One Little Word

Hey there crafty friends! If you saw my blog post from yesterday, you know I've been dealing with a lot of personal issues (and more that I haven't even talked about yet!), but that hasn't stopped me from getting crafty whenever I can. For instance, right now I'm working on my 2020 Word of the Year, aka One Little Word project, and this year, my word is "Clarity".

If you haven't heard of One Little Word, it's been around for a long time, and has been used by various celebrities, life coaches, and online gurus for years.  It's part self-help with a crafty twist, and many adherents participate year after year. The most basic approach is to pick a word (usually something you want to focus on, learn, or manifest in your life), and you find ways to bring that word into your daily life.  My first Word of the Year was in 2013, and I started a "365" project (see below). Last year, my good friend, Susan, gifted me with a subscription to Ali Edwards' "One Little Word" online workshop, and I was hooked! This will be my second year to participate, and I can honestly say I've gotten more out of my word than with any other project.

So I finally managed to find the time to record a flip-through video and I can't wait to share it with you, even though 2019 is over and done.  It's such a wonderful and creative process that I can't resist.

The video isn't great (still working through the bugs in that process!), but I hope you got a good idea how cool the One Little Word project really is.  Maybe it will inspire you to do a OLW project of your own? Oh, and if you're new here and curious about my 365 project (no, I didn't finish it, but I do still work on it), you can start with these posts here:

• Six Reasons to Start a 365 Project This Year!
• Five Easy Ways to 365
• One Word of Truth
• One Project a Week Alternative
• See the results on our Flikr.com group

You can also search "365 project" right here on my blog to see more info about many of the daily projects I posted in the Flikr group.  

Thanks for reading, and I can't wait to share more of my One Little Word and other Ali Edwards projects with you!

Cindy

One Little Word January Flip Through

Howdy there!

If you've been following me this week, you may recall my mention of One Little Word, a digital online class presented by Ali Edwards.  My sweet friend, Susan, bought the class for me as a belated birthday gift.  I've been talking about it for years, and although I've had a word of the year for many years, I've never taken any of Ali's classes.

For those of you who don't know, One Little Word is a year-long class that focuses on finding a word that represents your goals or intentions for the upcoming year. If you want to know more about finding your own word of the year, just put that in the search terms on this blog page.  I've talked about it many times!  This will be the first time taking Ali's class, so I'm not sure what's really in store other than the fact that each month she will present a lesson with prompts (homework).  I've gotten a bit of a late start since I only recently started the class, but I'm enjoying the work.

So even though I got started a bit late, I think I'm going to be caught up soon, and I wanted to start sharing, in part because it's good for me to share, and also to break up the monotony of so many 12x12 layouts from all of my Layout A Day posts.  So here's a peak at my album so far, and I will continue to post more videos and pictures as I move through the class.



Thanks for watching! This has been a fun process so far, and I look forward to sharing more with you.  In the mean time, I'd love to hear about your word of the year (or one little word, if you prefer). Tell me about it in the comments below!

Layout A Day - LOAD 219

Yesterday, I mentioned Layout-A-Day, but I didn’t really go into what it was.  If you’ve followed me for a while, you’ll know that LOAD (as it’s affectionately called) is a month-long challenge I’ve taken on many times over the past few years.  My first LOAD was in February of 2012, and I joined in after I saw a post from another blogger I follow (Joy Tracey’s Obsessed with Scrapbooking), and I was intrigued.  I wanted to be more productive with my scrapbooking, and this gave me the perfect excuse to do a little crafting every evening after dinner (“You need someone to take you to the store to get supplies for your science project? Go ask your Dad, I have to do this layout for Layout-a-Day’). So I signed up, and have been hooked ever since.

My stack of layouts after I completed my first LOAD in 2012.

The brainchild of Lain Ehman, LOAD typically ran 3 times per year, in February and May, which were open to the public, and in October, which was open only to the members of Scrap Happy, an online network of Lain’s followers.  I wasn’t much interested in the Scrap Happy group, so even though I was sad I couldn’t do the October LOADs, I never joined.  Instead, I just did every February and May, completing every daily challenge on time…that is, until my Dad had a heart attack.  Then I had to drop everything to go home, and it just fell apart after that.  I never finished that February challenge, May got interrupted by something else, and eventually, Lain decided she didn’t want to LOAD any more.  I had heard that someone else bought the rights, but I wasn’t on the mailing list, never found out who it was, and so I was just sad that such a fun and interesting challenge had fallen by the wayside.

Fast forward to January, 2018, and once again, I found myself signing up for LOAD!  I can’t remember how I found it, but somehow I stumbled across a link to the next event, which was starting up the next day, and my heart took a giant leap!  I was so excited to join again, and I did.  But there was a hitch…I was set to leave on a cruise in 4 days, and I would be nearly a week without internet and with very little scrapbooking supplies. Regardless, I was determined to do it anyway, so I packed up a little tote of supplies, a traveler’s journal, my trusty HP Sprocket printer, and I decided to scrapbook on the fly.  I bought the onboard Social WiFi package, which allowed me to upload my photos to the Flickr gallery and still participate in the challenge.

Scrapbooking in my travel journal during my August cruise (MINI LOAD).

Everything went okay for a day or two, but then the girls I was traveling with, my instructors, decided we needed to finish up some work we brought with us.  It turned into a much bigger project than we’d anticipated, and I spent most of the rest of the cruise working on that.  I didn’t get much scrapbooking done, and after I got off track, I didn’t do much on it at all.  Something similar happened in May, when I had yet anothercruise, this time one of our popular Scrapbooking Cruises we do each year.  I was so busy getting ready for the cruise, then teaching classes and leading the group that I fell off my proverbial wagon and failed to finish that LOAD, either. They say bad luck comes in threes, so yep, I missed out on the finish a third time in August, when the new owner, Alice Boll, decided to host a Mini LOADthat lasted one week.  It was right during the middle of a group cruise I organized for my Aggie Moms.  I did get some work done on that one, but not the whole week.  And I’m not sure whathappened in October, which I finally got to participate in because I finally broke down and joined Scrap Happy for the year.

So here we are…it’s February, I’m signed up for LOAD 219 (that’s Layout-a-Day February 2019), and I’m already behind! As I mentioned yesterday, I’m in the middle of a craft room reorganization (watch for a big reveal, soon!) and I have a lot of year-end (2018) bookkeeping that I’m trying to get done. So I missed the launch out of the box, and have been playing catch-up ever since.  I decided I would do 2 layouts a day until I get caught up, which should have taken me 2 days, but then I skipped a couple more days, and one of my pages took longer than I intended, and there are a million excuses, but I am catching up…AND…I am also starting in on Ali Edward’s “One Little Word” challenge at the same time…even though I’m starting it a month late!

Working on my One Little Word album.

So for today (and the next few days, too), I’ll be sharing with you my layouts from LOAD 219 and OLW, along with some info about my processes and supplies.  I hope you’ll enjoy it, and maybe it will give you some inspiration to challenge yourself.  After all, you don’t have to sign up for a challenge to create a layout every day.  Just get out your supplies and do something.  Be creative every day, whether it’s a scrapbook page, a card, something you made for your home, something from paper, something from fabric, or something you’ve drawn.  It all counts – as long as you DO IT!