Printables for Patrons
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.
Creative Careers Interviews
By Molly J. Anderson-Childers
Abby Connors' creative journey has been a circuitous route, a twisting and turning road to her dreams. She began her career as a music teacher, soon changing her focus to help children with special needs. After going back to school to become a school psychologist, she had trouble finding a position in her chosen field and worked a miserable office job. Just when things were at a low point, she discovered she loved teaching movement and music to children through a community education program. The rest, as they say, is history.
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.
Creative Craft Projects
By Chris Dunmire
As featured in Money by Sandra and Harry Chonron, my original origami plant design is fun to make, but hard to give away! With as few as 20 single dollar bills, you can make this uniquely memorable gift and adapt with your own embellishments for any occasion: birthdays, retirements, fundraisers, and more. Fully illustrated project instructions are included in my 23-page ebook for your digital reader, plus reprintable fun fake novelty Money Plant seed packet you can 'gift' with the plant!
Mastering Creative Anxiety
By Eric Maisel, PhD
Many anxieties arise as you attempt to create. There is the anxiety of facing a blank canvas and fearing that you have nothing to say or that you have something to say but won't say it well. There is the anxiety that comes with putting yourself "out there" and risking criticism and rejection. There is the related anxiety known as performance anxiety that afflicts almost everyone. There is the anxiety associated with going into the unknown, with relinquishing control, with making choices (as the creative act is one choice after another) — innumerable anxieties arise as you try to create and as you try to find an audience for what you create.
Fostering Creativity
By Abby Connors
All children have unlimited creative potential. Yet in my twenty years of teaching music enrichment classes to young children, I’ve noticed something. In almost every class, there’s one or two or three children who seem to be absolutely exploding with creativity. These are the ones who dance like dervishes at the slightest provocation, ask questions about anything and everything, and sing along exuberantly — even when they don’t know the words! They make up their own words, or happily sing nonsense syllables without a trace of self-consciousness. Where does this kind of unstoppable creativity come from?
Juicy Journal & Wild Words
By Molly J. Anderson-Childers
An assortment of creative recipes for jounaling, expressive writing, collage, and mixed media painting and drawing. Features: Recipe for a Sizzling Creative Journal; Recipe for Spicy Creative Writing; Recipe for Fresh Collage Salad; and Marvelously Mixed-Up Drawing and Painting Sorbets.
Profiles of Creative Empowerment
By Diana Rivera
I'm a total believer that when an achievable idea clicks, it happens quickly and effortlessly (at least at the beginning) and then it sticks. It's as if the tick-tock of the inner clock finally strikes at the moment of some timed conception. It's as if it was pre-designed, pre-orchestrated, pre-choreographed in the waiting room of ideas. In order to advance in one's creativity as an act of experimentation or as a profession, it might rely on the enhancement of one's skills, strategies and/or synergies.
DaVinci's Genius Habits
By Linda Dessau
Davinci made the most of the left- and right-sides of his brain as seen in his note taking, likely inspiring Tony Buzan's technique of mind mapping. Michael Gelb writes, “Left-brainers think, ‘I'm sorry, I'm left-brained. I can't possibly be creative or imaginative.’ And right-brainers make the mistake of programming themselves: ‘Well, I'm right-brained — I can't possibly come to meetings on time.’” So it's not just artists. Right- or left-brained, we've all become victims of our stereotypes.
Guided Imagery
By Molly Childers & Chris Dunmire
The importance of play is tantamount to learning for children — but what role does play have in an adult life? Feeling stuck? Muses on strike? Doldrums got you down? This guided meditation will reconnect with your inner child when you're feeling stuck as you enter the Forest of the Lost.
The Nine Modern Day Muses
By Jill Badonsky, MEd
Albert is the Modern Day Muse of Innovation and Imagination. His powers range from encouraging us to break the rules to embodying a different persona in order to experience a more creative perspective. These tools can dull writing into irresistible prose, a relationship suffering from routine into one rich with novelty, or an unexciting business plan to one thriving in distinction. When I plan workshops, it is this Muse's creative concepts I call upon the most because they easily lend themselves to quick applications for creative success.
Creativity & Inspiration
By Tom Evans
There have been many times throughout history where two or more people come up with the same bright idea at the same time. Some of these cases will undoubtedly be down to either plagiarism or espionage but some are the result of pure synchronicity of thought and invention. In this modern day and age, unless you sit in a dark cave, you are bombarded by terabytes of data each day. You could easily scan a newspaper but not consciously read an article about a new invention or idea but then it could appear in your conscious mind sometime later, perhaps as a light bulb moment. You then see the invention mentioned on TV or the Internet sometime later and you might think someone has stolen your idea when it wasn't necessarily yours in the first place.
The Enlightened Way to Clear Writer's Block
By Tom Evans
The brain is about two per cent of the adult total body weight but consumes something like 25 percent of the energy from our bodies. It also burns about 25 percent of the body's nutrients and it is estimated it takes 70 percent of the glucose we consume. This is one reason we can faint to protect ourselves, as I mentioned earlier, and you can become mentally exhausted if you are thinking and processing too many things. This is, of course, where using your vestigial minds really comes into its own. It might come as no surprise that with all this new brain and mind activity, it is a good idea to pay attention to our fuel intake.
Inner Voices of Creativity
By Anne Marie Bennett
Where are your creative boundaries today? Do you need to draw some proverbial lines in the sand in order to give yourself the creative freedom you crave? Be still for a few moments. Notice your breath slowly flowing in and out. Look inside yourself and ask your own Boundary Creator to step forward. What does he or she look like? Ask this inner voice to help you decide where and when you need to create boundaries around your own creative pursuits.
Art Perspectives
By Chris Dunmire
In my art appreciation class I was given the task to compare and contrast two pieces of famous art. Critera included viewing one piece in person at an art gallery and another online and report my subjective findings on the visual elements, principles of design, and differences of my experience viewing the art in each way. For my in-person piece, I went to Chicago's Art Institute to see Georges Seurat's iconic painting, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Next, I found Constantin Brancusi's cherished series and piece, Bird in Space online.
Sidewalk Oracles
By Robert Moss
Part of the secret logic of our lives may be that our paths constantly interweave with those of numberless parallel selves, sometimes converging or even merging, sometimes diverging ever farther. The gifts and failings of these alternate selves — with all the baggage train of their separate lives — may influence us, when our paths converge, in ways that we generally fail to recognize.
Creative Writing Prompts
By Bonnie Neubauer
A biopic dramatizes the life of person, sometimes stretching the truth. Use a riveting, recent event from your life to write your own biopic's opening scene. Also, the distinction between autobiography and memoir is often confusing. Here's the skinny on how to tell them apart: An autobiography is about a total life, from birth to death, often in chronological order. A memoir focuses on a slice of life, in detail, often using fiction-writing techniques to relay the story.
Printables for Patrons
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.
