Valentine's Day 2020

We don’t really celebrate Valentine’s Day. Both my husband and I think it’s a very commercial holiday; we didn’t even celebrate when we were dating. The fact that the anniversary of our first date is January 31st (22 years!) was enough for us to just skip Valentine’s Day all together.

Since my kids started school, we’ve done a smidge more, but still not THAT much. I do step up to reasonably-above-average in the parenting department and make custom valentines for their class parties. Every year I expect them to ask for boxed sets from the store and they continue to surprise me with wanting something fun and custom.

Last year I vowed to not send candy to school. This year I vowed to not send food at all. We scoured Pinterest for ideas and saw fun sayings to go with toy airplanes. A thorough Amazon search for inexpensive airplane gliders at different sizes, price points, and availability to get here within a few days (because you KNOW we didn’t start these until a few days before Valentine’s Day) and we found these great gliders! They came in clear poly bags (which I really liked) and had a bunch of different color combinations.

I took the same cartoon faces I made of my boys from last year and turned them into pilots and I LOVE how they turned out.

I don’t think I will be able to get away with these same cartoons next year. I’ll have to make new ones.

The card stock was printed with two per 8.5x11 page and then I trimmed them with a paper cutter and folded them in half. Two staples attached them to the clear poly bags.

We found a bunch of different sayings for these, and these three were the winners. I wanted to use “you’re so fly” but my kids had NO idea what that meant. I think I showed my age.

Price Breakdown:

Airplanes: Amazon, $16.99 for 36. I ordered two boxes total for my kids’ classes, so $36.44 including sales tax.
Printing: Office Depot, color printing onto #65 card stock, $17 including sales tax
Paper Cutter: already had one
Stapler & staples: already had those

Total: $53.44 which was just about $.74 cents per valentine. And since there are 26 kids in each of my kids’ classes, we had a few extras that we gave to teachers, neighbors, and a few non-school friends. This was definitely more than I wanted to spend, but my kids LOVE how they turned out and so do I. I may have to add these to my Etsy shop for next year!

My Favorite Books

I’m an avid reader. There’s nothing I love more than getting sucked into an amazing story. If there happens to be multiple books in a series; all the better. As a kid I loved reading what most girls read in the late 1980s: The Babysitter’s Club and Sweet Valley High. I loved Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books and the Little House books from Laura Ingalls Wilder (I’m pretty sure I’ve seen every episode of Little House on the Prairie on TV).

When my mom realized I could finish a Babysitter’s Club book in a few hours, she lent me her copy of All Around the Town by Mary Higgins Clark. It’s been more than 20 years since I read it and I can still remember the storyline. The next book of hers I read was A Cry in the Night and I was seriously hooked on her books. I probably read more than a dozen Mary Higgins Clark novels before I finished seventh grade. All throughout my teens and twenties, I read novels from Patricia Cornwell, Michael Crichton, Sue Grafton, Michael Connelly, and more that I’m not remembering right now. I remember cutting class in community college to camp out in the library when I was nearing the end of a really great novel; Patricia Cornwell was the reason for many of those days.

This week I learned that beloved author Mary Higgins Clark passed away at the age of 92. She was the author whose words hooked me into so many fascinating stories and I believe she was the one who cemented my love for reading.

I wanted to share some of my favorite books. These are the books or series that I can go back and reread over and over when I don’t have something new to read. For a very long time, I wasn’t ever able to reread a novel. So to make a list of books that I have loved enough to re-love, that’s really saying something.

All of the links in this post are affiliate links. Purchasing anything through these links helps keep my website running and me fully stocked in watercolor paint. It’s very much appreciated.

SERIES:

The Outlander Series by Diana Gabaldon - These will suck you in and you won’t be able to tell what day it is. It’s historical fiction mixed with romance, drama, mystery, and a smidge of science-fiction thrown in. I know some folks dislike the length, each novel is over 1000 pages, complaining that the author spends too much time with the day-to-day stuff that the main characters go through. That’s the stuff I really love; the stuff that makes me understand what 18th century living was really like, and how it could be for someone who’s lived in the 20th century. There are currently eight novels, and number nine is supposedly due out some time in 2020. Oh and there’s a show. It’s kind of amazing.

The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher - I was never a huge fan of fantasy books. Hard-to-pronounce names to keep track of often lost me as a reader. A long-time friend told me I’d like the Dresden Files. “They’re not your typical fantasy books” she told me. I picked up the first four and was hooked by about the middle of book two. Wizard Harry Dresden is such a grounded and relatable character in a very believable world that is both real life and fantasy. Fantasy characters from different religions, mythologies, and more all play a part. There are sixteen books in the series (!!). Book number twelve ended in such a dramatic fashion, I’ve read a few fans wonder if the author is running out of stories for our wary wizard. Gawd, I hope not!

The All Souls Trilogy by Deborah Harkness - These are awesome stories about witches, vampires, daemons, history, science, genealogy, love, action, and holy crap just go read them. You won’t be sorry. The author takes these fantasy characters and weaves a tale that makes it all sound completely plausible in our world and makes me really look at people and wonder if they’re hiding the fact that they’re really a witch or a daemon. BBC is making these into a TV show, the first season can be viewed now. It’s incredibly short, cramming a wonderful novel into just eight episodes, but they really did an amazing job.

The Anne Trilogy by Posie Graeme-Evans - The Innocent, the first book in this trilogy, was one of the first historical fiction books I ever read. It’s a wonderful story that takes place during the War of the Roses in 15th century England. The second book takes place in Brugge, Belgium and is described so beautifully. The author manages to talk politics in short enough spurts to not lose my interest and the main heroine is such a wonderful and relatable woman.

STAND-ALONE NOVELS:

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant - This was the first novel I read that delved into Biblical fiction. It tells the life of Dinah; the only daughter of Jacob from the book of Genesis. In the Bible she’s barely mentioned, but this fictional tale starts with the lives of her mother Leah and sisters. I read it before I became a mom and I loved it so much that I hoped to have a daughter and name her Dinah. That never happened (I ended up with boys!), but I have reread this novel many times since becoming a mom and the book took on a whole other dimension of wonderful and heartbreaking.

The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman - After reading The Red Tent, The Dovekeepers was a novel that Amazon suggested I might like. Yup, I did. An amazing story about four very different women from very different backgrounds who find themselves all living on Masada; a fortified city high atop a plateau in Israel and inhabited by Jewish people who were expelled from Jerusalem in the first century CE. The Jewish people were hiding there when Roman soldiers began to invade. Because Masada is on top of a mesa, it took months for the Romans to build a ramp. By the time they got there, 960 Jews had committed mass suicide. Two women and five children were found alive.

The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant - A wonderful historical fiction (I was on a big kick in my early 30s) that I have fallen in love with after rereading when I became a mother. Alessandra (my name in Italian) is such a beautiful character living in a turbulent and exuberant time in Renaissance Florence, Italy. It goes on about how the Medici family were big patrons of art and the rise in popularity of the friar Savonarola and the eventual Bonfire of the Vanities. It’s ultimately a story of how a headstrong woman would have fared in that tumultuous time.

Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins - One of my oldest friends loaned me a copy of this book one day when we were in our mid-20s. She didn’t preface it with anything other than, “it’s kind of wacky, but you’ll like it.” Yes it was, and yes I did! The author weaves a seemingly disjointed series of tales that include a Dark Ages king who decides he doesn’t want to die, an Indian woman whom he falls in love with, pagan gods, a Paris perfumer, and beets. Toward the end the stories come together in a very satisfying way and asks lots of great questions about religion and immortality.

The Romanov Prophecy by Steve Berry - My mom says I was named after the last Czarina of Russia; Alexandra. The story of her family has always fascinated me along with the mysteries of whether any of her children survived their execution. Steve Berry took what is known about their story and wove it into a wonderful work of fiction. At the end of the novel, he sites all of the sources for the truths in his story too. That weaving of history, theories, and fiction has made me a persistent fan of his books. But The Romanov Prophecy was the first one I ever read, and the one I can reread over and over.

The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone - Probably the only biography I have read that wasn’t assigned reading for school. I have always been a fan of Michelangelo; even when I was a teenager. One day my mom was watching a Charlton Heston film by the same title and I was intrigued. I stumbled upon the biography one day when killing time at the library in between college classes. I happened to be taking an art history class that semester and checked the book out. It so beautifully explains the struggles that most artists go through, the dilemmas of creating art for oneself versus patrons and paying clients. While Michelangelo is known for painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, did you know he didn’t want to do it? And he didn’t think he was a very good painter? He was a sculptor! Go read the book. Even if you aren’t an artist, if you have any appreciation for his art, you’ll enjoy the book.

What would you list as your favorite novels? Ones you can go back and reread when you want?

30 Things - Hike it Baby

I had the privilege of creating an activity sheet for Hike it Baby back in 2017 titled: 30 Things to do Outside with your Kids. I made it very graphic-heavy and it was a really fun challenge to arrange it all. Folks could print it out and check off the items they found or even stick it in a sheet protector and use a dry erase marker. I also made a PDF version where the checkboxes could be clicked using Adobe Reader.

The first one went nearly-viral on Facebook with hundreds of Likes, Comments, and over 8000 Shares. It was really awesome to see.

The popularity prompted us to do a couple more. We’ve also made Spanish versions of all three of these.

30 Things to do in Your Neighborhood was created in 2020 when the world was quarantined and getting out to parks or some outdoor spaces was difficult.

30 Things to do at a National Wildlife Refuge was created in cahoots with Portland & Vancouver National Wildlife Refuges.

These have been so much fun to create, I hope we can do more in the future. What else could we do? 30 Things to Find at the Beach? 30 Things to Find When Camping? 30 Things to do on a Night Hike?

Family Forest Fest

I had the privilege of creating artwork for the Family Forest Fest; a camping experience designed for families with young children. In 2017 they had events in two locations; one on Whidbey Island outside of Seattle, the other at Leaping Lamb Farm in Alsea, Oregon. In 2018, they had one event in Alsea, Oregon. They hosted a teddy bear hunt, outdoor play for kids, live music, bubble professionals, a movie night, a costume carnival, night hikes, family yoga, and so much more. There were also outdoor gear vendors there with gear for campers (and kids) try out. It looked amazing and I was sad to see them stop the events when it was becoming too difficult to make it sustainable.

I designed t-shirts for the events along with magazine ads, social media graphics, event maps, signs, and banners. Here's the adult t-shirt from 2017. It was printed in kelly green for staff members and navy blue for adult attendees.

The kids tees were printed on lime green.

I also created signs to identify different parts of the camp and a map of each location so campers knew where everything was. Some spaces were even sponsored.

Event map for the Oregon event:

For the 2018 event, they were able to use many of the same signs, but we did revamp the t-shirt designs:

Kid’s shirts were bright blue:

For the adult tees, they went with this lovely shade of dark green along with some lighter green and gray options:

Image by Heartbeat Photography

Image by Heartbeat Photography

Image by Heartbeat Photography

Image by Heartbeat Photography

It was such a pleasure to work on all of these items for Family Forest Fest. Thank you so much Shanti and Erin!

Rosy Maple Social

I had the privilege of working with Brittany on a logo for her business. She lives in a part of the country where they get Rosy Maple Moths. Google them, I had no idea such a beautiful moth even existed! They look like a moth from the world of Dr. Seuss or maybe The Muppets. They were great inspiration for her logo. Below is what we came up with:

In addition to the full-color logo, I also made sure she had a handful of different color variations of her logo, plus the moth silhouette in solid colors. That way she has lots of options to use when she creates social media graphics for her business.

I love how it turned out, thanks Britt!