gratitude journal 2014

It's gratitude journal time!  

The inspiration for this year's gratitude album came from this pin from Kesiart.

She created hers as an Advent calendar (genius!), and the moment I saw it, I knew it would be the perfect format for this year's mini album for our family's Thanksgiving Day gratitudes.

The frame is from IKEA.

I simply cut paper 3 3/8 x 5 and stapled pockets of 3 3/8 x 2.

Then embellish the pockets (I kept mine super simple).  Hole punch and thread onto a binder ring.  Family members will record this year's gratitudes onto coordinating Project Life cards.

I scored a metal tag on clearance at Michaels for like 40 cents!  G is for Gratitude (and Great deals!).

You can see past years' gratitude journals 

HERE

top dog dies: give thanks

Each year for Thanksgiving, I like to create a gratitude journal for family members and dinner guests to record what they are grateful for.  More recently, I have been creating place cards for the table setting.  This year, I was lucky enough to have some Top Dog Dies to help me out.

Using the Scallop Box Die

I created place card favor boxes:

20 of them:

Each one topped with a handmade flower

filled with a pearl center.

The boxes themselves are filled with some chocolates for a post-dinner, pre-pie treat!

For this year's gratitude journal, I decided to create a banner:

Each pennant has a glassine envelope that contains a Project Life card for recording this year's gratitudes.

Each pocket is embellished with an accordion-folded medallion made with the Sizzix die

and trimmed with paper cut with the Madison Border Die

I love that this year's "journal" doubles as holiday decor!

For those of you celebrating tomorrow, have a very happy and blessed Thanksgiving.  And for those living in other parts of the world, may you always find something to be grateful for.

gratitude

I always think of November as the month of gratitude.  

There is always, always something to be grateful for.

And I truly do believe the key to happiness lies in being grateful.

This month we are taking note of our daily gratitudes through:

the Happy Tapper Gratitude Journal app:

our family mini gratitude journal:

I also wish I could say I could keep up with the Instagram photo project #thirtydaysofthanksgiving, but I am really, really, really going to try to complete all of the #fmsphotoaday prompts this month (so far so good on day 4--you can see all of mine on my Instagram feed)

I'm also on the lookout for some inspiration for this year's Thanksgiving Day gratitude recorder.  Since I'm hosting Thanksgiving for the first time ever, I'm kind of tossing around the idea of having each guest write what they are thankful for on the tablecloth.  They can add the year and then we can reuse the cloth each year and add to it (that's assuming this year's food is yummy enough that I get to host Thanksgiving again!)

Here are our past gratitude projects:

2008

2009 (no blog post)

2010

2011

Are you doing anything special to record gratitude this month?

ps.  while we're on the topic, this is a beautiful book about gratitude:

check out the website  h e r e  for loads of inspiration

Gratitude Album

It has become a tradition in my family to take note of what we are grateful for on Thanksgiving.

To go along with this tradition, I create some sort of gratitude holder.  

Last year it was this Gratitude Box:

The year before, this little suitcase (which somehow never got posted to my blog):

And in 2008, it was a meander album {instructions are here}:

This year, I decided to create some simple tags:

The backside looks like this ( I simply ran regular manilla shipping labels right through the manual-feed tray of the printer):

 Each tag has a different quote about gratitude.

Since I had to come up with 24, I kept the designs simple and made them all with DCWV Harvest Gathering papers and some paper doilies.

They will hang from a branch in a cranberry-filled vase so that everyone can take one down and fill it out:

And then they will all be bound together in this little envelope mini:

so we can flip through it next year.

Gratitude Box

This time of year, feelings of gratitude abound, and it has become a traditional time to take stock, count blessings and appreciate life.  For the past three years I've done a little gratitude project for my family--everyone writes down their thoughts of thankfulness on Thanksgiving, and I match them up with snapshots from the day.  

Here is this year's:

I upcycled a box that held notecards and altered it with some patterned papers and a handmade flower.

The top opens up and the cards fit perfectly right inside:

The cards are just a word doc I created, printed on white cardstock and matted with colored cardstock.  

You can download the cards here.  The fonts I used are Times and Times Again and CK Becky, both free downloads.

On Thanksgiving Day, I will be sure to get snapshots of each family member, and then I can just print them out glue them to each card and trim to fit.  Easy!

I hope you will whip up one of these before the holiday to record your family's gratitudes.

Here is a pic of the other two I have done:

You can find details for the meander book (left) along with full directions here.  I will be back to add pics and deets for the little lunch box in the next day or two.

A Thanksgiving Project

During this time of the year, many of us find ourselves reflecting on our feeling of gratitude. This is a mini-album I put together last Thanksgiving to house my families' notes of gratitude. I'm planning to do the same project again this year, maybe something more along the lines of this adorable box by Alexandra.That's my beautiful sister alongside my gorgeous niece (I must go warn them I put their photos up here!)


I found the original instructions for creating the meander book at Splitcoast. Below you can download and print my instructions I created for a class:

Meander Book Class