Lately, life has me a bit down. How could I tell? By my writing. While I was organizing a few areas of the blog, I reread this post and this post from a year ago. Don’t I sound way more cheerful back then?

Do you have a hobby that brings you joy or peace or both? I know for a fact that blogging for kraft&mint gives me an outlet for my creativity and the million things I’d like to do in my little spare time.

Let me capture the thoughts in my head. In a nutshell, this post is about personalized gift wrap, but it is also about my personal life. I don’t talk much about my life on the blog because I’d like to keep things “light” and “lovely.” But if you think my life reflects the “clean minty” design of my blog, you are wrong.

My soul is far from being tidy, but I’ve been feeling lethargic, tired, just putting one foot in front of the other. Motherhood is getting easier and harder at the same time. Oh, I’m so tired that I can’t write any more words. Maybe in a few days I’ll get my thoughts together. I’m back, just a day later, with the same blasé attitude. I’m also drowsy from a long nap. See, life is beautiful, I just had the luxury of taking a nap! On top of it, the wonderful husband has taken all three kids to buy shoes, without me, so I have a semi-quiet house all to myself.

I apologize if this post throws you off as being very strange and with a lot of ramblings. The last thing I want to do is waste your precious time, and you are having to press the “x” button saying goodbye to my blog.

I simply want to put into words that the beautiful pictures on my blog  are not a reflection of who I am or what my life looks like. You can view kraft&mint as my fantasy world, where all things look tidy and pretty, but life is far from being that.

At this very moment, nothing is wrong, but a few areas of my life have changed, leaving me very sad.  I’ve lost my community church; one of my closest and dearest friends just moved away to another state and my dad passed away last year. This is a lot to process, and I won’t go into the details of it all in this post. I just want to be honest with you and stay away from “wrapping” my life inside a cute blog.

Writing about these events is extremely painful. But I’ll take it one step at a time, praying that what I share with you is what I need to share, without scaring you away ;)

Thank you for sticking with me and reading kraft&mint, pinning from my posts, and most of all making a craft inspired by my work. That brings pure happiness to my soul!

Now back to this post and what these photos are about! Lovely, personalized gift wrapping! If you look closely at the flowers illustration and overall look of the paper, in the middle of it says: “Given with love from the Rosiens.” My personalized gift wrapping paper is from tinyprints, and I received a roll in the mail a few days ago. I was so excited at how beautiful it turned out; I had to blog about it!

These are a couple of leather pouches that I made and I can’t wait to blog and post a tutorial for you.

Ta-da! A pretty gift with my new wrapping paper.

I couldn’t throw away any leftover paper so I framed a piece of it just for fun. I think it looks very spring like and will keep it in my office area.

You can view tinyprints personalized gift wrap here, and customize any design with your photos and family name. There are very many options to choose from, and it might be hard to pick out one.

Until next time! Hope you are having a good start of the week.