SHOP THE ITEMS
It's finally spring! I know, I was kind of looking forward to winter way back in November, but by the time it's February, I am so over it that I could scream. I'm ready to wear shorts again!
We're starting the year off with a very calming challenge. I've noticed that most of my design choices have been kind of calming lately so I guess I must subconsciously need less pressure.
Anyway, I'm not mad about it because this Countryside kit is perfect for spring and I can't wait to get started!
This theme will be in the shop on Friday 2/9 at 12PMcst and officially this challenge will last from April-June
In the interest of eventually having all of our seasons in a single calendar year, instead of having winter going across two years, officially, our seasons will be a bit off and will follow the "official" days of season changes. Since, officially, summer doesn't start until June 21st, this does make sense even though if personally, having spring in June seems weird. 🤣
Some of you might feel the same so we'll vote in the Creating & Co Book club for the dates of the planning party after the theme has gone live. That way, we'll have the official celebration and giveaways whenever the majority wants them.
(A planning party is when we show off our planners using the theme and chat about the group read. There's threads all week to win shop credit and it's a lot of fun!)
As always, you can do the challenge on whatever dates makes most sense to you!
Like I said, I must be wanting calming vibes and I feel like this kit really captures that. It definitely makes me want to go rent a cabin somewhere with nothing but a suitcase full of books and a laptop to write.
For our weekly kit, we'll have the vertical option (shown above) and our new deco format. Our deco format can be bought by the page -- so if you don't want a certain page, just don't pick it up. It's the best for making a kit work for your planner.
We'll also have our new mini weekly kit that is perfect for planners that have a width of about 1.0" (or even 1.25" - 1.3" like the hobo cousin or vertical fully booked planners) and we'll have some checklist boxes and extra reading stickers to pick up if you want too.
As for the challenge itself, we will have a group read for it, though if you choose not to read the group read you can count it as a free space. We will start voting on the group read in the Creating & Co Book Club after the theme goes live.
There will be 5 prompts other than the group read. I asked in the book club how many prompts you guys wanted in our seasonal challenges and most of you said six but don't worry, if you're a big reader, I have another option for you too!
In case this is your first challenge with us, here's how it works:
- Each prompt has something that you're going to find on a book cover. Let's say the prompt is "jewel". You'll find a book that has jewels on the cover.
- Write the title of the book on your challenge table and read the book
- Pick up the book sticker and place it over the faded book on the side of the prompt
- Repeat until you finish all the prompts!
Our most common size is our 4.75" x 6.75" dashboard + book stickers -- this is the one shown below! It fits perfectly in our build your own book journal too! I also use it in my a5 bullet journal.
We will also have a couple of other sizes:
- A 7" x 9" version that you can use in most common planners--Erin Condren, Happy Planner, Yellow Paper House, Paper House Productions, etc.
- A "books only" option that has some book shaped labels and a header so you can arrange them however you'd like in your planner
You can also feel free to draw your own layout and join the event and chat with us!
Each of our challenges come with a badge sticker that is handy for keeping track of the challenges you've completed through the year. You can make your own layout to keep track or pick up one of our tracking dashboards (larger size) and fill it in as the year goes on!
So there's no confusion, here's the official explanation of our spring prompts:
- Jewel - A book cover that has a jewel on it. It can be drawn on, part of a piece of jewelry a person is wearing, or even raised and glittered
- Kiss - I've noticed lots of romance covers have two people kissing lately so I thought this would be a good one to find!
- Lace/Filigree - A lot of the books I've been reading lately have some kind of lace or filigree pattern around the edges, but it could also be a lace dress or ribbon
- Tree - We had plant for our year long challenge, but I thought we'd narrow it down to trees for this one
- Mountain - With scenes being popular on covers these days, I've seen quite a few mountains!
- Free Space/Group Read - This one is represented by a few books and we'll vote on the group read, as I said. If you don't want to read the group read, you can always use it as a free space!
I'll be posting threads all week to ask for suggestions for these books, so make sure you check them out in the Creating & Co Book Club to leave your own recommendations or get ideas!
This year, I wanted to give you a few options for tracking your reading over the season. Instead of just being a seasonal challenge and that's it, I thought it would be fun to expand it to cover the whole season, if that makes sense.
First up, we have a bookshelf for spring! We released a general books read shelf last year but I wanted to make them for the seasonal challenges too. This is just for keeping track of any books you read during the spring season, whether you read them for the challenge or not.
One of the other new things is a seasonal book bingo! I thought this would be fun for anyone that reads a lot. I've had quite a few requests for doing more book bingos so I decided to add it to our seasonal line up.
This isn't our official challenge and there's no group read or anything. This is just for fun if you want an extra challenge. You can either do it until you have a single bingo or until you have a black out bingo!
Another idea I had was inspired by my kindle app and xbox/playstation achievements/trophies. Basically, they're just fun little awards you can give yourself as you complete tasks. The idea I had was to just put them on whatever day you do it.
So if I read a book in the bath on Monday, I'd put it at the bottom of my Monday.
For now, we have a sheet of 14 achievements, but I definitely want to add more so if you have some ideas, drop them in the comments or send me a message on social media! If these are popular, I definitely want to expand it!
Finally, we do have a couple of vinyl stickers! As always, we have our tarot stickers that at this point are a kind of "collect them all" type of deal! We release them for all of our reading challenge themes.
The other is a quote sticker that I thought would be great for using in the spring on the back of your kindle or wherever!
Before I show you the rest of the releases for the week, I also wanted to let you know that you'll be able to pick up a bundle of the most essential spring reading challenge items!
All 6 items together would be just over $35 but if you pick up the bundle, you'll get a bit of a discount with the bundle being $32.95. It's mostly just an easy way to get you in and out of the shop!
This is the first time we're doing a bundle but if it's popular, you'll see them pop up for other themes too!
Other than our spring challenges being released on 2/9 at 12pmCST, we have a few other things I wanted to show you that will also be in the shop:
Make sure you're in the Creating & Co Book Club to get your vote in for the group read and the dates for the planning party and we'll see you and your planner there!