Blog Archives - Spoonful of Imagination

Launching a New Chapter

January 28, 2019 By Erica Deuel 3 Comments

We started blogging a little over 10 years ago. I know for sure because we started when I was pregnant with Jeremiah who turned 10-years-old a few months ago. It all started as a way to stay in touch with our family and friends while we were spending a lot of time on the road. In between my family updates, I started posting Friday Project Spotlights as a way of sharing simple DIY craft projects for my friends to do with their kids. With no attempts to market these posts, somehow they picked up a groundswell of momentum. Before I knew it, hundreds of people were tuning in each week to craft with me. We rebranded from our family blog into Spoonful of Imagination and those hundreds became thousands. It’s so humbling. Truly. As someone who struggles with dyslexia and the fear of stringing words together, it never stops surprising me that people keep showing up.

This blog has stretched me to grow and try things that I would have never ever imagined. Matt and the kids have gone from cheering me on to becoming my partners in this platform. They have helped me write, build, take pictures, brainstorm, share my posts, develop craft kits, ship out items from our shop, and eventually build a non-profit art studio. What a ride!

But we are keenly aware that it would have never happened if it weren’t for you – our loyal friends, readers, and fellow creators of Spoonful of Imagination. Thank you. No seriously… THANK YOU!!!

As we’ve grown and our kids needs have shifted and changed, I’ve honestly put this space on the back burner for a while. For those of you who have felt that shift, I’m excited to announce that is about to change.

With Matt working full time in video and film production and me working full time at managing the art studio, we’ve both found that our creative energy is being poured out like never before. We are so thrilled and privileged to be able to help so many people and organizations create. What we have found though is that we need to have a creative project that is “ours.” Something that we can do together, as a family. That brings us back to here, Spoonful of Imagination.

Now, as an all-hands-on-deck team, we are working on putting together new content for you, our loyal friends and readers.

We will have new posts and DIY tutorials just like the one I posted the other day. But it’s better than that! Starting today we are launching (well kinda re-launching, but I’ll get back to that in a minute) a YouTube channel dedicated to Spoonful of Imagination vlog content!

This is something we’ve been talking about, dreaming about, and planning for months. Oh my goodness, let me start by saying, “RESPECT!” to all of the faithful YouTube creators out there. We have spent a lot of time studying other channels out there. We have learned so much from people like Peter McKinnon, Casey Neistat, Art Hub for Kids, Matti Haapoja, That YouTub3 Family, just to name a few… and we’ve decided to toss our hat into the vlogging ring. We have a couple of new videos on the channel now. You’ll also see some OLD videos. We decided to leave some of those up for memories sake and to serve as a reminder of how far we’ve come.

Here’s a quick introduction from Matt and me just sharing the heart behind the channel and our vision for what we hope to accomplish. It’s the most boring video we will create, we promise. After this, it starts to get super colorful and very fun.

Like everything we’ve always done, our desire is to help other people create. We believe there is life changing power in being creative and if we can encourage someone to add a Spoonful of Imagination to their life, then we consider that a win!

Here’s our first DIY Tutorial. Enjoy! Oh and as we’ve learned from our YouTube mentors, please subscribe to the channel, like the videos, and share with your family and friends. Your comments, likes, and shares have been the fuel that have kept this blog going for so long. We would be honored to have you join us in stoking the fires for this latest chapter of our journey!

Collections

July 24, 2015 By Erica Deuel 1 Comment

A few weeks ago my family packed up our van and headed out on a road trip. We drove from Indiana down to little Port St. Joe in Florida for a week at the beach, back up through Atlanta to see some family, and then off to Virginia to see some dear friends, before returning home. We soaked in some amazing views as we rolled through 2,800 miles of the country.

Do you like to road trip?

We love it. The long drives force us to sit and do nothing but talk with those that we love and take in the stunning creation out the windows.

On this last drive, we saw a vast array of land. I loved seeing the corn-growing in Indiana, the mountains in Tennessee, and the ocean with leaping dolphins in Florida was pretty spectacular. The landscape changed from flat grounds to the most gorgeous mountains and hills. My mind kept thinking how it looks like God had textured and layered his painting so perfectly. One scene that got me was my parent’s back yard. Those Pine Trees…I have all the heart eyes in the world for them. It’s a funny thing growing up in Georgia. Pine trees are common. They may even be annoying or a nuisance cause they are just everywhere and the pollen they spew in the spring can be ridiculous. After moving to the mid-west, it suddenly hit me one day that my flower beds have rocks covering the ground rather than pine needles because there are no pine trees. My heart ached a little. Pine Trees are home to me.

Even as I type this out and think of that picture, I feel myself fighting a lump in my throat and watering eyeballs. It’s amazing what a picture can do, isn’t?! A single picture can bring back a flood of emotions. It can cause you to recall lots of memories even to the point you smell and taste them. Hence the phrase: a picture is worth a thousand words. It’s so true.

It reminds me of my childhood postcard collection. As we camped, hiked, and traveled as a kid I would buy a postcard wherever we went. It was my little snippet of that trip. That single image sparked a family trip, a camp out gone bad, a birthday hike, or even just a long day in the car fighting over seat space. The memories, the images, the postcards are snippets of what was my reality, My life. These are my moments that I never want to forget.

I can be guilty of sharing TOO many images these days. Social media has made it so easy to upload a picture that sometimes we miss the moments. We are focusing on the actual image and capturing the perfect shot rather than living the moment. The order is reversed in how these memories should go.

I want to recapture the sacred picture. The picture that floods my brain. The one that I go back and look at 20 times that week and smile, laugh or cry aloud at the moment it captured. These pictures might not be the most edited. They might not be the prettiest, but they are real.

It’s these thoughts that make me want to try a new regular series on on the blog called Eddy’s Postcards. Eddy, is also a memory from my younger days. It’s a nickname I picked up while mentoring some pretty awesome girls. They took my initials and had fun with it. Now I really feel old with all these “remembrances of younger Erica days”. Oh well.

I will post a picture every week and give a little blurb about why that picture is my favorite picture from that week. I hope this idea will help me think less of the posing of pictures and more of the pictures that are the real moments I never want to forget.

For example, this picture from our trip is one I have smiled at so many times since we have been home. I love how I can hear the boys squealing with delight, how Matt is literally in the middle of the action capturing it all, and Matt’s sweet dad is standing off to the side all by himself looking reallllllllly worried about all the fireworks going off around his family. It’s awesome.

I hope you will follow along with this series, and it can encourage you to remember the moments that matter and let some of the others go. We are in this journey of life together, and I hope we can (in some small way) spur each other on to be stretched, focused on what matters, and give life all we can.

Haven, Here I Come!

July 31, 2013 By Erica Deuel 2 Comments

We just got back from St. George Island and had the best time hanging out with my extended family, playing on the beach, and swimming in the pool. Those were great summer days. We got to catch up with people we love, meet our new nephew/cousin, and just relax.

I will be posting more about that trip and the fun we had with my big family (including the boys’ fishing trip where they caught a shark), but first off I want to tell you what I am excited about.

Tomorrow, I leave for my first ever blog conference. I am so excited. Attending a blog conference was one of my personal goals for 2013. It might be the only one I have almost accomplished, but that’s ok. I’m going and so excited about it! There are so many wonderful bloggers going that have become real life friends that I can’t wait to hang out with, as well as some pretty awesome bloggers that I can’t wait to meet.

Haven, is a conference for DIY bloggers, and I know I will learn so much attending the sessions and from talking with everyone else. I plan to come back and hit the ground running with all kinds of new ideas and inspiration! So stay tuned!

I can’t wait to share with you about my time at Haven, but if you want to follow along with me, while I’m at the conference, be sure to follow my twitter and instagram feeds. For those who follow along, you will get a chance to win a prize next week – don’t miss out!

Thanks so much for checking in, and I will be back soon!

Thank you so much to my amazingly talented and servant hearted sister-in-law, Christina, for working and using her talented photography skills for us while on her “off” time. We are blessed by you, Someplace Wild!

iBlog Sneak Peak: Simplicity

May 14, 2013 By Erica Deuel 2 Comments

The three winners of my iBlog giveaway are: Rachel R., Tara T., and Karen B.

I will be in touch with each of you! But wait, everyone is a winner today… Here is a very short excerpt from my chapter to give you a preview of the kinds of info shared in this e-book.

As you know the internet is quite large. There is a lot of content out there and more being produced every single day. The truth is, there is a lot of noise and a lot of content that is competing with yours.

Fortunately for you and for me the majority of content publishers out there don’t get the idea of simplicity. Rather than pulling back and creating something special, most sites just turn up the volume. Tons and tons of sites end up becoming hectic and busy billboards. You know the sites I’m talking about. You don’t know where to start and you just end up moving on because it hurts your eyes to stick around.

Remember we are talking about Curb Appeal. I am all for really fun, unique, and detailed posts. However, is your design simple? Intuitive? Easy to navigate? Is it easy to load?

Here are a few ideas on simplicity:

Navigation: I would encourage you to limit your site to have 4-6 tabs or pages when it comes to the navigation. Once you get beyond 6 tabs you can end up with lots of layers or nested navigation. This can be too much for someone to digest. It ends up looking busy.

Widgets and Gadgets: You can install a number of elements into your site that can assist with simplicity. WordPress calls them Widgets and Blogger calls them Gadgets. To put it simply these are plugins you can install into your site to help its functionality.

Mobile Responsiveness: Massive amounts of web content are being viewed on these tablets and smartphones every single day. Yet the majority of websites are not mobile responsive. Mobile Responsive is a design or a plugin that will adapt the layout of your site for a mobile device.

Load Times: If you are anything like me, if a page doesn’t load in about 5 seconds, I move on to the next site. I consider something to be wrong with it. I would suggest a Load Time plugin. There are a lot out there, find the one that suits you. The primary idea is that it will prioritize the order in which your content loads. Text first, pictures next, advertising last, etc.

Easy to Contact: As your blog grows people will want to contact you. It may simply be through a comment on your blog or the desire to send a personal message. Either way, make sure that your readers can easily contact you.

One of the primary elements of your design can be found in your consistency of creating new content. Think about your blog like a magazine. As you stand at the check out lines the new covers of a magazine draw your eye. Imagine if every week for several months the magazine covers never changed? Eventually you would lose interest because “I’ve seen that before.” But at the end of the day it’s about what is inside your home (aka blog) that makes it truly special. Be smart in your initial design, tweak as you go along and learn more, but keep the consistency of fresh new posts at the forefront of your work and your site will turn out just fine!

I wanted to share a few tips and encourage you that I think this e-book is a great read. If you didn’t win a copy, You can still buy one here.

Thanks so much for all your support!

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