All posts in giveaway

I’ve got to be honest with you and say my thoughts are still with Newtown today, but I’m bringing you a fun, light, pretty giveaway from a company I like that has a gorgeous aesthetic anyway because, as Kathryn White put it so well yesterday, “there is a place for the trivial, the normal, the happy humdrum of daily life—even in great sadness.” Even as we weep with those who weep and even as we seek evidences of light, we also dwell in our little worlds and look for ways to be light, in big things and small, in petitions and days of silence and blog posts and prayer and hugging our families and offering a hand to hold, to look for ways to call out truth and goodness and beauty and love, to look for ways to give and to help and to point to the lovely. This is our pointing to the lovely, right now, today.

If you already follow us on Instagram, you know how we love using the network to share moments of beauty from our everyday lives—what we’re eating for breakfast, the light in our front yard, flowers on the table, golden fire in the sky. Since we started using Instagram even before we were married, and since it was the first place where we posted a photo of us on our wedding day (on the cover above!), it was only natural that it would be an Instagram album that we’d want to get printed after a year of marriage, chronicling our first 12 months together as husband and wife. Tim did all the legwork, bless his heart, uploading photos from my phone to the computer, picking which 40 to feature, organizing them into a book at Artifact Uprising, a company whose tagline is “inspired by the disappearing beauty of the tangible” (!!); and when the 8.5-inch square book arrived, you guys, I could not believe how good it looked.

In fact, we like our Instagram album’s thick pages, textured feel and quality binding so much, we asked Artifact Uprising if they’d be willing to give one of these albums* away to one of you—and they said yes. Instructions for entering the giveaway are posted below!

*Even if you don’t have an Instagram account, you can win the giveaway—the prize is good for one of the 8.5″ albums or the equivalent monetary value towards any other Artifact Uprising product, like their gorgeous wood calendars, for example, or another softcover photo album.
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(The winner of this giveaway has been contacted, and the contest is now closed! Congrats Sarah Kate!)

We’ve been looking forward to today’s post for weeks, not just because of the giveaway but because of what it represents.

As you can see in the photos, Easy Canvas Prints recently sent us a gorgeous 16 X 20 canvas of a picture I took of artichokes a few years ago. We love it. It hangs in our kitchen, just to the right of the sink and cabinets, and we see it every time we’re sitting on the living room sofa or working on our laptops, making us pretty sure that we’re going to add two more similar canvases along the same wall sometime soon.

Easy Canvas not only sent us a canvas, but they’re also giving one away to one of you—maybe to turn into a Father’s Day gift or to blow up a family photo or to decorate your own kitchen with a food-centric theme, whatever you want.

And to enter, here is all we ask: go comment on another blog, any blog, telling them something you genuinely like about one of their posts or about the site in general, and then come back here and link to it in a comment.

To give you an example:

I loved reading this recent post at Art and Lemons because of the way Nikki tells a story, because of the beautiful light in her photos and because of the way she is celebrating the art of film. So I went and commented at her site and told her so. If I were entering this contest, I’d copy the link to my comment, come over here and say, I commented here! and link to that site.

We know this is a little different than the traditional giveaways where you subscribe to our page or become a fan on Facebook or promote it on Twitter, but we wanted to do it as an intentional way of celebrating the blogging community, of helping to promote someone else. We hope your comments will encourage other bloggers as well as show us some cool sites to check out.

Winner will be chosen Friday. More contest details below.
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