Our Bonhoeffer Print

If you know me at all, I am a giver! I love gift-giving! Receiving is fun too, but nothing brings me as much joy as the look I get from my loved ones when I nail it when it comes to gift-giving... so you can imagine the agony (okay, I'm definitely exaggerating here but the word is close enough to my feelings) I go through every year when Christmas comes around. If I had it my way, I would get a meaningful gift for everyone I love... but such is life, this is not realistic. Aaron and I have much saving to do when it comes to our goals so we came up with an alternative idea: we would make gifts! 

I read Life Together early on in my time at SPU and it really struck a chord with me. It's one of the few books I actually enjoyed reading in college so I kept it. Awhile ago, I took it out again to re-read it with Aaron because at that time, we were trying to figure out what community meant, especially in regards to living out our faith. This little book has so much wisdom-- anyway, we pulled out one of our favorite quotes from the book and decided to make an art print to give to our closest friends. 

“Only where hands are not too good for deeds of love and mercy in everyday helpfulness can the mouth joyfully and convincingly proclaim the message of God’s love and mercy.”

Of course, when it came to actually implementing the idea as far as time and energy went, it took us awhile to get started. There were actually moments when I wanted to give up on the idea, because we had no time and because I'm a perfectionist, I didn't think we could pull it off. However, I could tell Aaron was very keen on the idea; I knew it made him giddy. One evening he pulled out a few branches and leaves he had noticed in his front "yard" and that was the jumpstart we needed to get the project rolling.

Aaron laid out his findings on his desk and sent me this picture: 

From there, he did a sketch with pencil and outlined in pen:

I placed these pictures in Adobe Illustrator and made them vector images and started shifting some things around. Below is some work in progress:

After some drafts, here was our finished print! 

We wrote a little note to give to our friends, printed these bad boys out, packaged them in nice cellophane bags (because that always makes things legit), and packaged them up with some good ol' kraft wrapping paper. To make things a little bit more fun, I made prints of Aaron's film photos he had taken over the last few years to add a little more personalization to the whole thing and calligraphed name tags.

We had a lot of fun doing this together and our friends were so surprised and thankful. I'm already curious as to what we'll be making next year for our friends! 

If you'd like to get a copy of this print, head on over to our shop and purchase a downloadable print for $10.00. The proceeds from this project will go directly to Arise and Shine Uganda, a babies' home where I volunteered for a few months in 2013 and 2015. Contact us if you have any questions about this effort!