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Little Summer Joy | Adventures in Serendipity

August 14, 2015Annette Haring

HELLO NEW WEBSITE!

Hey guys! Welcome to my new home!

I've been playing around with Square Space and am really happy with it so far. I hope you like it here too! Keep in mind things will be a work in progress as this is a "soft launch"; nothing big to reveal today (other than my new site! yay!)

I'm kind of liking the idea of just going for it. Making my home on the internet a bit more me. And letting it grow from there.

It's kind of fun!

I'm kind of liking the idea of blogging more and hoping to make it happen more often. After years of treating Instagram as my blog, I'm loving the idea of being able to go deeper and have a place to share more ideas and projects. Possibly grown into something more. Who knows.

I like it. hello adventure!

LITTLE SUMMER JOY | ADVENTURES IN SERENDIPITY

So on to my topic today.

I wanted to share some ideas from my prompt(s) for the Little Summer Joy class. I was one of six contributors and they are all wonderful!! The prompts are so good. You will get so inspired to live with more joy this summer!

You can find that **FREE** class over at Little Paper Projects. You'll need to sign up *here* to see the full posts.

I ended up dividing my prompt into three parts because once I put my content into blog form it was just too much for one post.

Thankfully Jen and Julie are working with me on that.

The topic I was given was Adventure. My take on it was to be open to not just the grand adventures, but the everyday ones as well. To inspire more Microadventures in our lives. (Inspired by Alistair Humphreys. read more about him here.) And then to be open to the fun little surprises that find us along the way. To follow those serendipitous little joys that make your summer magical.

AHARING_MINIBOOK_LITTLESUMMERJOY_HELLOADVENTURE

I'm then encouraging participants to capture the moments (potentially in a new or not so often way--such as with an Instax or getting them printed differently) and to collect a treasure to take home. To reflect on their experiences and include the story and their feelings in their albums / projects. And finally, I share some techniques on incorporating adventure and serendipity in our albums as well as challenging participants to make creating their album an adventure as well.

I know it's a lot, but it's what was in my heart. And hey, it's free!! So enjoy!!

Here's another sneak peek at my little mini album:

AHARING_MINIBOOK_LITTLESUMMERJOY_FOLLOWADVENTURE

I added little sequins into those 2x2 squares and created a confetti pocket with the Fuse Tool. I have a short video tutorial for it. (that I think will be on their site, but if not I will share it here.)

Here's an excerpt from my prompts:

"Adventure is more than going on a voyage somewhere. Make your own adventures and follow serendipity. Your adventure can be simple or grand. At home or far away. It doesn't matter. What matters is your openness, spirit of adventure and the joy in your heart."

So much fun! I hope to see you there!

I'm happy to report I took my own challenge and we went on our own Microadventure this week! I had stargazing on my Summer Manifesto and have had two late nights in a row of enjoying the Perseids! Something that brought back many memories of good times growing up and in my college years. It got us outside and the magical moment for me was that my daughter joined us one night. She was so excited to go and promptly fell asleep in the truck. We were about to go and we decided to wake her up as we were seeing one or two every 5-10 minutes or so.

She's an adventurer at heart, but even for her being out in the dark when she was that tired was going to be tough. And we saw a shooting star!! Her first!

Hooray for serendipity and microadventures!

Have a wonderful summer and make many magical adventures!

If you check out the class I'd love some feedback as I'm percolating on the idea of doing more classes here or elsewhere.

Participation in Little Summer Joy was a free gift to you and an adventure for me. I say that's a win-win! Enjoy!

To find out more about Little Paper Projects, click here.

categories Mini Books
tags mini books, Little Summer Joy

Little Summer Joy | Introduction and Manifesto

July 17, 2015Annette Haring

Hello again!

I'm excited to announce I will be a contributor for a fun *free* little summer project called Little Summer Joy! I'm excited to be contributing online again. I had started a little mini book to document the little things that bring me happiness this summer and had even used the "little things" concept from Ali Edwards Story Kit for my title page (more on that below.) But as many of my projects go, I feared the title page would be about all that I finished! :)

So when I saw my Instagram friends Jen Lake and Julie Gagen create a new site called

Little Paper Projects

and launch the first project: Little Summer Joy, I knew this would be a great fit for me. Lucky for me they had a spot open for a contributor! Maybe it will give me the spark I need to actually do something more with my site. Or maybe I will just enjoy my summer, documenting what I can and enjoy sharing that. How about we just enjoy living, creating and sharing with one another? That's pretty exciting!

I really like the idea and philosophy behind Little Paper Projects as well. I love the idea of using memory keeping as a way to explore how we see and experience our world. That using little projects like this can create more self awareness and self love. I've been pretty much on board with that philosophy since I started memory keeping and I like how they are creating a community around it. Hooray for an awesome community of folks wanting to build each other up! It's awesome.

THE PLAN

Okay, so here's my plan for my Little Summer Joy book this year. I'm using a 4x4 mini album from Seven Paper, some of Ali Edwards "Little Things" Story Kit™ and a bunch of my stash. I am not looking to go super minimal with this project. You totally could and that would be awesome! Jen and Julie shared several options

here

. I've done simple journals before--for an example is my

30 Lists journal

that I still adore. So, I might do a journal on the side with it. But right now I just want to PLAY with some of the cool stuff I've collected and make something with it. I've decided I need to make more stuff or I need to put the collecting on hold. And since I really like it, why not use it?!

Also, I recently picked up the Fuse Tool and am really loving playing with it too! So you'll see some fun sequin pockets as well. Let me know if you would like to see a video "how to" on that. It's quite simple to use! Here's a look at my main title page. I just added some confetti I had plus some sequins. You start from the bottom pocket and just build up. Love how it turned out!

The first lesson for Little Summer Joy is to create your summer bucket list / manifesto or whatever you want to call it. I really liked Tracy's idea to also include things that might be holding you back from joy. I primarily included things we want to do as a family, plus a few things I wanted to include on my own.

Here's a look at my title page plus my manifesto. I kept it simple and just used the back of the 3x4 title cards to create a 4x6 canvas to write on. I stamped Summer Manifesto with this

stamp set

from Kellie Stamps. Wrapped the edges in some glitter washi tape from Target and just wrote my list. Simple and done!

The nice thing about including my summer manifesto here is that I can easily refer back to it, but I'm not creating a book solely on these items. Some of them while will be included and who knows, maybe all?! But one of the focus points for me for this book is to be documenting the little things that are making me happy. Things I want to do and how to inspire myself to actually DO them. Plus, a reflection component of noticing things that brought me joy just because and not because they are on a list. Does that make sense? Plus, I want to include some of the prompts for the class. So I'm keeping a pretty open mind and heart here. It's summertime after all! Keep it easy!