March's "assignment" for One Little Word was to create a vision board that would be a few things: a reminder of your word, reasons why you chose it, intentions for the year under this word as a guide, motivation to keep the word in your daily life, and I'm sure plenty of others for all types of people who participate. For me, making this board was almost therapeutic. I enjoyed combing through magazines for inspiring phrases and words that clicked for me and my word, grow. In the beginning I had a thought along the lines of, "how am I going to find words and phrases that mean something to this project in a stack of old cosmos?" but man, I was wrong. There are so many ads and articles that contain words and phrases that could really be viewed however you want them to be. A surprising number of the cut outs I used were from hair product ads, which is hilarious to me that hair ads are so seemingly inspirational, but hey, whatever works.
I didn't find the word "grow" in any of the magazines, at least not in anything big enough to capture my attention, so I decided to do what I did for my lyric canvas and add vinyl letters to the middle of the canvas to spell out grow. I painted in gold (with this) over the word and used whatever paint I had left on my brush to extend out to the edges of the canvas, which wasn't much, but because I knew most of it was going to be covered, there wasn't a need for it to be "perfect". Because of the way canvas sits, I knew that the paint was going to bleed into the cracks under the stickers, but instead of going in with white as I intended, I thought I'd leave them because I liked the whole concept of "blurred lines" and how this project can be interpreted in any way that you need it to for your own life. After the paint dried I used adhesive spray to adhere all of the little magazine clippings to the canvas. I thought about using a roller to just quickly attach everything, but I bought some adhesive spray a long time ago, and that's what Ali used so I decided to roll with it. I'm so glad I used it. This stuff is my new best friend, but a warning: make sure you lay down a newspaper or spray over something disposable because this stuff is no joke, it's very very sticky and will get all over everything if you're not careful.
Once I was finished with it I was so pleased with how cohesive everything ended up being (in my own mind). All of these phrases and snippets of sentences have made me feel connected to my word in a much different way than the assignments of the past two months have, and I'm excited to have it up on my wall to look at whenever I need to be reminded of why I chose this word and why it's important to me. I hung it up with these, this, and this, and the wall that they're all on is starting to look really great. Eventually I'll have enough things up that it will be worth photographing, but this canvas filled a significant empty space that I've been staring at for weeks, so this project was a win, win.
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One Little Word is a workshop run by Ali Edwards in which participants choose one word to focus on for an entire year. Join Ali, myself, and many others on this journey by learning more and signing up for the class here, read about Ali's OLW here, and see all of my related posts for OLW 2014 here.
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