Imagining is good for the soul. So are beautiful memories and stories that inspire us.

As I was thinking of starting another year and wanting to shine love the best I could, I tried to imagine and think of a way that my family could be in constant conversation about how we can show, see, and feel love.

It is easy for our world to be all about us. We feed our needs. We buy what we want. We take care of ourselves. Yet, our world has so much pain and hurt. I am finding the moments I push outside myself and give of my time, heart, and talents I can be used and see parts of the world that are bigger than me. I want my kids to experience and see how much they are blessed. To do so we need to be talking and looking for ways we are blessed and how we can bless others.

I came up with this simple heart memo board as a way we can constantly have our eyes open and hearts vulnerable. Before I tell you anymore about how we will be using our memo board exactly, let me show you how I made it.

I started with two 1″ x 1″ boards. I used my Ryobi Compound Miter Saw to cut them into six pieces. They measure (1) 12″, (3) 13″, (2) 24″. I also cut one of the ends of my two 24″ pieces and two of my 13″ pieces at a 45 degree angle, so they would fit together nicely at the points of my heart.

Once I got all my pieces cut, I used my new Ryobi Corner Cat Finish Sander to sand the ends of my wood pieces to get them smooth and remove any split pieces.  This was my first time to use my Ryobi sander and I LOVE it. It is light and powerful. Until now, I have mostly hand sanded projects because the last time I used an electric sander it was heavy, and had an electrical cord that was constantly in my way. I can’t rave about this sander enough. I was enjoying using it so much that I almost forgot to stop and take some pictures.

I think I have forever been converted from manual sanding. After I finished sanding my pieces, I placed the wood in its heart shape. I pre drilled a small pilot hole into all my joints. Added a touch of wood glue at each joint. I then screwed them together and painted my new finished wood heart with wood stain.

Once the stain was dry, I got my other supplies together. I used jute webbing, scissors, and a staple gun.

I stretched a piece of webbing across from one side of my heart to the other and stapled it in. I left a slight gap and placed another row of webbing up on the wood heart and stapled it in as well. I did this same technique all the way to the top of my wood heart.

Once I got all my horizontal rows in, I cut off all the fringe ends of webbing that were hanging over the sides of my wood heart. I then started weaving rows of webbing in and out of my other rows. Note: I had to remove some of my first staples to be able to get this second layer of webbing weaved in. If I had thought of it, I probably should have cut all my pieces and placed them where they were to go (having weaved), and did the stapled step last. This would have prevented having to remove any staples and re-staple.

Once I had weaved webbing through my whole heart, my memo board was complete! I love the simple design, yet the huge way this project could inspire and help my family be in constant conversation about bigger things than what we should eat for dinner. Although I do love to talk about food, since Matt is an amazing cook.

With this heart memo board we are going to write on little cards and clip to the board anytime we experience something like an answered prayer, seeing God move and provide, ways we were encouraged as we were used, our sweet foster children’s names, how we were marked or changed by something, etc. It’s meant to represent and capture heart level stuff. I hope we have eyes to see and hearts to take the time to capture, process, and write down the ways we feel our heart stirred in 2014. At the end of the year, I want us to re-read each card as we take them off and place them in a scrapbook of some sort.

Thank you so much for checking in and reading about my heart memo board. Do you have a way to constantly be capturing all that your heart feels? I am not good with journaling and I have a horrible memory, so I pray this little system helps me and my family.

On another note: I will be sharing more of our family’s continual foster story on IG (as ericadeuel) as we go through this. Please feel free to follow me there for more intimate parts of our journey and life than I may open up to in my usual DIY posts.