If you’re thankful you should show it…

I’ve had the idea to add a thankful jar to our house for a while but in true Wonder fashion I wanted to wait until the new year…(I like clean and definitive starts to things – lol). We noticed our daughter is always looking for the “next” thing and somewhat unappreciative of the toys and opportunities she has. Don’t get me wrong, she is a GREAT kid, but with all the commercial and materialism out there it’s a hard road to navigate, especially for the little ones. I proposed the idea of the thankful jar at the beginning of December and we wrote down what we were thankful for the first two weeks of the new year but I just now finished the jar.

What is a thankful jar? It’s a jar where you keep slips of paper where you jot down what you are thankful for. Simple right? Some people do it everyday for a month, some only once a month. For us we decided that we would each write down one thing we were thankful for or something that made us smile each week in 2019. While our jar is totally “extra”, you don’t need a fancy jar or colored slips of paper to do this, so don’t let that stop you because in the end it doesn’t matter if your jar is “fancy” or not – it’s the process of looking at your everyday life and finding the positive.

Now…if you DO want a totally “extra” (read – over the top) jar I’ll show you what I did.

I grabbed this jar from IKEA. It was $3.99 and small…in fact I hope it will hold all 52 of our thankful paper slips.

I scoured the internet for different quotes about being thankful and landed on “There is always something to be thankful for”. Using a wreath element I bought in Adobe Stock I designed this:

I cleaned our new jar with some soapy water, dried it and wiped some rubbing alcohol over where I wanted the vinyl to go. Cutting this didn’t go as well as I had hoped. The lines were so super thin and the blade didn’t cut all the way thru the vinyl in some places. I am sure I need to clean something somewhere…but I was on a time crunch so I just upped the blade depth and force and cut it out a second time. I lost part of the line on the wreath but I doubt anyone other than me could actually see it. I love this font, it’s “Amarillo” from DaFont…but with it being so small the extra line flourishes (or serif’s if you will) are really super thin…and were very hard to weed and adhere without pulling and warping the line.

I used two rolled up towels to prop up the jar and to keep it from rolling while I applied the vinyl decal.

It is sooooo satisfying to peel off that transfer paper and see my design in all its glory!!!

Once the decal was on and the transfer paper off I laid a piece of paper over the decal and used the back of a spoon to burnish the decal a bit more. I find the smooth back of the spoon leads to less chance of ripping or marring the vinyl. With the super thin lines it was a very smart move.

For the actual slips of paper we wanted something colorful and bright. I used Illustrator to draft up some slips with a space for the date and a line for each member of our family. You could easily use any word processing program to do the same.

I am really excited to read thru our thankful moments at the end of the year and I am happy for the opportunity to show our kids that there are so many things for them to be thankful for.

Our finished jar sits on top of our book shelf in our living room, in perfect view of the family. I love looking up there and SEEING that we are thankful for so many different things. So far they have included things like:

I am thankful for a garage so I don’t have to scrape ice and snow off the car
I am thankful that I get to share video games from my childhood with my daughter
I am thankful for our zoo membership
I am thankful we got to see so many cool things with my family over Christmas break

Tomorrow we will add our third slip of paper and I am eager to hear what my family is thankful for this week.