DLP [Documented Life Project] Week 26 Challenge: Add bible verse that inspires you or a line from your favorite book.
As soon as I read this challenge, I knew it was time to add “Desiderata” to my journal. This is a favorite poem by Max Ehrmann that hangs in my parents’ home and now, in my home. It has been a beautiful reminder through some tough times. It has been like a favorite scripture to my family. My father read it to my mother as she passed on to whatever’s next… I think reading it to himself as well to help him cope with the biggest loss he’s ever known.
It actually hangs in our guest bath room. As a result, I’ve learned the bathroom is the best place to hang something that you want to remember often! 🙂 When I asked my son if he recognized these lines, he knew immediately that it was Desiderata. “It hangs in the bathroom, Mom. I read it all the time.” (I told my husband maybe we should hang the multiplication table in there to help the boys learn it!) When a dear friend was here visiting shortly after the birth of her second child and while battling post-partum depression, she read it and bought a copy for her own home soon after.
How this page was made:
I saved lots of paper towels that were used under the fabric to catch excess dye in a tie dye class that I recently volunteered in. The colors were so lovely that I just couldn’t throw them away. I laid them all out to dry in the sun. Now, I had a pile of vibrant color to start from!
For this particular page, I used mod podge, mixed with a little bit of blue acrylic paint, to glue one of these tie dyed paper towels onto a paper sketchbook page. I let it wrap around and over to the back as well. I printed out the entire Desiderata poem on deli paper to add to the back. It was too late to print it directly on the sketch paper since I had already adhered the paper towel and I had printed a few copies trying to get a good one on deli paper so I already had this handy. This page is actually my 2nd attempt because I didn’t like the first one, which had a busy collage under the deli paper and distracted from the beauty of the prose.
I had made a different card using this same tie dyed paper towel method (but on recycled cardboard, which is why I had added some paint to the mod podge, to help hide the letters on the cereal box since the paper towel is slightly transparent!) and painted flowers and sunshine on it with acrylic paint. That card was for my kids’ tie dye teacher from their class last week.
I loved it so much, that I decided to paint a similar scene for this to highlight the few words from Desiderata on one side of the flap/page. I printed and used mod podge to add the words because I had discovered on another card that writing bled too much on the paper towel and wasn’t as clear. Voila! 🙂
May you ” be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace within your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful. Strive to be happy.”
painted jaybird
Precious.