Latter-day Village Square

Lori Nawyn has designed this delightful new YW Valuez memory book - and we have put together an instant download product with all the artwork and photographs with complete instructions!  If you look closely, you will notice that the book is made with white envelopes bound together with metal rings.  It takes 8 white envelopes that you decorate with print outs of Lori’s designs, scrapbook chalk, ribbons and embellishments.  Girls can put little quotes in the pockets, and there are places for photos - so they can use the book both as a reference for talks, devotionals and lessons as well as a way to remember special events and keep their YW values on their minds.  Making their Valuez books would be a great project to have the girls get together and work on.

See what’s included in the kit and more photos here.

I searched on the web for a source for all the ribbons and chalk etc - and found this website - Creative Images Rubber Stamps - they have almost everything you will need to complete the book, and your local craft or scrapbook store will probably have everything as well.

~Debra

Courtney White’s newest LDS YW Lesson Handouts are now available!  This set is for the YW 3 Manual, lessons 13-24.  The photography, as always is stunning and powerful.  Someone was asking for them because they will be teaching these lessons soon, and I realized that the YW manuals do not require leaders to teach the lessons in order.  They have leeway to select lessons they feel their young women need most at the time.  Courtney had the material ready, but there is a lot of preparation involved to make it ready for the web and for downloading.  I hurried and got that done and now they are in the store!

All the lessons and handouts are wonderful, but lesson 23 had a lot of posters with wonderful counsel from President Benson about overcoming discouragement, and I decided to try something new.  I went through the lesson and put together a PowerPoint Presentation, including the images Courtney prepared, all the scripture quotes, questions to ponder from the lesson, and some extra images of church leaders who are quoted and stories that are included in the lesson.  Then I picked out some music from the church music website to go along with the slides.  This presentation is included in the product!  Even if you do not own PowerPoint, you can view the presentation with the free PowerPoint Viewer available from microsoft.com.

I serve in the nursery, and sometimes I have many big pictures to show during the lesson.  So I started putting them in a Powerpoint presentation, adding music and so forth and bringing my laptop to church with me to show during our lesson.  The little children loved it!  I am sure your young women will also enjoy a change of pace!  You can either just show it on your own computer, as I did, or burn it to a CD and show it using the DVD player from the library.

But don’t feel bad if you don’t have or want to show a PowerPoint Presentation!  The posters are all included to be printed out, and I also included card size posters you can print out for each girl, and a lovely little mini-folder with pockets that you can put the mini-posters in to give to each girl.

~Debra

At midnight, I put up the new June Club Collection in the Village Download Depot Club - Lori Nawyn’s 2007 Girls Camp Collection - it is precious! I hope many people will take advantage of it this summer. So many fun ways to use the wonderful art -

• T-shirts
• Camp Flags
• Scrapbooks
• Journals
• Camp Signs
• Secret Sister Gifts and so much more.

Take advantage of the new Printable Fabric Sheets for Inkjet Printers available at many local craft stores or online, to print these great designs right on fabric for countless projects!

One of my favorite items in the collection is the Paper Dolls! I LOVE paper dolls - remember Betsy McCall???? And Lori has done such wonderful dolls for her collection!

This collection is only available in the Club through the middle of June! So join and download now!

The other collection for June is my own Family Reunion Collection. I decided to do a textile collection - meaning, the images are created out of fabric! I’m having a lot of fun with this collection. It will be online mid-month with a matching font.

The May Collections - Serene Heiner’s Mother’s Day Collection and Courtney White’s Photographic Temple Marriage Collection, are now available for purchase as instant downloads in our store.

Due to the sharp increase in LDS Young Women art collections and other products in our store, we have seen a whole new group of people frequenting our website - Young Women leaders! We’ve decided to add a new free Young Women’s Membership to our subscribers. We’ve always had some great YW resources on the site, in our Free Sampler, but the new YW art collections and stickers etc, have really drawn a lot of attention to the site from Young Women leaders.

The New Young Women’s Membership will give leaders access to all the YW resources on the website, including the Young Women Category in the Free Sampler, the YW images in the Image Gallery, Young Women Forum, Young Women Blog, periodic email updates about new YW products in the store, and our monthly newsletter - The Villager.

I have to give credit where credit is due. One of our most popular collections has been Courtney White’s Lesson Handouts. Courtney is a photographer and she has prepared a set of beautiful photographic handouts that go along with each of the lessons in the YW lesson manual for this year. Her images are beautiful and powerful, and bring home a message to the girls about the lesson topic. She uses a lot of variety in the images and how they are presented, with a variety of quotes from the lessons, as bookmarks, posters, notecards, surveys and so forth, that add impact. She prepares handouts for 12 lessons at at time, so each manual will end up with four quarterly collections.

Elsa Remund answered my request to do a Young Women 2007 Theme Collection that just blew me away. The theme “Let virtue garnish thy thoughts . . . ” did not bring to mind an obvious image, and I tossed some ideas out to her of a young woman standing next to a crystal clear waterfall. Elsa turned that into a young woman whose dress becomes a waterfall - I was thrilled with all her images for this collection. and it has been popular with YW leaders.

Lori Nawyn’s eye catching art is so delightful, and she has prepared a fun Young Women’s Value Collection and fun handouts she calls YW Tagz ‘n Thingz - that have really been a hit with YW leaders. We’ve turned some of her designs into wonderful YW stickers.

I had some wonderful help getting the word out to YW Leaders by the webmasters of a number of YW Websites - my big thanks to Melanie Day of Sugardoodle, Alice Gifford of YWConnection, Vickie Hacking of YWSuggestions, and Becky Sorenson from Becky’s World of SonShine.

Debra

Hello!
I am very excited to be able to be a part of this blog and share ideas and insights with all of you. I have truly enjoyed the task of creating the weekly lesson handouts and have been thrilled with the response. Stay tuned as the 3rd quarter handouts will be ready soon!

During Conference, as I was switching through the channels I stumbled upon a great documentary called “Sisterz in Zion.” Maybe you have seen or heard of it, but if not, I wanted to give my opinion, that this is a great program for YW! It shows a group of YW from New York–who truly hold the highest standards all on their own. Many of them are the only LDS in their families and schools, and travel alone through New York’s public transportation to seminary and church. What great examples these YW are to the youth of today! The documentary focuses on a few girls as they are followed “real world” style in their daily life. Then, they have the great opportunity to travel to Utah to BYU to attend a week of EFY. What wonderful and interesting things they encounter! I thoroughly enjoyed this film and suggest it as a YW movie night. You will laugh and cry and it’s a great way to get your girls ready if they too plan to attend EFY this summer. To find out more information you can go to:

www.sisterzinzion.com

It also airs periodically on the satellite station BYU-TV, check here: www.byub.org for listing times.

Cheers!

Courtney White