Finishing the Color Finder 1.0 round up!!

Hopefully you haven’t gotten your fill of MoJoy Color Finder 1.0 guest blogs.  I’m the last one up and can’t wait to share another recap.  I am so proud of the other ladies having the courage to share their perspectives and insights to the weekend.  Mo was super serious that there would be opportunities to STRETCH and grow.

I drove in Thursday night because I had an 8 hour drive to get from San Antonio, TX to West Monroe.  It seems a theme of this retreat is that everyone came bearing food – Wisconsin cheese curds, Mennonite pastries, homemade dips…we had it all!  I made homemade croissants to bring with me.  Check out those dough-butter-dough-butter layers!

 

Come Friday morning, I ran a few errands with Mo and got ready for the retreat!  Amy K., from Wisconsin, was the only one flying in for the retreat and I ended up picking her up from the airport.  Mo even had a “Welcome to Louisiana” sign for her.

Mo has taken her art retreats to another level with the swag we received.  She had custom sewn jewelry bags and journal covers, vinyl stickers, and MoJoy branded handouts.  Loved all the colors!!

My stash!

Mo had custom painted each individual’s name tag on old hymns and used Suzy’s button maker to create them.  These were awesome as well and in ROYGBIV order!

After gushing over the art room and all the swag, it was time to get at it!  Mo had different quotes, paper,envelopes, and other mixed media to use in our journals.  We chose our fabric covers and then had to put the insides together.

We each decided the order we wanted everything, pre-marked our holes, used the Crop-a-Dile to punch, and then bound the books.

Jennifer whipped out the ink pads to ink the edges.  After attending Mo’s last retreat, Jennifer does not think paper is complete without some inked edges.  I also used StazOn to add my name inside my cover.  These journals would get filled throughout the weekend.

Not sure what that face is about!

If you look at the bottom of the next picture, you can get a glimpse of the “most awesome ribbon.”  Mo found this when we shopped at Canton and we used it in lots of our projects  Essentially, it is thin vintage silk ribbon.

Mo had each of use take the Strengths Finder 1.0 prior to coming to the retreat.  It is a personality test that identifies five top strengths for you.  The Color Finder 1.0 was based on combining your strengths and colors to grow and stretch.  She had pre-printed each retreaters’ description for their strengths.  We discussed the high points to each strength and later incorporated them into our journals.  These were also tied to the first John Maxwell principle for the weekend, the law of awareness.  You must know yourself to grow yourself.

Jewelry was the second half of the night.  We took a color test to identify which colors we naturally gravitate towards and what colors represent/mean to us.

Each person chose a key and 1 or 2 colors to put with the key.  These colors represented the areas each person wanted to stretch in not necessarily what is most comfortable.

The jewelry making was not only meant to be representative of growth, but Mo also taught basic jewelry making techniques for everyone to take home.

Pam was a natural at wiring beads!

Chrissie’s cross was a favorite by everyone.  Orange seemed to be a common color chosen by all of us “responsibility” strength people.  I think there were 5 of us that shared that strength.  Orange is being bold, taking risks, and daring.

 

We also made several hammered jewelry pieces.

We had leather wrap bracelets and copper pieces to stamp.  The words or phrases we used were completely our choice.

 

For this copper piece, we hammered a word, used the tool to curve the metal, colored the letters with sharpie, and distressed the copper.  After that, we took a silk ribbon to make it into a wrap bracelet.

 

 

The rest of the night was open for those who wanted to stay up or you could go to bed.  I stayed up this night to add more to my journal.  This book would become a “smash book” style full of inspiration, take aways from the retreat, and notes written from everyone.  I started by using pre-cut Pinterest quotes that Mo had available to all of us.  A huge thank you goes to the MMPT staff who cut these!!  Having everything pre-prepped made creating so simple and relaxing.  Washi, paint chips, scrapbook paper, and pinterest quotes were the main things I used in my journal.

 

That is until Mo brought out gouache water colors.  I have wanted to try these for a while, but couldn’t find them in a store.  They are heavily saturated water colors and are so awesome.  I got my paint on for all of my white pages.  Stay tuned for how they turned out and other adventures from Day 2!