Italy night

Michael and Erika Barone are missionaries on their way to Italy. I've been working with them for the past several months on their printed materials they'll use as they travel on deputation. It's been a fun & challenging process, and I think we came up with some good quality pieces for them to use! other than some printing issues that lots of people won't even notice, I'm pleased with how the different pieces turned out.

The image above is the three banners that we had printed 3 feet high. Another friend built a frame for these to hang from so the Barones can set them up on a table and still travel with them easily.

Last night, the Barones hosted an Italy night at our church. Michael preached and showed their informational DVD, and Erika led the teen choir singing a song in Italian. She's quite a talented music director/musician. And she had just had a baby 4 days before. Amazing woman.

They had Italian food at a reception afterwards...pizzelles (note to self: powdered sugar and black dresses do not mix well), chicken cacciatore, and some pasta and veggies dish. It was the best meal I'd had all week! I think they had about twice as many people show up as they had expected, which was a huge blessing. I don't think the church has been that full on a Sunday night all summer long!

Mike & Erika...I'm excited to see the Lord continue to work in your lives as you start on this journey together. Glad I've been able to be a part of it.

a passion for God

we brainstormed through dozens of possible themes for our missions conference in 2006. there were a lot of good thoughts, a lot of trite phrases, and a lot of promising starts. the more we talked, and as we had further meetings, it looked like "a passion for God" was winning out.

because, really, missions is about our passion for God spilling out as we share the good news with those around us, far and near. the more we get to know who God is, the more we want more people to recognize his amazingness! He is worth it!

so we went with "a passion for God" with several different phrases after that: "for He is worthy" "that all may hear" and so on. this logo came to me more quickly than any other logo ever has. i saw it in my mind, did a couple variations, and we were done. it's still one of my favorites. nothing fancy or complicated, just a basic color scheme and simple lines.


we like to have a little something to give out as reminders in the weeks leading up to a missions conference, so we did some magnets and bookmarks. I won't be ordering magnets from that particular company again, as they barely held themselves on to a surface, let alone even the thinnest piece of paper! color registration was less than stellar also.

the bookmarks were much more successful...we had them printed up as 2-sided postcards cut in half, so there were a total of 4 different sides of bookmarks. i took photos of maps—a world map, and a local map and did a grainy gray treatment on them with our theme verse printed on top. they're quite handy to have around...as bookmarks and as a reminder of who I am and what I'm called to...

raccoons and missionaries

so, today I thought I'd write a post just so that I could begin a third post in a row with the word "so." I believe this originated with my friend Jen Elmo (who is no longer Jen Elmo, but Jen Corey!), as she would often completely change the subject of conversation while making it sound like it was what we'd been talking about all along by starting with "so..."

for example: say we'd been talking right along about where we were going to go to dinner. at some point in the discussion of Japanese vs. Thai vs. Indian, Jenny would say something like this: "…so, I have a nest of baby raccoons living in my attic." or some other such totally unrelated item that felt like it should have been preceded with something more dramatic than "so." This was not an exact transcript of a particular conversation, but we have eaten Japanese, Thai & Indian food together (I think?) and she did, at one point, have a family of raccoons living in her attic.

you've probably figured out that the image above has nothing to do with raccoons or Thai food. it's part of a project I've been working on with Michael and Erika for a several months now to help them out with their deputation process. I've known them for several years now, designed their wedding invitations, and have been going through the process of creating a brochure, prayer card, letterhead and some banners for them to use as they travel around raising support for heading off to Italy in the hopefully near future.

It's fun working with them, as Michael usually has a pretty clear idea of what he wants, and I just need to figure out how to make it work. It's been a learning process all along for both of us as decisions are made about which printers to use, which pieces to focus our efforts on first, etc. I have had to try to get a bit better with managing my time wisely so I can get these pieces out the door after working my normal 9-5 job. I wish I could spend much more of my time doing projects like this for missionaries...it seems like it may actually make an impact on the world for good...more so than the woodworking tools catalog I've been doing at my full-time job.