thankful postcards for 2017

quick post: jumbled lettering fonts to express thanks or on prayer and being blessed

Supplies: 

*Bible art journaling stencil set from American Crafts

*heavyweight blank index cards

*colored pencils, skinny tip markers, wide tip markers

*pencil or black ink pen for tracing

Results:

The back side of the stencil set is shown for the designs and words. I used a lot of creativity to reimagine, repurpose these to see what I could create with a giving thanks theme. Why did I do this? Why did I give myself such a challenge? 

Back on August 13, we had a house fire. Neither of us was home. I was in the hospital waiting to get discharged the next day and my husband had just arrived on the floor when a neighbor called his cell to let us know that firefighters were kicking in our back door.

We had a 40-43% structural loss with $70-71K in structural & labor estimate and a $19-20K property loss of items.

On August 6, I didn't realize I had a massive blood clot traveling in my body. I thought the "wheezing" was bronchitis, not congestive heart failure or something like it. The blood clot hit my heart and knocked me out for a bit as I was getting out of the car on driver's side. I boomeranged between the car door and body frame giving me massive bruises from each side of head and all the way down to my toes (wearing sandals and landed on gravel driveway). That night and most of the next day, I didn't realize how close to death I had been.

God blessed us with so many miracles of timing and details that still amaze us! He spared our lives!

As I'm trying to recover and we're trying to get housing and insurance matters going, on October 27, my husband suffered a mild heart attack!!! Yes! He's 12-13 years older than me; however back in 1998 at age 48 after we had only been married 2 years and 1 month, he suffered his first heart attack followed by a 5 bypass graft open heart surgery.

This time around he seems more interested to follow cardiologists' advice for rehab and doctor appointments. Diet-wise, he's still struggling with that but with the diabetes and this 2nd major cardiac event, hopefully he will make some long-term improvements for more vegetables in his daily food choices.

Art and craft supplies wise, I lost about $150-200 in the fire and have new purchases at about $25-30 so far since we are living in a rental and we don't want to have to move too much stuff back in with the addition of extra stored items already in garage this past year and with new furniture and electronics that still need to be bought once insurance claim is settled.

Our medical staff for both of us were fabulous! Tip: be positive, happy, and express appreciation and it will help them to return it.

We are blessed. Yes, we have gone through drama and trauma x 3 this autumn but it could be so much worse.