Friday, January 28, 2011

Smile often . . .


Working up to a big weekend of revelry and cavorting.  The husband is celebrating one of those pesky two-digit birthdays that ends with a zero.  He is not one to stress about the passage of time or its markers along the way and since I'm right behind him birthday-wise, I've decided to adopt his cheery outlook.

Wishing you a weekend filled with easy smiles and much frolicking!

Thursday, January 27, 2011

Something. Anything.

Write something.  Anything.  A list is easy.

  • I woke to a lovely snowfall this morning.  Giant, meandering flakes drifting ever downwards, muffling all of the city noises.  Something to smile about.
  • Have I ever mentioned that I'm left handed?  I've always loved being a lefty.  My mom taught me how to knit and crochet the right handed way, but I ended up holding my needles and hooks in an unconventional manner and had to figure out how to make it work.  Every once in a while, being left handed gently reminds me that we all have a bunch of these quirks, these largely inconsequential differences that are there to teach us how to adapt and adjust and view the world from a unique perspective.  I love that.
  • In addition to being left handed, I am the world's worst voice mail messenger.  Something about that beep sends me into a panicky tail spin.  Incoherency takes over, followed by nervous giggles.  Please don't ever ask me to call and leave a message.

Draw something.  Anything.  A doodle, a happy face, the stick figure from the hangman game even.

  • Here are a new little box and frame that may appear soon on a journal page near you: 

More to come . . .

Happy Thursday, friends!

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

New journal page

Update: The journal page in this post is no longer available for download. For a selection of free, printable journal pages, please visit my Printable Journal Pages collection.

~~~

These are my favourite days, the days when I get to post a new journal page.  So let's get on with it!

Today's page takes a quick peek at those moments of keen awareness of the world around us, you know those moments, the ones that give us goosebumps . . .
 

. . . or those moments of great conversation with friends or family members or colleagues or strangers on the bus whose viewpoints are very different from our own . . .


The entire page looks an awful lot like the photo below, except when you print your page, you will likely have more ink in your printer cartridge than I have in mine . . . office supply shop, here I come!


Today's journal page is available in its usual configurations here (border-free) and here (border-full and colour-free) and here (borderful and colourful.)

Thank you so much to everyone who commented on my last post.  You guys make my day with every comment and I'm quite sure I wouldn't have made it to page 38 without your encouragement and friendship.  It means the world to me.

Happy Tuesday, friends!

Thursday, January 13, 2011

New journal page

Update: The journal page in this post is no longer available for download. For a selection of free, printable journal pages, please visit my Printable Journal Pages collection.

~~~

So I've been gone for a bit.  Got a little lost there for awhile, I have to admit.  Ran out of ideas.  Happens, I guess.  For a long stretch, just looking at the computer made me anxious, so I started to avoid it and even when ideas started to return, I wasn't sure about coming back.

There are 37 individual journal pages posted here at Grace is Overrated (or at least there will be after this post.)  For a long time this felt like an evolving project, and I think we've come a long way together, but I've been feeling for some time now the need to steer these pages toward a larger goal.  What that should be, exactly, is still a hazy mystery to me and that drives me a little nuts sometimes.  Mostly because there are a lot of things I love about the casual routine we've got going here:  I love posting the pages individually as they are created; I love the thrill of giving them to you with no strings attached; and I love your reactions to them.  I've made a lot friends here, friends who've dropped by to say hi even though I haven't been around (thank you for that), and I don't want that to change.

At some point, though -- right about now, for example -- I'll have to move beyond casual.  Somehow, casual made sense at page 10, when I wasn't sure what I was doing or whether anyone would be interested, but now at page 37 when there are all these pages and no structure within which to make sense of them, casual just isn't enough anymore.  Also, casual is sadly unsustainable in a financial sort of way and I have to think about that too, even though I'd really rather not.

It's time to move forward, to experiment a little and see if we can't come up with something a little more cohesive and perhaps a little less formulaic.  There will be lots of experimentation involved and I hope that you will stick with me through the odd creative glitch here and there.  It's also time to open a shop.  So I'll be working on that too and letting you know how that goes.

What I've been rambling towards is this:  today begins an informal sort of countdown.  Page 40 is about as far as I'd like to go with the pages as they are.  Beyond that?  Well, there will be a lot of tweaking between now and then.  I'm not saying that the new normal beyond page 40 will be unrecognizable in comparison to all that came before it, I'm just saying that hopefully our journal pages and this blog will work better as a whole.

Today's new page is definitely forward leaning.  Bordering on plans, resolutions and other such things, but not quite.  Because I like to leave room for whim.



The full page looks startlingly like this shot here, taken in front of my back window because that was the only light to be found in the entire house . . .


As always, you'll find today's page here (no border) and here (border, colour-it-yourself) and here (border and a splash of colour).

Hoping you'll stay tuned, friends!