106: Favorite Things

Anyone who knows me can attest to the fact that I love surprises. I love to curate gifts and swag for conferences and live events. I love to pull together beautiful resources and tools for my team members. I love to do it for our course Surface Design Immersion and I love to give gifts at the end of the year. It's one of my favorite things to truly it is more blessed to give than to receive and I live it out wholeheartedly. I enjoy so much just a beautifully crafted object or product or something that just makes life feel easier or more enjoyable.

I'm Bonnie Christine and this is where all things creativity, design, business and marketing unite.

I'm a mama living in a tiny

town tucked right inside the Smoky Mountains, running a multi seven figure business, doing the most creative and impactful work of my life. But when I first set out to become an entrepreneur, I was struggling to make ends meet and wrestling with how to accomplish my biggest dream of becoming a fabric designer. Fast forward to today. I'm not only licensing my artwork all all over the world, but also teaching others how to design their creative life

and experience the same success.

I'm here to help you spend your life doing something that lights you up. I'll help you build a creative business that also creates an impact, changes people's lives, gives you all of the freedom you want, and is wildly profitable. Welcome to the Professional Creative Podcast Podcast.

Years ago I was reading Magnolia Magazine by Joanna Gaines. She's my hero and I read in her holiday Christmas edition that she hosts a favorite things party every year. And I love this idea so much, so I implemented it right away and I host a favorite things party with my friends every year. So the idea is that you bring your very favorite thing from the entire year year. And so Joanna, I believe you know my friend Joanna, I believe the way she did it was that everyone brought a small favorite thing and they had one for everybody who was going to be at the party. So if there's six people, you would bring six of your favorite things. We just do our one favorite thing and so everyone gets to go home with something. So I thought it would be fun to just cover some of my favorite things today. Like if you invited me to a favorite things party, you can bet that I would show up with one of these things. Okay, so these are things that I've actually given in years past. These are things that I might give at my upcoming favorite things party, but they are some of my absolute favorite things and I would encourage you to do this same thing as well. It Is such a fun exercise. Doesn't have to even be around Christmas. You could do it. We did this at my last Mastermind. We did a favorite things exchange party at the end of the Mastermind. So it's just really fun and it's a great way to get to know people more because they get to share with you why the thing is their favorite thing. So I have two things to share with you in four categories. We're going to go through art supplies, beauty and health tools and tech and home. Are you ready? The first one is art supplies. Two things that I am just absolutely obsessed with are a particular kind of ink and sketchbook. So right now I am loving using walnut ink. I am going to link everything up that I share about today over in the show notes. And just for the record, nothing is sponsored. They're just truly my favorite things. So this one is by Noodlers Ink and it's just walnut ink. It is gorgeous. It's this beautiful brown, earthy tone. It's kind of like it behaves like watercolor and I love, love, love it. It's beautiful. And then to go with that, I would bring an Etcher Sketchbook. I think I'm saying that right. Etcher Sketchbook. It's E, T, C, H, R and I love their basic sketchbook. It's cotton paper and the outside of it is just a white, white fabric covering. So you can even paint on the outside or just let it, you know, get messy as part of your process. And I love just having a big stack of them on my desk. So that's number one, Walnut ink and Etcher Sketchbook. Now the second one, if you are gift giving or you have someone in your life who, who can really give you like the gift of a lifetime, it would be an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. Now this is a big gift, but it's also one of the most life changing things that I've had inside my art practice because it really gives you the gift of working on the go. Like you can really take it with you and work on your illustration or your art or your design or your sketching on the airplane or on the sofa. And you don't have to be so tethered to a workstation. And so I, you've probably heard me say this before, I basically use mine like fancy tracing paper. So I'll sketch with pen or pencil and paper and then I'll take a picture of that and then work off of that sketch in the iPad Pro to get it ready to take over to Adobe Illustrator. Now, I finish everything in the desktop version of Adobe Illustrator, but the bulk of that in between work can be done on the iPad. And I love it. It's just such a solid gift. I would recommend getting it engraved if you're giving it to someone and put something special on it. Okay. Category number two is beauty and health. So two of my favorite things that I have received and given at my favorite things party. Number one is a nail polish called Dazzle Dry. Now, Dazzle Dry is a just a system for nail polish. It's a base coat color and top coat, but it looks and lasts long like gel, but it's not gel. And so my favorite thing about it is that it dries to, like, rock hard in five minutes. And you know that I don't have time to sit around and let my nails dry. I cannot express to you how mad I get when I'm. I've done my nails and they're beautiful, and then too soon I've messed one up, and so it just kills me. So I love Dazzle Dry because it's beautiful. It's generally, for me, it lasts somewhere between, like, five and 10 days. It kind of depends on the color, but sometimes it'll last up to 10 days and it looks beautiful. They have a great color lineup, and I love how quickly it dries. Okay. The second one is probably the thing that I'm most obsessed with, and it is my sleepwear. So I am obsessed with this silk sleep set from Lunia. It is amazing. Like, if I can't find it, I pitch a fit like, I cannot go to sleep without it. I have slept in this Lunia silk sleep set every day for, like, the last two or three years now. I have a couple of them, so it's not the same one. Calm down. But I love, love, love it. So it's washable silk. Again, I will link this for you over on the show notes. But to go with it, I have the eye mask. And I wear an eye mask every single morning. It is my favorite thing. If I want to sleep in or if the sun is coming up earlier than I am waking up, I just slip this silk eye mask on, and it's like it's 2am Again. And so it feels so good. It's so soft. The weight of it is perfect. I love it. I have one. I got one for David last year. He loves huge fans of the washable silk line from Lunia. Next is tools and tech. So one thing that I am currently kind of obsessed with is this camera called the Opel C1 camera. So the Opel C1 camera was introduced to me by Lissy Teehee who's on my mastermind. She was so, so beautiful on camera one day and I'm like, what are you using? And she had just started to test out this Opal C1 camera. So it's basically a tiny DSLR. So it's like a tiny DSLR that just replaces kind of like goes over your computer or your laptop. Setup is insanely easy. All you do is plug it in and then it's a camera to use on zoom or for recording or anything. It's beautifully designed and the best part is that it comes with like this little piece of software that allows you to, it's called C1 Composer and it allows you to change the bokeh on your camera settings, the coloring, the lighting, all of this stuff. It's almost like, it's almost like Lightroom or something. But it's in real time in your camera so you can warm up the space or cool it off if it's too warm. It is amazing. And so I cannot tell you how much I love this little camera. It's called the Opal C1. Again, all the links will be on the show notes today. Now the second gift idea, favorite thing of mine is really only for your entrepreneur friends, okay? So they just, it just has to be for someone who speaks your language. So if you have someone like that in your life, I love, love, love this time keeper cube. So it's a simple time keeper cub for time blocking. So it's 15, 20, 30 or 60 minutes. You can find some that do slightly different like 10, 20, 30, 45, 60. But anyways it's a little cube and all you do is set it on your desk with the time that you want it to track facing you. So 30 minutes or 60 minutes and then the timer goes and it just alerts you when it's done. And it's the best tool for focus work and doing only one thing and getting really in the zone. So promise yourself you're going to work on this one thing for the next 30 minutes. And then along with that I would give a set of books because the time cube is very affordable. And so I would give like some of your favorite entrepreneurial books. Now some of my personal favorite books would be Two Weeks Notice by Amy Porterfield, Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz, Launch by Jeff Walker, Buy Back youk Time by Dan Martell and Copy that Sells by Ray Edwards. This set of five books plus A time cube would just be. It would just put someone on fire to, like, hit the new. The new year running. Okay, and the last category that I'm going to share with you is home. Two things that I love, love, love, love, love. Number one is a tortilla press by Masienda. I got into making my own tortillas this year, and I'll link my favorite recipe on today's show notes as well. It's incredibly simple. And now I can't go back. I cannot go buy tortillas anymore. I have to make them. They're so amazing and so delicious. Oh, my goodness. They're just incredible. And so the only thing was that they're time consuming to roll out, so you can absolutely hand roll them, but one batch of dough will make, like, 16. And so it just takes a long time to get them rolled out. And so I found this tortilla press. It is, first of all beautiful. It's also simple. It comes in a bunch of fun colors, and it just makes, like, literally, you put a little ball of dough in the middle, and you pull down the handle and boom, it's done. Like, it's the perfect tortilla. And then you just slap it on the grill or the griddle, and it's just the best tortilla ever. So I am obsessed with my tortilla press. And the next one are the sheets that we sleep on. So these are a bit of an investment. They're from a company called Branch and Bowl. So we have been sleeping on Branch and Bowl for maybe three, three years now. And it's like the best investment. You know, I'm. I. I don't require a lot of convincing to invest in sleep stuff. You know, like, how important could it be to just have the best night's sleep of your life? Like, every night? Like, we're spending, what, like, how much time, like, 30, 40% of our life in bed. So it should be amazing. And so these sheets are amazing. I have the organic ones, and they just get softer and softer and softer. And they're just my absolute favorite thing. Like, my friends come over to my house to just get in my bed and feel my sheets for a minute. So those are my home categories as well. Now, part of my favorite thing about favorite things is learning what your favorite things are. So please come tell me what your favorite things are. I am always looking for just that next little thing that makes a great gift or makes our life easier or our work more enjoyable or our art more creative. So I would love to hear your thing. What would it be this year if I invited you to my favorite things party? What would you bring? Again, I'm going to include a roundup of all of these links and everything that I mentioned over on the show. Notes for today. And my friends, that's a wrap. Create the beauty that you want to see come alive in the world. And remember, there's room for you. Bye for now.