Your Early-Owl Access to Garden Notes is here!
Get early access to order the Garden Notes collection!
Introducing the Owl and Ember Garden Notes Collection!
I have teamed up with Owl and Ember for a new collection just for gardeners. As small, woman-owned businesses we want to reward our loyal supporters, so we are giving you early-owl access to the new Garden Notes Collection! We are thrilled to introduce you to Garden Notes, our new gardening journal and planner! And to go with Garden Notes, we have three all new exclusive sticker sheets — perfect for Garden Notes or any planner!
Right now, this collection is available exclusively for MMM and Owl and Ember subscribers!
If you are already a subscriber, you should have recieved an Early-Owl access email. If you aren’t a subscriber yet, sign up below, and you will get the link to order right away:
I’m so excited to introduce you to Garden Notes — truly a labor of love!
As always, let me know if you have any questions. And thank you for your love and support! Happy gardening!
Cheers!
Angela
Make Your Holidays Merrier!
The all-new version of The Nice List is here!
The All-New Nice List is here!
Introducing The Nice List All Year and The Nice List Christmas Workbook!
THE NICE LIST: PAPER EDITIONS
The Nice List includes two separate notebooks:
The Nice List All Year: a gift-giving tracker to last for years to come
The Nice List Christmas Workbook: a planner for the entire Christmas season to keep you organized and help bring a little sanity to your holiday season
Both are available individually or together as a bundle and are designed to be used in a traveler’s notebook or independently.
FREE GIFT WITH PURCHASE:
The Nice List books are designed so that they can be used in a traveler’s notebook -- a simple way to keep them together. For a limited time we will include a FREE handmade, upcycled traveler’s notebook with each purchase of The Nice List Bundle (while supplies last).
THE NICE LIST CHRISTMAS WORKBOOK INCLUDES:
How to Use The Nice List
How to Use The Christmas Workbook
November Calendars: weekly and monthly (undated)
December Calendars: weekly and monthly (undated)
Weekly To Do Lists for November and December (undated)
What Sparks Joy for You? Setting priorities for the holiday season
Budgeting worksheets: to establish a budget for your Christmas season — and for each gift, too
Coupons & Codes: tracker for holiday sales and discount codes
Giving Lists: to help you prioritize where you spend your money and on whom
Thoughts on Thoughtful Giving: ideas for gift giving and reducing the stress of the holidays
Thank You Note Tracker
Holiday Card Tracker
Menu Planners
Baking Planners
Shopping Lists
Blank pages for notes and planning
With a little planning and some careful thought before a gift is ever purchased, The Nice List can help you keep Christmas from spinning out of control and help you find the perspective you need. The Nice List helps you set deadlines to avoid high shipping charges and has a tool for tracking all of those promo codes and sale codes that start to flood your email inbox, too.
The Nice List All Year gives you a place to track all of the gifts you give the loved ones in your life -- not just at Christmas time. It is designed to be used for multiple years and can be purchased separately if you have more than 15 people in your life to track.
THE NICE LIST ALL YEAR INCLUDES:
How to use The Nice List
How to use The Nice List All Year
Giving Records for 15 people covering multiple years
The Nice List All Year is also designed to be used by anyone -- not just people who celebrate Christmas. From Hanukkah to Lunar New Year, Kwanzaa to Eid, and birthdays, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day and more -- record every gift you give and make notes for coming occasions, too.
Plus, when you use The Nice List All Year year after year, you develop a record of your gift-giving, so you never give the same gift twice!
A BEAUTIFUL CHRISTMAS PLANNER
Not only is The Nice List a beautiful planner, but it also comes with online tools including an extensive giving guide with gift suggestions in every budget for every person on your list — parents, inlaws, kids, friends, teachers. We have suggestions for them all and exclusive discount codes as well.
I love the Christmas season so much I have written what my husband described as my “love letter to Christmas” — The Nice List!
Order your copy of The Nice List today, and give yourself the gift of a very organized and holiday season!
The One Room Challenge Begins!
Exciting news! The Fall 2020 One Room Challenge has begun! Check out all of the details!
You can get all the details on the One Room Challenge and my projects here:
I hope you will stop by!
XOXO
A
Staying Home and Staying Cozy
How are you spending your Coronavirus confinement? I have a few ideas in case you are starting to lose your mind.
My dear friends, it has been a minute! Actually, more than a few minutes. I took some time away from writing to work on other projects, and then COVID-19 happened. One month ago today, in fact, we started to shelter in place. Aside from daily social-distancing walks with the dog and the child, we really haven’t left the house. And like so many of you, I’m juggling school lessons with a spouse working from home and my own work projects, too.
It is a lot.
And let me tell you: if you aren’t ok, that is totally ok. This is a remarkable, historic time. It is scary and insane and strange and monumental all at once. And it is ok not to be ok.
But now that we are a month into this with no real end in sight, I have gathered a few ideas and resources which might help you make your own confinement a little easier.
DIY Face Masks
First, I have put together tutorials for making face masks in three different styles. I have made more than 30 masks, and I tried several different ways to make them. Finally I decided on three different masks that seemed to work best — and are easy to make. If you need to make masks for your family, I hope you’ll try these out. Let me know how it goes!
Hygge Makes Everything Better
Early on I chose a word for this period knowing that a focus would make everything a little easier. My word is: hygge. What’s hygge? It is the Danish concept of coziness, happiness, and goodness — all rolled up together.
Focusing on hygge has allowed us to jump into our confinement with joy and love. My husband travels a lot for work, so having him home for an entire month has been amazing! We are cooking a lot, snuggling on the couch, reading even more, and I’ve taken up needlepoint which is a wonderful distraction.
I have updated my What I’m Reading Now list — lots of good book suggestions!
I am also journaling — sometimes angrily, sometimes creatively, sometimes with great sadness. And we have become Zoom experts — along with the rest of the world — from class meetings to get-togethers with friends.
But I’m also doing a lot of sleeping — or at least reading in bed. And I have some tips for sleeping Scandinavian-style which is all about bringing the hygge into your bedroom. We love it!
Small Home Projects
We aren’t tackling anything big right now. The Spring One Room Challenge was supposed to start on April 1, but it has been postponed to May at the earliest. But we have been doing small projects around the house. Our kitchen, for example: we were supposed to remodel it this spring, but those plans have been put on hold. So we have taken on a few small projects — temporary fixes for a truly dysfunctional kitchen. Small projects like this can ease the daily stress of living in a house that doesn’t work well — even if they are temporary fixes.
Celebrating
I’ll be honest: I didn’t feel much like celebrating Easter. But as the day approached, I realized just how much we needed a celebration in the middle of it all. We have also celebrated two big birthdays for family — one with a Zoom-call party and another with a silly drive-by parade. Life goes on, and we can still celebrate milestones, even if we can’t do it in person as we would like.
And when I did hang the Easter eggs from our branch chandelier and put out the Easter decorations, the change was welcome, and we had a wonderful family celebration.
In the next few weeks I will share some of our favorite recipes and projects. It is almost time to get out into the garden again — despite the fresh snow today! And one day soon we will be back to something that approximates “normal” again.
But until then, stay safe! Wash your hands. Wear a mask. And stay home as much as is humanly possible.
XOXO
Angela
The Thoughtful Giving Guide is Here!
The list of the most thoughtful and useful Christmsa gifts for everyone on your list is now available!
I have been searching all year for unique, useful, and thoughtful gifts, and they are now collected together into one place. The 2019 Thoughtful Giving Guide is here! Enjoy!
Budget-friendly gift suggestions for everyone on your list! Lists include:
My Favorite Gifts | Gifts Under $15 | Gifts for Mid Modern Lovers | Gifts for Children | Books to Give Gifts to Make | Wines to Give | Bubbles for the New Year
Last Day to Order The Nice List 2019!
Today is the deadline for pre-ordering the 2019 edition of The Nice List!
Today is the last day to pre-order the 2019 edition of The Nice List! This year’s edition is gorgeous with illustrations by Jone Hallmark and new added content. We are so excited about it! And we can’t wait to get it into your hands! Books will be shipped by the end of October, so you will have them for the entirety of the Christmas season.
Here’s one last sneak peek into the 2019 edition of The Nice List:
After today the PDF version will still be available, and there may be a few single copies left, but multiple copy discounts won’t be available, and supplies will be very, very limited. So grab your copy today!
And thanks to all of you who have already ordered The Nice List! I so appreciate your love and support!
Questions? Let me know!
XOXO
Angela
Order Now!
KonMari and Gratitude
Thinking about joining the KonMari Craze that’s sweeping the nation? We have done it. We are doing it again. It is awesome, and we have some tips to make it all a little easier. Read on!
Hello! I hope you all are well in this new year! It is cold here which is such a pleasant change, and we had snow last weekend. So lovely!
As I have written before, my word for the year is gratitude, and I am working to practice gratitude every day. I am journaling. I am praying. I am giving thanks. I am writing thank you notes. And I am KonMari-ing my house again.
Perhaps you have heard of Marie Kondo, the Japanese guru of tidying. I first read her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying a few years ago, and I did a first effort at decluttering our home. But then we moved… so now that we are settled into our new home and lives here in Colorado, it is time to do it again.
This week I have written all about our efforts to “KonMari the shit out of our house” — as my husband so eloquently put it. I also have a few tips for tidying in case you decide to join the rest of America that has gone #konmaricrazy !
If you do decide to KonMari your life, I also have reduced the price of my ebook about selling children’s clothing. The principles in this book apply to selling any kind of collection — sneakers, purses, jewelry. And the book is only $5 right now!
In gratitude,
Angela
Thanks a Thousand
I have a whole new section of my website devoted to gratitude this year where I have a guide to writing thank you notes, a review of Thanks a Thousand, and much more!
About fifteen years ago I had the world’s most boring job. There were days when I had nothing to do. Nothing. So I stocked my office with stationery and started most Mondays writing letters and thank you notes.
I left the job, but I kept those habits. This week my first task each day is to write a few thank you notes for the gifts and hospitality I received over the holidays — all of which I wrote down in The Nice List.
My word for 2019 is gratitude and writing thank you notes is one of my gratitude practices. I am not always perfect about doing it, but I feel so much better when I have. Not out of guilt but because it is good to meditate on your blessings and the gifts of time or talent that your receive from others.
So this is my thank you note to each of you! Thank you for supporting me in this new venture. Thank you for buying copies of The Nice List — and for telling me how you have used it! Thank you for being good friends and cheerleaders! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!
On one of the opening spreads in my 2019 planner, I wrote this quote: “It is not joy that makes us grateful; it is gratitude that makes us joyful.” Brother David Steindl-Rost made that observation, and I encountered a version of that quote in AJ Jacobs’ latest book — Thanks a Thousand — where Jacobs sets out to thank everyone who made his cup of coffee possible.
I have a whole new section of my website devoted to gratitude this year where I have a guide to writing thank you notes, a review of Thanks a Thousand, and much more!
I would be most thankful if you would drop by and check it out! 😉
XOXO
Angela