Guildess volunteers at Daystar

Well, here I am almost two weeks without a blog post. I guess that's what happens when you decide to go entirely handmade for the Holidays. Instead of posting photographs of all the wonderful handmade items, I would like to highlight a volunteer project I worked on this Holiday season.

As co-directors of Guildess, a Contemporary Female Artist Guild, Ashley Gustafson and I wanted to develop a simple project to extend a helping hand this time of year. Our dreams of the Holidays have never been without family, food and gifts, but for some they lack all three. As a way to remain true to our artistic background, we developed a project that involved artists from our local community. We sent out a call for artists to create handmade Holiday greeting cards and mail them to us. Our goal was to hand these out a local soup kitchen or shelter with a batch of warm cookies. After a few phone calls, we found ourselves setting up a date and time to visit Daystar, a local transitional shelter program for formerly battered women. Daystar provides shelter and support services to survivors of domestic abuse that allows them to regain their confidence and self-esteem and to break the chain of violence in the lives. Daystar also provides women with the tools to become financially stable and emotionally independent.

Upon hearing of an art room at the shelter, we decided it would be great to organize a card making workshop for the women of Daystar to make their own Holiday cards for family and friends.