If you have no idea what a TRUTH CARD is, or how to make one…or WHY to make one… click on the following links to learn about THE WORLDWIDE TRUTH CARD EXCHANGE and HOW TO MAKE A TRUTH CARD and watch this video about WHAT WE ARE DOING IN MANILA and even see this blog post about THE DAHLIA HOUSE IN MANILA, PHILIPPINES…

But for now…we need your help again!

We wanted to remind you about the most amazing force of beauty we have all participated in…the worldwide Truth Card exchange…..and to give you some updates about where the Truth Cards have been going all over the world…and tell you…WE NEED MORE TRUTH CARDS!!! We will be sending Truth Cards to victims of the tornado in Oklahoma along with some other needed things…we especially wanted them to know that their sisters all over the world are on their side and love them…..a truth card really does change the world a little bit of  love at a time!

For your viewing pleasure…..here are some of your gorgeous truth cards again…so you remember how wonderful they are….(can you imagine receiving one of these on a hard day?)

Well, the beautiful TRUTH about TRUTH CARDS is that we have gotten thousands and thousands of them from you…….and we very carefully open and read them, and put them into protective sleeves to be delivered to their lucky recipients….our sisters all over the world in need of encouragement.

Here we are, sorting your Truth Cards to go to Restore Innocence, an organization in Colorado that provides a safe place for many girls who are victims of human trafficking.

Another one of your beautiful Brave Girls organized a call for Truth Cards for our sisters who were victims of kidnapping in Cleveland….and ANOTHER one of you beautiful Brave Girls is taking a whole pile of Truth Cards on a long awaited trip to Africa to share with our sisters there……photos for that will be coming soon!

Here is  photo of when I got to pass out your truth cards in Manila, Philippines…truly a life changing experience!!!

We also decorated the safe house with your cards!

After taking 1500 truth cards to Manila…..Brandi wanted to take them on a big trip all over Southeast Asia…and she did that and it was SO AMAZING!

Here is a photo of when Brandi went to Thailand……the girls kept their truth cards near them as they made jewelry. These are our young sisters who have been rescued from brothels and the sex trade….where they were enslaved to work…..so thankful they have been rescued and restored …. This was taken at Nightlight International in Thailand.

Here is Brandi at Sak Saum in Cambodia…..explaining what the truth cards were before she handed them out…..the truth cards mean SO MUCH to them.

In India….Brandi met VERY YOUNG girls who are enslaved in human trafficking in the sex trade. Here is one of the young girls at Oasis Global looking at her truth cards. Many of them had to be read to them by interpreters but the cards are treasured keepsakes to these girls, reminding them that there are people all over the world who are praying for them, who love them…..and who are working hard to make sure that they can be free. They are not forgotten.

Here is a video of some of the girls in India at Crossover Foundation thanking YOU for the truth cards and reminding all of us that we are ALL Brave Girls.

SOOOOO, are you in? We need more cards…they really DO make a difference. See this page to find out exactly what you need to do.

We love you all so much and can’t wait to pass on your beautiful art to our sweet sisters in Oklahoma.

xoxo

melody, kathy and the BGC team

Yes……Summer Shrimp Cocktail Soup…I haven’t made it since last summer and it will be PERFECT for a fun work day at the barn!

Here’s the super fast recipe for this delicious cold soup that you can throw together in minutes and keep in your refrigerator for a quick lunch or snack, or your own afternoon with friends!

Summer Shrimp Cocktail Soup

1 46oz jar V-8 Spicy Hot Vegetable Juice

1/2 – 1 lb cooked shrimp (any size – cut up if large)

1-2 English cucumbers, diced

1 red bell pepper, diced

1 green bell pepper, diced

1/2 red onion, diced (or 1/2 cup chopped green onion)

1 cup diced celery

Several dashes of tabasco (optional)

1 -2 T Worcestershire sauce

Dash of cayenne (optional – to taste)

Salt and pepper (to taste)

Other great additions: fresh herbs, fresh garden tomatoes, green or yellow zucchini…you get the idea

Combine all in a large bowl. Taste and adjust seasoning; then taste and adjust again. Refrigerate in mason jars or other covered container up to 3 days. Served super cold in pretty glasses (or paper cups if you’re at the beach or park).

This soup is best after just a couple of hours when the flavors have had time to blend but the veggies are still perfectly fresh and crisp. You can adjust the vegetables to whatever you have on hand and in just about any combination.

PS. If you don’t like spicy things, just use regular V-8 and omit the cayenne and tabasco and season to taste with salt and pepper.  And it’s just as good vegetarian style with no shrimp at all – just throw in more veggies.

You simply must enjoy this on a sunny afternoon or evening, sitting on a lawn chair under a tree. Happy summer, brave girls!

love,

kathy

UPDATE: Aaaand the winner is….. VICKIE ORLANDO! 

Vickie, just shoot an email to malary@bravegirlsclub.com with your shipping information and we will get your Chip Art stamps sent out to you right away!

Thank you for participating, everyone… Check back for another Pin it to Win it next week. Have a beautiful day.

___________________

Gooooood morning, world! Who’s ready for another giveaway?!

A few weeks ago, we did a Pin it to Win it and 20% off a few Chip Art alphabets. And this week, we’re doing the same thing, but with beautiful flowery Chip Art stamp sets. Rose, Daisy, and Vintage Floral.

Chip Art is our absolute favorite at Brave Girls Club and we even have a whole room in the Art Barn named “The Chip Art Room.”  Their possibilities are so limitless… use them to add beautiful, debossed designs to chip board, leather, leather bracelets, clay, hardcover books, soft metals, canvas panels… the list goes on. These tools are a lifetime investment… and we know you’ll be addicted the second you touch them!

If you’re curiosity is yearning for more, we have a couple videos that will tell you ALL ABOUT it:

Introduction to ChipArt

Chip Art Tutorial and Ideas

So now that you know a little bit more… take an online trip to the shoppe to check out the rest of the Chip Art supplies if you’d like! Our warehouse is flowing with an abundance of this stuff and it’ll be gone before we know it. But FIRST, pin your favorite flower stamps to Pinterest and perhaps you will win a set!

To enter the giveaway, just follow the usual ‘Pin it to Win it’ steps… here are the instructions if you haven’t done this before.

• Choose your favorite image from this post and ‘pin’ it to Pinterest.
• To make it super easy, there’s a little button at the top and bottom of each post that says “Pin It”, so just click that button and select the image you want to pin.
• If you don’t have a Pinterest account yet, you will be guided through setting up a free account when you click on the “Pin It” icon. Or go to this link to join Pinterest.
• Then come back to this post and comment, saying which Chip Art stamp set you pinned… and let us know something brave you did this weekend!
• At noon on Tuesday (MDST) we’ll randomly choose a winner from the comments, verify the Pins over at Pinterest, and post the name of the winner right here in this post.

And don’t forget, if you don’t get lucky this time… These stamps are 20% off for the rest of the week only!

Have a beautiful Monday.

xoxo

From the moment they arrived…

When we cast away our worries…

and got to know each other quickly…..

and ate delicious handmade food together…..

we spent soulful time alone to gather all of the pieces of ourselves back together….

and ate more delicious food….

and danced and laughed together…

and learned to stitch beautiful things…..

and had many beautiful conversations over luscious dinners….

and the art…..ohhhhh the art……….the artmaking…..

….and the food…

and a very special guest speaker……8 year old Eden……

….and even every dish was washed with love….

…a bond was created that can never be broken………sisters…..brave girls…..

we witnessed each other letting go of things that don’t have a place in our lives anymore….

and made more art to seal the deal….

and laughed and laughed and cried and laughed some more….

all while creating even more beauty….

and more deep connections and soulful friendships to last forever…

……and rolls from scratch, of course….and homemade jam…of course….

and then we planted a tree to represent our brand new lives moving forward….

and celebrated together with the most perfect weather imaginable…..

and wrapped it all up with song….

It was another beautiful week to remember……with beautiful souls.

We can’t wait to have YOU here, too.

xoxo

Dreamers are not always treated with kindness and understanding. Visionaries are rarely taken seriously. People who seek for what is good and true are often scoffed, laughed at or shut down.

Are you willing to dream big dreams anyway? Are you willing to believe in the vision you have of what you want the world to be, or what you want your life to be? Are you willing to keep seeking the kind of life that others might say is unrealistic?

It’s brave to keep dreaming big dreams, to keep posing big questions, to decide not to settle for the status quo. It’s brave to seek for more beauty, goodness, joy and light in a world when it’s often so hard to find. It’s so courageous to keep your heart and mind on the good stuff and to ignore the fears that try so hard to keep us from all that our hearts are begging to have and experience.

BUT THE PEOPLE who do these very things are the people who change the world, who lead the way and who live big lives . . . people like YOU.

So…thanks for continuing to believe in a better way…for working towards big things while enjoying the little things along the way….for continuing to seek for sweet fabulousness and when you can’t find it . . . for creating it.

Thanks for being you. Keep being brave.

xoxo

The differences between people lie in their use of these senses; most people don’t know anything about the inner senses while a few people rely on them just as they rely on their physical senses, and in fact probably even more.”

― C. JoyBell C.

And as my wise sister, Melody, has said… “You are so much smarter than you think you are…….listen to your heart…listen to your soul….listen to your body….then trust yourself. “

YOU KNOW. You really do.

love,

kathy

*** UPDATE***

…And the winner iiiiissss…. Cynthia H! Cynthia, shoot an email to malary@bravegirlsclub.com and with your shipping address and we will send our your pretty little magnets this week!

Thanks for participating, everyone… I love reading your comments! Also, don’t forget that these are 20% THIS WEEK ONLY.

Sending love. xoxo

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It’s a little late… but… HAPPY MONDAY!

I like to get the Pin it to Win it post up first thing on Monday morning, but we’re just getting back to work after an amazing Brave Girl Camp last week. So it’s a bit delayed, but we’ll extend the giveaway until Tuesday night! This week, there are a few select magnet sets on sale for 20% off in the shoppe… and one of you lucky ones will win your favorite set!

Have you ever seen magnets as pretty as those??? Each one is a shiny little morsel filled with gorgeous art and wonderful words. Head over to the shoppe to see more magnets and larger photos… and take a minute to look around at all the other goodness while you’re there!

To enter the giveaway, just follow the usual ‘Pin it to Win it’ steps… here are the instructions if you haven’t done this before. 

• Choose your favorite image from this post and ‘pin’ it to Pinterest.
• To make it super easy, there’s a little button at the top and bottom of each post that says “Pin It”, so just click that button and select the image you want to pin.
• If you don’t have a Pinterest account yet, you will be guided through setting up a free account when you click on the “Pin It” icon. Or go to this link to join Pinterest.
• Then come back to this post and comment, saying which magnet set you pinned… and let us know some good news in your life!
• At noon on Tuesday (MDST) we’ll randomly choose a winner from the comments, verify the Pins over at Pinterest, and post the name of the winner right here in this post.

We have a set of these magnets on our fridge… and they REALLY DO give me a little boost every time I happen to read them… plus they make the fridge look pretty.

And don’t forget that if you don’t win this time… these beauties are 20% off this week ONLY! They are a super awesome gift for girls of all ages, too…

Alright, ‘pin’ your heart away! We’ll post the name of the winner right on this post tomorrow (Tuesday) evening… Hope you have the most wonderful spring day!

xoxo

I first want you to know that I am and have always been a very unconventional mother….a free sprit mother with free spirit children….sometimes that has made me feel and look like a freak….and often….it has made me feel like I am not doing it right. There have been so many things that have happened in our life that have made it necessary to adapt to situations….situations that made us fall outside of the ‘norm’….not so much where I have ever belonged anyway….but still…being a mom is hard and you never really feel like you are doing it right.

What I have learned is that NONE of us ever feel like we are doing it just right…..but that every one of us really is doing our very best.

I have always seen my children as big souls who are simply in much tinier bodies than ours….and that my job as a mother is to help them to grow into the exact soul that they were born to be…and already are. I have tried from the time I became a mother to just listen listen listen for what they individually need….being a mother is the hardest job I have ever had…the most precious, amazing difficult job. It is not always fun and there is so much that I flat out stink at…….but I want more than anything for  my children to learn to use their own wings. I want them to have an amazing life.  I have often felt like my children were wiser, better, smarter souls than I am……and if you ever spent a day with my children…you would understand what I mean. (just like I would feel about YOUR children if I spent a day with them) Motherhood has been this giant honor to me all along….a terrifying one……a scary one that so many days I wonder how I was ever given the right, the honor and the stewardship to carry out. I have been a mother for 21 years now…and still….it scares me every day to know that I am sort of in charge here.

My biggest fear in life is that I will mess up my kids. Truly…this is my very biggest fear.

So I have 5 amazing, funny, smart children who are free spirits with strong minds and wills and with their own dreams and their own goals….I am very very very close to all of my children. Marq and I have loved (not always ‘liked’ especially between the ages of 13-17) being parents to them from the very day in 1991 when I was 19 and he was 23 and we had ABSOLUTELY NO CLUE WHAT WE WERE DOING and our little dimple-cheeked son came into the world with a mass of black hair and sparkling eyes.

I don’t talk much about my children because I never want to cross the line with THEIR OWN story….ya know? I want them to live it out and be able to tell it on their own when they are ready to do that. I have learned the hard way to keep sacred things sacred…and my children are sacred to me. Please just know that my life is completely wrapped up in our 3 children who still live here at home with us…and the oldest two who are now living on their own but are still here just about every day. We are together every day…we eat together, work together, play together, dream together….we help each other…we all fiercely love and protect each other.

But there was a time, not so long ago, that I completely dreaded mother’s day….every single year that it came along. This is not because I dreaded being a mother….it is because every year….after the breakfast in bed from my sweet kids and the tender written words and special treatment by my husband…….we would head to church or flip on the television and hear a whole program about mothers….about motherhood….(often about perfect mothers, about the ideal image of motherhood) ….. and then the television shows, the commercials……the greeting cards………

…and I would start to feel little daggers being driven into my heart over all of my inadequacies as a mother….

…especially when my children were small and motherhood was in the “boot camp” stage….diapers and bottles and colic and croup and too many car seats to buckle to take a 10 minute trip to the store (so you just stay home, isolated, all the time and make due) …..during those years on mother’s day, during the nonstop tributes to mothers, I always felt myself withering a little more, a little more, a little more……….and I always wished we could just skip mother’s day because all it did was point out all of the things I was not good at and not doing and all of the ways that my children must somehow be missing out……ya know?

We have always sort of gone against the current with our parenting…..and I’m not going to give you many details of what I mean because one of the things that I think can make us very miserable on mother’s day and any OTHER day as a mother is when we look at how others are parenting and compare ourselves. What I will tell you is that I am an intuitive mother……and we are intuitive parents. We do what we feel is best for our children and our family……and very very very often that is very different than what is going on around us…what everyone else is doing………and so when I make the huge mistake of comparing….that’s when I am miserable and feel wobbly, shaky, clumsy and uncertain….just like everything else in life. Our life is 100% different from the life of any other family….we have had different experiences…we have 7 completely different personalities….we have 7 different life missions….we have 7 different sets of strengths and weaknesses…..so the only way to survive (and even thrive)  as a mother is to do it from my own heart…and listen listen listen to the gift of intuition that I know FOR SURE that we are all blessed with.

Just like everything else that we EVER do in life….especially if we are trying to do big scary things that have a lot of risks attached…….people have opinions.

Opinions are especially hurtful, even cruel when they are about the way we mother….or the way we parent……especially when they are directed at us personally…..OR WHEN WE TAKE THEM PERSONALLY.

In this age of over-information and beautiful blogs and facebook and pinterest and every other imaginable way to very beautifully and artistically be able to compare ourselves with everyone’s very very very best of everything………….please don’t ever ever ever do this when it comes to being a mother.

So….the way to be miserable on this very special, sacred and fragile day is to seek out every tribute to every mother (or any tribute to any other mother) and look at all of the ways that you don’t measure up to those tributes. Please don’t choose to spend this day in this way. So much is left out of those stories….so much….and if EVERYTHING was included…..those tributes would end up looking exactly like your life. ok? You are a mother worth writing a tribute about because motherhood is hard stuff that doesn’t really have big rewards that are easy to see every day….and often the rewards are many decades away from the time the work has been put in….with years and years of heartache, exhaustion and weariness in between.

Want to have a good day on mother’s day? First……give yourself some grace…..believe it when your children tell you that they love and you and they they are so happy that YOU are their mother. Believe it if they DON’T TELL YOU TOO…..because let’s be honest….there are stages in a child/teen/young-adult’s life when they are fantastically self-centered and believe that mothers will just show up every day just like the sun does every morning…and then they never think another thing about it. Someday……someday someday someday you will see that the love all really did sink in…..and that it was worth it. YOU KNOW that if you had it to do over again….you would have done ALL of that stuff that you never got thanked for. It was worth it.

Think hard about all of the ways that you have loved your children the VERY BEST WAY THAT YOU KNOW HOW TO LOVE THEM….and that YOU have just flat out done THE VERY BEST THAT YOU COULD DO……..and that you continue to do that every day.

…even if you can look back now and see that there are things that you would have done differently….because now you know better. You always did the best you could do…

And finally….the very very very best way to have a fantastic mother’s day is to look around at all of your friends…all of your family….all of the women in your life…..and please please please tell them that they are doing a great job. (because every one of them is doing the very best that they can do right now)

There is not a more beautiful, comforting and healing compliment that you can get about being a mother than one from another mother.

Tell the other mothers in your life that they are doing a great job….an mean it.

What we DO NOT NEED is to be judged….or to judge…..we don’t really need opinions about what we should have done, or should be doing……NO ONE KNOWS what is going on in any family that is being so carefully thought-through, agonized over and dealt with in the very best way that the mother (and father) knows how to do it.

Let’s be good to each other as mothers. Let’s not judge OURSELVES against each other…and let’s not judge each other. …and let’s all take a guilt-free nap….knowing that we really are pretty much exactly like every other mother alive out there….whether she is the mother being talked about in the tributes, or the one being gossiped about because of her out-of-the-box ways……let’s all just give each other grace enough to know that we are all doing the very best we can do………and that we all need a hug and a nap and some kindness to keep us going.
And…let’s remember that whether we have children or not…we all have mother hearts…and there are so many ways to mother……so be sure to reach out to those who have mothered you in any way…….sometimes the ones who mother us best are those who do not even have children of their own.

HAPPY MOTHER’S DAY WEEKEND.
xoxoxo
melody

(first published Mothers Day 2012)

It’s hard to feel special or unique or different or relevant or important when there is so much information available about everything and everyone all the time. It is hard to feel like we could ever possibly make a mark or make a difference or make a unique life when we can look around and see that it seems as though there’s already someone doing everything we have ever thought of, or that there are hundreds of others doing it.

It would be easy to simply give up and keep our lives at status quo, and think, “what’s the point of trying to do anything these days, a million others are already doing everything I want to do.”

Clever girl, listen up.

NO ONE has ever existed on this earth who has your exact ideas, mixed with your exact skills, mixed with your exact personality, mixed with your exact style, mixed with your special way of doing things. NO ONE. It may seem as though every mark has already been made that could ever be made, and that there simply isn’t room for you. But this is so untrue. Your unique talents combined with where you are in your life, who you know and who you can help create a situation that will NEVER be duplicated again in all of history.

So please go out and do those things that only you can do. If you do not do those things, they will never be done, and that would be an awful shame — for you and for all of us. We need the best of you. BE BRAVE AND GO FOR IT!

You are so very loved.
xoxo