Every Little Thing!

Good Thursday afternoon!  I am running behind today.  It feels like my whole day got away from me!  Or maybe because it is a short week this week and things are a little out of whack from my normal five day work week!  The up side to that is...it IS a short week!  Yard work, here I come! LOL!!

Here in the south it has be so hot and muggy and I am so ready for a break from that all!  That being said, fall is heavy on my mind!  It is my favorite time of year for many reasons.  As much as I love spring and summer vibrancy and colors, my heart is truly a fall color person!  The colors of fall bring about a change in our demeanor, a quickening in our spirits of new seasons to come!  It slows our pace and invites us to drink in the colors that warm our hearts!  I love the changing of the seasons in the natural as well as spiritually speaking.  I love to see what magnificence God will do next!

Today I want to shares a spread from one of my journals that just brought me such peace.  Since my heart is ready for fall, I wanted to show that through this simple page.  I was thinking of the leaves and how they start falling.  It's small, little bits at first almost to the point that you don't notice it, and then all of a sudden there is this vast array of hauntingly, beautiful color everywhere!  It takes your breath away!

I wanted the spread to be soft because that is where my mind was when I envisioned the spread.  So I started with some gesso and then pulled one of my favorite acrylic paints from Folk Art to use.  It's a blue pearl and I love it because of the effect it has when you lay it down.  All the pearls may be the same, but I am partial to the blue.  So just randomly put some down with my fingers and then took a baby wipe and moved it around the page until I got the effect that I wanted.  I then took some Tim Holtz Distress Ink in Spiced Marmalade and added it to the page and again used the baby wipe to move it around until it looked right.  And then added Vintage photo around the edges.  I really liked how it looked so I wanted to make sure it didn't move, so I sprayed a Krylon fixative over it to make sure it stayed.

I had this piece of emphemera that I had gotten from the internet that I liked and printed two pieces so that I could cut the butterflies out of one and then use them on top of the other.  I colored the butterflies with my wonderful Faber-Castell Gelatos and topped them off with Glossy Accents. I then used Tim Holtz Distress Ink on the banner in Spiced Marmalade and Broken China and then Vintage photo on the edges.  I finished it with Walnut Stain.

I then took my fave script stamp from Inkadinkado and stamped the background with StazOn Saddle Brown - love that stamp.  I then took this fabulous Unity stamp that I have called Tree of Gratitude and stamped across the bottom in StazOn Saddle Brown and then took these loose leaf stamps from a stamp set from Inkadinkado called Autumn Foliage and stamped them randomly around to make it look like leaves flying around.  I then took two other foliage stamps from that same set and stamped up in the corner as if it were a closer tree.  The first one I stamped behind in Tim Holtz Distress Peeled Paint, like ghosting and then did the other in the foreground in StazOn Saddle Brown.

I Modge Podged my banner down and outlined with Faber-Castell Big Brush Pen in Nougat and then adhered the butterflies with Aleene's Tacky Glue.  I stamped my sentiment with Tim Holtz's Worn Text stamp set in StazOn Black and then added some little highlights with my Sakura Gel Pen in orange. I finished off dusting the edges with Tim Holtz Distress Ink in Walnut Stain.

The Creator of our universe does nothing short and always with purpose!  There are no small things in God's Kingdom!  Every little thing, if within His will, turns into something BIG for His Kingdom!  So.....every little thing counts!  In Mark where Jesus speaks of the parable of sowing the seeds, Jesus is saying "this is the ways God does things.  God is like a sower who scatters seeds. The seeds may be tiny and invisible to the naked eye. Yet when the seed is planted, it grows into a shrub that provides shelter for the creatures of this world. The Kingdom of God is like this. The initial evidence may be infinitesimal, but the ultimate results are great!"

Be blessed today as you realize that God's beginnings may be small, but the results are BIG!  Every little thing counts!