Last month my husband and I taught a class at the John C Campbell Folk School in North Carolina. It was a six day class titled Pulling It All Together. We had an absolute blast!!! Our goal was to pull together all areas of book making – paper design, calligraphy, and handmade books bindings – to help people learn how to create a book from beginning to end. We taught predominately Japanese print techniques…which I will write about later…and then let the class get creative. One of the things I love about teaching and giving people knowledge is the same instructions, the same materials, the same tools will yield an AMAZING variety of creative ideas and outcomes. We learned as much as our students did…it was such fun!
I created this piece on the last two days of class. One of our students wanted a piece of paper that was brown not white. She tried dying the paper with tea, and it wasn’t dark enough. She then utilized coffee grounds from the dining hall to get a richer color of brown. Once she was done, I used her leftover coffee and added black fabric dye. I dipped each piece of paper very quickly into the mixture, working to leave some white spaces. I then hung the papers on an outdoor clothesline and splattered black and brown ink to get more texture. After letting it dry for a day under a book press, I began lettering blessings we spoke at lunch and dinner each day of class, and added a few favorite quotes and family blessings to end up with ten pages overall. Here is what this first quote says:
Reflect on your present blessing
– Charles Dickens 1870
of which every man has many;
not on your misfortunes
of which all men have some.
No matter who you are or where you are in life, there will be misfortunes and blessings. We have to choose each day on which one we want to focus. Some days it is easier to get down in the dumps and stay there, feeling sorry for ourselves and letting the not so wonderful parts of our life keep us dismayed. And I do believe we all have to feel this way once in a while. The challenge is not to stay there too long. All of us have some sort of misfortune…ALL of us! And, we all have many blessings, probably more than we have fingers to count. The things we take for granted, the results from our hard work, the joyful outcomes of our long term decisions, the people and places we love…even the quiet sleeping pet in the corner who snores! When we take a moment to slow down, take a deep breath and truly reflect on what we have…what we don’t have suddenly feels like a much shorter list.
So today let me encourage you to reflect on your blessings more than your misfortunes. Because it is what we set our minds upon, it is what we focus on that determines everything else in our day. Let each day be an adventure in loving life and valuing what we have instead of toiling on what you have not. It’s all a choice, so reflect wisely and give thanks!
Stay tuned this month as I share the other nine pages of this creative book…
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