would be great to see you join up!

Thrifty Thursday, September 18

Thrifty Thursdays

About once a week I visit my favorite place, Leftovers, Etc. For $7.00 you can fill a grocery bag with whatever is in the store. The concept of the store is to provide free/affordable resources to educators, artists, scout groups,etc. The store is supplied by donations from it's own shoppers, and from corporations and businesses.

One never knows for sure what will be in stock, although you can always count on finding the usual items like pringle cans, coffee containers and such recycleables. My favorite areas are in the stationary and domestic departments where you can find all sorts of things pertaining to paper/art supplies, and fabric and crafts.

Because I work with children at church as the Craft Coordinator I'm always on the lookout for things that can be used in future projects. In the Spring I found a box of really good heavyweight paper and the whole box was $4. I have a cool die of a 3-d angel that the children will be making as give-a-ways at the Nursing home at Christmas. All summer I have been collecting things that can go on the angel's dress and wings.

If I went here to get something specific I would probably be somewhat disappointed, but I have learned to let this be my few hours of quiet time and my big $7.00 splurge on myself for the week.

Spring flowers in my yard

An Art project I got suckered into

I belong to a group of wonderful women who PIF (Pay It Forward) and Snag items related to scrapbooking, rubberstamping and altered arts. There are three levels of trading,Low Level value $0-$4.99, mid level value $5.00-14.99, and High Level value, $15 to $25.

First you decide the value of the item you want to trade off and place it with a good description on the right level database. If someone "snags" it, they pay 1 creditfrom their account and you earn 1 credit for your account on that board. Then you can use your credit to snag something of interest to you perhaps pif'd by a completely different person.

Ok, that's not too hard to understand. Well, one week we were having a game called Hand Made Hoopla sponsored by one of our members, Kay. She's a real live wire! Everything she does is done with excellence, and she urges us to do things like PIF with generosity, and do Random Acts of Kindness. Well she Piff'd a 26 day journal of what she called her ordinary life. Well, I snagged it before anyone else could! What a great way to learn more about a new friend.

Well, what I quickly learned about her is that she is really sneaky. Right after I snagged her journal she writes back and says, "well, you know, now you have to keep a journal for 26 days too." It didn't sound so hard. I've kept spiritual journals before so I thought this would be pretty easy, but I was wrong. I don't do anything easy.

The book had to be at least 3x5 inches. I'd been wanting to make a book using tabbed index dividers so that's what I settled on. I also found a tablet of paper by K&Company called Classic K Margo, and used these papers to give the book a little continuity.

Above are a few pictures of the journal. The first is the cover and an idea of how thick it is. The next is an entry about procrastinating on my Crow pages for a Fat Book project, and the third one is a fun quote I found after seeing some beautiful rainbows this summer.