Printables
By Chris Dunmire
As featured in Money: Everything You Never Knew About Your Favorite Thing to Find, Save, Spend, and Covet by Sandra and Harry Chonron, this original and unique origami craft project makes a delightful gift to create, but hard to give away! Learn how to make this truly memorable gift with my with easy-to-follow instructions in a fully-illustrated, step by step 23-page PDF eBook.
Printables
By Chris Dunmire
They say that "Money doesn't grow on trees", but who says you can't grow it in a flower pot? With a little bit of creativity and imagination, I say anything is possible! Yes, YOU can make one of the most creatively delightful and satisfying gifts ever with my origami Money Plant design and as few as 20 single dollar bills. This craft is fun to make and hard to give away and features my fake funny Money Plant Seed Packet. Featured in Money: Everything You Never Knew About Your Favorite Thing to Find, Save, Spend, and Covet by Sandra and Harry Chonron.
Author Interviews
By New World Library
Creating produces anxiety because so much is on the line. For someone who's self-identified as a writer, painter, composer, scientist, inventor, and so on, his identity and ego are wrapped up in how well he creates — and when what we do matters that much, we naturally get anxious. It's one thing to sing in the shower and another thing to agree to sing at your daughter's wedding: so much more feels on the line!
Printable Templates: Writing Prompts
By Chris Dunmire
The Thanksgiving season naturally opens the space for reflection and appreciation for the abundance in our lives. Holidays gift us with the opportunity to consciously "check in" with what we are grateful and thankful for — not just in the material sense, but also in intangible assets. To put a fun, contemplative twist on this opportunity for reflection during the Thankgiving season, I've designed an enticing prompt in the form of the "Thankful Four" handwriting turkey — a printable PDF packet to download and use as a tool for inner exploration and outer creativity.
Printable Puzzles: Find a Word
By Chris Dunmire
Trick or Treat! Sharpen your pencils and ready your noggin' — while you ready for Halloween, I'll help you stretch your creative brain with this spooky-fun find-a-word puzzle. See how seasonal-savvy you are by finding all of the Halloween related words on the list in the letter grid. Words are hidden horizontally, vertically, diagonally, forwards, and backwards. Never fear if you get stuck: the answer key is also provided!
Autumn Writing Prompts
By Chris Dunmire
It is easy to pluck a greeting card off the rack and post a meme graphic on social media, but personalized hand-written messages remain highly prized treasures! Let me open the space for you to engage your writing and creativity. While greeting cards celebrating birthdays, weddings, baby showers, and Christmas are Hallmarks of traditional celebratory giving, here's a unique opportunity for you to break the mold and dig into the reason for the season. Celebrate the beauty of autumn and the gifts it ushers in, including special holidays for family fun and togetherness — Halloween and Thanksgiving — with some creative writing, right here, right now.
Autumn Writing Prompts
By Chris Dunmire
Going back to school. Harvest time. Colorful falling leaves. Corn mazes, acorns, pumpkins, scarecrows, Halloween and Thanksgiving. In the Midwest, Autumn is the time of the year when cooler temperatures sweep in over summer's waning heat and the growing season comes to full fruition before winding down to dormancy. Fall officially begins in September and runs through October, November, and into December, when the seasonal change next morphs into winter. Inject some seasonal inspiration into your creative writing with these fall-themed writing prompts, photos, and printable projects and reflect on the meaning of the season to capture the transforming magic in the air for this colorful, transitioning space in the year.
Rethinking Depression
By Eric Maisel, PhD
You may be thinking, "Well, psychiatrists, psychologists, family therapists, and other mental health professionals surely know what to do with these symptom pictures. Maybe it isn't an exact science but more like an art, where, through practice, these professionals begin to discern the difference between a mental disorder and a life challenge. So, even though the system is flawed, practitioners do know important things about mental disorders." You would be wrong.
Fostering Creativity
By Abby Connors
I'm talking to you, there, hiding under your blanket. You've forgotten how many times you've hit the 'snooze" button. You feel apathy, fatigue, overwhelmed by the relentless responsibilities of teaching. You just don't want to go back to that classroom. If you teach young children, you've probably been to Burnout Land — at least once. The usual suggested "cures" for burnout: Take a vacation, or at least a day off — make time for yourself and your needs. Try meditation, exercise, hobbies, time with nature. All good things, all vital for mental and emotional well-being. They can help us return to the classroom refreshed and ready to teach.
Juicy Journal & Wild Words
By Molly J. Anderson-Childers
To create a nature journal, you can hand-bind natural papers into a recycled cardboard cover, or purchase a blank spiral bound sketch pad or journal from your favorite bookstore or art supply shop. Either way, you want something sturdy, a journal that will be able to withstand wear and tear. Look for something that's not too large and bulky; a journal that fits easily in your backpack or pocket when you're on the trail. Your art supplies should be similarly low-maintenance and easy to carry — a couple of charcoal pencils, a few favorite pens, and a portable watercolor set will get you off to a good start.
Inspiring Creativity
By Rick Benzel
Finding a luminary in your field; working with a creativity coach. One of the most intriguing ways to learn how to get unstuck is to find yourself a hero, that is, a luminary in your field after whom you might model yourself. If you are a writer, pick a living or historic writer whose life or work you admire. Read everything you can find about the person, including his or her work habits, thoughts on the writing life, and problems with writing that may be similar to yours.
Learning from Great Masters
Leonardo da Vinci was not only a great artist, but a scientist and inventor as well. His creative genius is chronicled through his art and journals and research reveals him to be a true Renaissance man and far ahead of his time, inspiring generations of creative thinkers, artists, inventors, and innovators. This engaging series is based on the seven timeless principles explored in Michael Gelb's How To Think Like Leonardo da Vinci: Seven Steps to Genius Every Day, and explores DaVinci's methods and habits related to his creative explorations and inventive accomplishments.
Using Both Sides of Your Brain | Being Open to Experience | Leaping into Your Experiences | Taking Care of Your Body | Awakening Your Senses | Seeing the Connection in Everything | Being Curious About Everything
Guided Inspiration
By Robert Moss
You are about to enter a place where all fields of knowledge, including deeper knowledge of your soul's purpose and connections, can open to you. The best will be revealed only as you seek it; you'll know it when it lets you find it, not before. So you start by setting an intention, but you remain ready to let the journey take you beyond it. In the secret library, you can find information and inspiration in any area that rouses your active curiosity and your creative spirit. Anything that stirs the creative spirit in you is a matter of soul, whether it is golf or alchemy, cooking or astronomy, landscape gardening or writing.
The Nine Modern Day Muses
By Jill Badonsky, MEd
Oh, the energy we use in this society to suppress what we perceive to be our undesirable traits — our negativity, judgmental nature, and our other secret peculiarities and struggles. Often we do not even allow our shadow side into our own consciousness but others can often see it. People who passionately irk us are usually mirroring our own shadows back to us, though ours may surface with a different rendition that we do not recognize. In this exercise we not only deny our humanity but we also disable a potent creativity feature — sublimation.
Creativity & Inspiration
By Tom Evans
Most people never give their thoughts a second thought. This is a shame as what you think and how you are thinking fundamentally affects the world around you. Just imagine if your day could be full of brilliant ideas and inspirations that made you healthier, wealthier and wiser. For most people, life just gets in the way of even contemplating that this could happen. Our thoughts are consumed by getting the kids to school, 'imagining' a confrontation with someone at work or worrying about how to make ends meet. This series will take you through a process of how to change the way you think so your mind works to your advantage and you are not a slave to your thoughts.
Freeing the Writer Within
By Natalie Goldberg
I hear people say they're going to write. I ask, when? They give me vague statements. Indefinite plans get dubious results. When we're concrete about our writing time, it alleviates that thin constant feeling of anxiety that writers have — we're barbecuing hot dogs, riding a bike, sailing out in the bay, shopping for shoes, even helping a sick friend, but somewhere nervously out at the periphery of our perception we know we belong somewhere else — at our desk! Scheduling lets our free time be our free time and not a constant case of playing hooky.
Inner Voices of Creativity
By Anne Marie Bennett
What does your Inner Creative Child look like? Is he/she getting enough healthy doses of creativity? What kind of voice does your Inner Creative Child use when it's content? How does he/she try to get your attention? What would your week look like if you were committed to satisfying your Inner Creative Child's need for self-expression?
Art Perspectives
By Whitney Freya
The principles of design are not the result of a panel of art academics who felt the need to create more rules. The principles of design are the language of our mind's eye, how we visually analyze everything we see. They have been used by artists for centuries to create paintings that successfully communicate their heart's desire, the natural beauty of a landscape, the spirit of a portrait, or the innate element of objects in a still life. Now you are going to learn how to use them. The principles of design are interwoven throughout our lives because we process so much of our world and our life visually.
Creativity & Spirituality
By Jan Phillips
We're like caterpillars getting close to the Great Transformation. In preparation for its metamorphosis, the caterpillar eats 100 times its weight, falls asleep, and then forms a chrysalis. When the first imaginal cells of the butterfly begin to form themselves, the immune system of the caterpillar tries to fight them off. The immune system fails, and the caterpillar cells become the soup that nourishes the emerging butterfly.
Creative Writing Prompts
By Bonnie Neubauer
Get creative with these writing prompts and exercises from Take Ten for Writers! Each of these writing activities features 10 different variables, so every exercise can be done 10 unique times with 10 very different results! These prompts will help you to get into the habit of writing without weighty expectations, write fast without overthinking or over-editing your work, learn how to weave details into your writing to paint a more realistic, tactile picture with your words, and celebrate your writing accomplishments as stand-alone finished pieces without comparing your work to that of others
Super Wordacious | Biopic | Hearing Voices | I Wood If I Could | LINGO-istics | Listing | Seuss-erific Q&A | Saucy Millionaire | Simile But Different | VocabuLeery
