The Creative Family Manifesto

The idea for this came about after reading The Creative Family Manifesto by Amanda Blake Soule*. Tom’s Mum gave me a copy of this for Christmas a few years ago, and after Littlest One was born I finally started dipping into it when I got 5 minutes here and there. It is the most wonderful book, and I wish I had started reading it sooner! If you want to live a more creative life and encourage your children to get involved at every opportunity, then I would highly recommend it.

Soule encourages you to use simple things around you to encourage creativity as a family. I love the part where she talks about imaginary friends, as Little One has an imaginary camel and he comes everywhere with us! He really is like a part of the family now, as is Camel’s friend Elephant and Elephant’s friend, Oscar the dog. Soule also emphasises the joy of sharing the tradition of handmade things, which is obviously something that is really important to me too.

Writing our own family manifesto

We are about to embark on our home education journey, as Little One will soon be 4 and would be going to school in September. It seemed like the right time to write our manifesto with this in mind, but also with everything that’s going on with Covid 19 too. It is a very surreal situation isn’t it? We are social distancing now, and it has actually been really good to think about what should be on our manifesto as we’re going to be spending much more time at home! It might be something that you can do with your family too as a positive activity to complete together. It doesn’t have to be framed if you don’t want to – even just jotting down your list of statements is a good place to start.

I used my personal manifesto as a starting point, as there were a few things that I thought would be good for our family manifesto. There were others I wanted to add to encourage things for our children and for ourselves. This is the list that I wrote, which contains 14 statements:

• Stay curious
• Go outisde
• Explore
• Make a mess – tidy up later
• Try again
• Learn from your mistakes
• Notice the little things
• Create together
• Make music
• Collect things
• Play
• Read every day
• Always be kind
• Love your community

This list covers things that we want for all of us as a family – things we want to encourage, and the ways in which we try to live our lives. I don’t see creativity as a separate ‘thing’ that we do, it’s in everything that we do. At the moment, Little One  frequently says that she can’t do things, so we’re always encouraging her to try again. We try to create things together when we can, whether that’s music, craft or something else. We read every day, and we emphasise the importance of being kind.

I wondered about changing the phrase ‘collect things’ as it reminded me of the phrase ‘collect moments, not things’. In the end, I decided that this is actually what I want it to say! Collections are great – leaves, stamps, feathers, colour charts – all of these things can inspire us in so many ways. It isn’t so much about having physical things for me, it’s about how we take inspiration from them. So I left that bit in!

Making your own creative family manifesto: materials

To make a family manifesto to be displayed like ours, you’ll need a few basic materials:

A big sheet of good quality card (we used an A1 size piece of card that I bought from our local art shop)

A set of watercolour paints and brushes

Some coloured paper

Stamps and an ink pad

A pencil

Scissors

Double-sided sticky tape or glue

A frame to display it in

Step 1

Take your large piece of card and set up the watercolours. Then get each member of your family to paint something on it! We went abstract and painted whatever popped into our heads. Littlest One even joined in too, and you can see where he painted with his hands in the corner. I think he was just 10 months when we did this, so it’s something that all ages can join in with. Leave it to dry completely.

Step 2

Now take your stamps and ink pad, and stamp out each of the creative statements onto coloured paper. I used a different colour for each statement, and chose 7 colours of paper for the 14 statements. When the ink has dried, carefully cut around each one in a rectangular shape.

Step 3

Remove the packaging from your frame. Take out the mount, but don’t discard it as you’ll need to use it in the next step!

Step 4

Once the watercolours have dried, place the mount on top and draw around it with a pencil. Then carefully cut it out, so that you have the right size to fit in your frame. If you prefer, you can use the mount to display – just do whatever works for you and adjust the size of the painted card accordingly.

Step 5

Position the creative statements on top of the painted card and work out where you’d like them to be. Stick them in place with double-sided sticky tape or some glue.

Step 6

The last thing to do is to put it in your frame, secure the back and then display. We have hung ours in the hallway, as we wanted to be able to see it frequently. Little One asks about it every time she goes up or down the stairs, which is great!

The beautiful pennant hanging above our manifesto is by HouseofHooray on Etsy*. The Pride of the North hoop is designed and stitched by me as an exclusive for For the Love of the North, an amazing shop which supports creatives from the North East of England. You can purchase one here! The pink pineapple embroidery was stitched by me, and you can read about that on my blog here.

Share your manifesto!

I would really love to see your manifesto if you make one – let me know in the comments below, or tag me on social media @hellohoorayblog. I hope this project brings you joy, especially during this really tough period. Stay safe, and wash your hands!

Please note that links marked (*) are affiliate links.

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It’s my Mum’s birthday today (Happy Birthday, Mum!) and I wanted to make her a special card. I’ve combined three of my favourite things here: pretty paper, bunting and stamps! I bought all of the things to make this card from Paperchase – one of my favourite shops!

You will need:

A piece of white A4 card
A selection of coloured papers
Some alphabet stamps
An ink pad
Scissors and glue

Step 1

Take the first letter stamp and stamp it on one of the pieces of coloured paper. Cut out a triangle around the letter.

Repeat this with all of the other letters.

Step 2

Fold the piece of A4 card in half and arrange the bunting pieces. I originally wanted to make a landscape card, but after moving them around a little I realised that portrait would work better for my bunting.

Step 3

Glue each bunting piece onto the card – don’t worry about glueing the pointy bits of the triangles, as this gives a better effect of the bunting hanging.

Ta-dah! That’s it – you’re ready to send it!

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Many of you will already know that one of my crafty plans this year is to learn how to make my own stamps (see my previous post about stamp-making if you haven’t already!). I have a new found admiration for anyone who can make beautifully crafted stamps – it’s trickier than it looks! Getting a neat edge is really tough, but practice makes perfect…

Last week I had the idea to make a little button stamp. Then I had an idea of what I could use it for! So yesterday, I drew a few little sketches and settled on this button. It took a while to carve it, and I tried to do it as neatly as I could…

It isn’t perfect, but as you can see from the bottom left-hand square, it printed out ok! I’m really a perfectionist, so dealing with that can be hard sometimes…but I actually like the slight wonky nature of this button

I realised that the light was disappearing (come on, British summer time!) so I gathered all of my things and started printing. I thought that this stamp would make some great little notebooks – and as a craft supply hoarder, I had some of these little Moleskine notebooks that were perfect.

Then I got out my alphabet stamps too!

I like this black and white version, but decided to add a little extra touch by sewing in some cotton in different colours.

Make sure you snip any excess cotton as close as you can to the knots on the inside. Ta-dah! They’re ready for lots of crafty notes

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Making my own rubber stamps was one of my top crafty plans for 2014, and today I had my first attempt! I received this amazing book for my birthday (thank you Helen and Keith!) – ‘Making an Impression‘ by Geninne D. Zlatkis. The photos are so inspiring and the instructions throughout the book are really clear, so if you’re a beginner or more experienced I’d highly recommend it! I really love these stationery ideas:

And when I’m a bit better at stamp-making, I’d love to make this bird cushion:

For my first stamps, I decided to go for a simple plant pot and flower stamp. I had designed some funky geometric patterns (see first photo!) but I realised that they would probably be a bit tricky. The first step was to transfer the design on to the rubber (I bought mine here).

Then I used the size no.1 lino cutter to mark out the basic edges:

After that, I dug out a bit more around the edge using the no.2 and no.5 size lino cutters:

When my pot was finished, repeated these steps with the flower design.

Then I just had to test them out, keeping my fingers crossed that I’d done it ok!

I’m really pleased with my first attempt, but this is definitely something to keep working at, so I’ll keep trying…with these stamps, I drew in the flower stem with a pencil. I think that this would make really nice cards!

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I’m a firm believer in sending thank you cards, whatever your age! I’m always trying to think of new ideas for cards, and this year I found some lovely letterpress letters in one of my favourite shops (I’ll be doing a post about it shortly…) and thought that they would be perfect. I don’t have a roller for ink so I just used my normal ink pads, but I quite like the texture of the printing. Hopefully, everyone we sent a card to has received it, so they won’t mind me telling you about them!

You will need:

Letterpress stamps – I used a T and a Y
An ink pad in a colour or colours of your choice
Some card (and possibly a trimmer if you need to cut it down to size)
A pencil and ruler
A pen in a colour of your choice

First, I measured the card and cut it to size A6 pieces, and then I measured half way along and scored the edge to fold it into a size A7 card.

Then I stamped a T and a Y in red ink, slightly off centre.

When that was dry, I wrote in the rest of ‘thank you’.

And that’s it – how easy is that?! I’m really pleased with how they turned out We sent them out in some little yellow envelopes that I made. If you’d like to make your own, then you can check out my mini envelope tutorial here.

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The envelopes that we’re going to send our invitations in – there is a bit of a story behind them actually! When I first started making stationery I bought a few sheets of pretty paper and eagerly took them home to make some envelopes. When I’d made some with this paper I thought: ‘They would make wonderful envelopes for wedding invitations’. And then Tom saw them and said: ‘They would be lovely for wedding invitations’ – even before I’d said it! So we agreed that we would have to have these and I went out and bought extra paper!

The flower we designed for our invitations (and the biggest inkpad ever!)

We chose pink card for the invitations, and decided that we wanted some sort of flower design for the front. Tom had the idea of using heart shaped petals to make the flower so that we can use the full flower or have one heart-shaped petal. This is going to work really well as we’ll have the petal on the bottom of each of the inserts in the invitation, which will tie everything together nicely. Once the designs were finished, we had them made into rubber stamps so that we can print the invitations in pink ink. The stamps were made by The English Stamp Company who are absolutely fantastic! You can upload your own design onto their website, and if the image isn’t quite right they will help you to solve the problem.

Our flower stamp

We don’t have access to photoshop software so were having problems with the resolution, but the lovely people at The English Stamp Company fixed that for us and emailed new versions of the files to upload so we could order our stamps. The stamps are beautiful – so well made and the results are fabulous (the E.S.C. also supplied us with the biggest inkpad I have ever seen!). And I’m so pleased that we’re designing and making things for our wedding together – it has been a fun day starting to make our invitations.

So now we just need to stamp our names on the front and then think about what goes inside…but that is for another day!

Post updated 24th June 2016.

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