PAJWLH- Discernment Part 2 and a little fun with Courtney Walsh

So this last month we have talked about relationships for our art journal project. With our last prompt on discernment and understanding how we can better help friendships, with this post I really wanted to talk about friendships...true friendships. 

This is a page that I made to record a special moment that I shared with a friend. Along this same theme, I was asked by my dear friend Courtney Walsh to help her out with the promotion of her new book 

A Sweethaven Summer. Courtney has written two craft books and this is her debut fiction novel. I was fortunate to have met Courtney while she was writing this book so to see it come to fruition is not only exciting for her, it is also exciting for me to see all of her hard work pay off.

When I met Courtney, I was surprised how much we had in common. My family had just moved to Fort Collins in 2009 and she and her family had moved to Fort Collins exactly one year later. Our lives have paralleled to where, Courtney jokingly says that she is living my life, just one year later.  I am a firm believer in things happening for a reason, and since the beginning of our friendship, I felt that pull in my heart knowing that both Courtney and I were brought together for a reason. These reasons have revealed themselves as we have taken turns encouraging each other and cheering each other on in our lives. With our experiences being so similar, it wasn't totally surprising that we had both had our hardships in relationships/friendships as well. These hardships prepared us to see in each other the qualities that we valued in true friendships. I am very fortunate to have a friend like her and I hope you will take a moment to check out her promotion that she is running on her blog.

It is hard to have friends. Sometimes friends take more out of us, than we have to give. Sometimes friends are in a different place in their lives than we are. Friends are not always the blessing on our lives that they are meant to be. I have gotten to a point in my life where I now value the few true soul friends that I have rather than the massive amount of friends that I might have held close in the past. I have realized that good friends are so hard to come by, yet NOT hard to maintain. Good friends don't fault you for time apart, yet they pick right back up where you left off. These friends should be held close and treasured. In my heart of hearts, I want to be the type of friend that loves, gives cherishes my heart and soul friends even if the list of these friends is short. I have learned the hard way that quality is what I need in a friend... not quantity.

So with this page, I wanted to have a little something to remind me of a special moment that I shared with a friend. A time that I was blessed to have this person in my life. This page acts as a reminder in my journal that there are people in my life that make me happy. This page (I will refer to these pages as Little Victories) is just one of the many blessings I want to record in my art journal. There have been to many pages in  art journals that are therapeutic or maybe dark, I really want to be able to look back (or have my children look back) at an art journal that is true to who I am and part of this is recording the good along with the not so good.

So for this prompt, I am going to make it pretty easy :) Here ya go!

Prompt:

• make a page for a friend, or to record a way a friend has blessed your life.

• Use NO PAINT (No acrylic or water based paints, inks are fine)
• Use scraps in a creative way (as a border, basket weaved, as a stitch, to create your background)

If you are joining us today for the first time and are wondering about our art journal project, feel free to check out the link here to our year long free art journal workshop. This will link you to the getting started page and you can follow the link from here to the first posts page.

Thanks again, for joining me :) This was the first page I had ever made without paint, I guess I never tried to do it any other way, lol. I hope this encourages you to enjoy a different medium to create with, even if it is just paper :)

~Liz ♥