How to Create an Inspirational Gift Book of Wisdom
The Blue Day Book. The Art of Doing Nothing.I Hope You Dance. If Life Was a Game Then These Are the Rules. And probably the most popular of them all, Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff.
You’ve most surely seen the numerous inspirational gift books out there on the market and possibly you’ve even purchased one as a gift for a friend, family member or maybe even for yourself. These inspirational gift books deliver words of wisdom for every day reminders or for people who are feeling down for one reason or another and need a little pick me up inspirational word or two. The best quality of these popular inspirational books of wisdom is that you do not have to read them in order. In fact, most of the editors of the gift books would probably encourage you not to. For it is often the case that if you believe that intuition has a large influence over what we say and do, you will be drawn naturally to a page that has the inspirational token of wisdom most appropriate for you at that time.
These inspirational books of wisdom serve as thoughtful, well-intended gifts, especially for others who are having some sort of trouble in their lives. While the inspirational books, though, are no doubt appreciated and most likely read and referred to quite often, the themes and styles of these inspirational books of wisdom start to get old after awhile. That doesn’t mean, however, that you can no longer give the gift of the inspirational books of wisdom. It is just a suggestion that perhaps next time your friend or loved one is in need of some inspirational words, you give him or her a similar book of wisdom, but with an inspirational twist. The twist, being, that you created the inspirational book of wisdom yourself.
It may sound intimidating at first, but it is really quite easy, and fun, as well, to create a gift book of inspirational words of wisdom for someone you know will surely appreciate it. Although when it is a gift book that you created from your heart, practically anybody would appreciate it. So the first decision you have to make about the inspirational gift book is who exactly you are giving it to and what the overall theme will be. It might be tempting once you start brainstorming to make a few of these gift books for various acquaintances so be sure to narrow it down to one to begin with. It does take a bit of time to finalize the inspirational gift book masterpiece. Themes can be concepts such as peace and relaxation or they can be motivational calls to action, like get better, reach for the challenge, I know you can do it, etc. If this part of the gift book making process is holding you back from beginning the project, though, you can take the easy way out and settle on a theme of “random inspirational quotes”. In this instance, there will be no rule as to what concept you have to revolve your words of wisdom around, so you can utilize each page or two for whatever theme strikes you at the moment.
Your first task is to select a gift book. Go to your local bookstore and browse the gift book and stationary section. There will likely be plenty of cover designs you’d like to use, but before hastily selecting your top favorite, be sure to consider the guidelines for the rest of the project first, otherwise you may waste your time, money and an entire trip out to the store. For the bulk of this inspirational book of wisdom creation, you will be selecting images and phrases from magazine pages and pasting them decoratively inside of the inspirational gift book. Keep that in mind while choosing the gift book to purchase and use as your foundation. You want to make sure that you select a gift book that will be an appropriate size for the cutouts you wish to paste in, something large enough to fit a short phrase onto a single page, but small enough so as to not leave you with huge areas of open white space to fill in after you’ve glued down your theme oriented images and words. Additionally, consider carefully the length of the gift books you are looking at. It is often easy to get a little ahead of oneself in planning the size and effort that will go into a project; it’s nice, and quite easy, to picture yourself spending endless hours perfecting the gift. But the truth is, flipping through magazines and searching for hours to find the perfect phrase to fit your theme and selected image takes a lot of time in itself. You are not going to want to have the pressure of having to finish the inspirational gift book of wisdom by filling in every page. So do yourself a favor and pick one of the shorter gift books. Finally, it is suggested based on experience that you stick to the gift books that have hard covers.
Now you are ready to begin. Hopefully you have old magazines at home that you can use to cut images and words out of or have a friend or neighbor that is willing to donate some to your arts and crafts gift making cause. Don’t forget that all those gift catalogs that come in the mail can be useful too; some of those images of for-sale gifts can be very interesting, not to mention the descriptions that accompany them. And if all else fails, either a local hair salon or doctor’s office if you can have some of their magazines once they expire. Chances are, they will just be thrown away. And if that doesn’t work, well, you can always find some interesting images online and print them out. The quality of course will not be as crisp but the content will be much more targeted to your proposed theme. Once you’ve obtained a few magazines to start with, silence your mind, think about the emotion you wish to convey to your friend or loved one and start flipping through the pages. You will find that your creativity will probably start taking off and you’ll begin to see endless theme ideas in the graphics you have available. Pay special attention to the advertisements if you are looking for inspirational words of wisdom that are self-promoting and uplifting. Since the goal of the ads is to sell you a product, they use inspirational phrases quite often to try to give you a positive impression of whatever it is they are selling. These can be very useful.
Pick out your images and words of wisdom and glue them in appropriately. It is probably best to stick to one theme per page for now, as it keeps the whole operation neat, clean and organized. Skip around the gift book’s pages if you want or decorate them consecutively, one after the one before it. It’s your choice. There really are no rules; just basic structures to jumpstart your own creative ideas. Therefore, if you are in the middle of creating your inspirational gift book of wisdom and suddenly feel inspired to do something crazy and random to change the entire gift result completely, go for it! The more of your heart that is in the inspirational gift book, the better. Your loved one or friend will be honored to receive such a wonderful inspirational gift book of wisdom.
