This is a very long review. It’s available as a 5 page PDF - the link is at the bottom. The review itself is not provided in it’s entirety, for the sake of brevity, but I’ll give you the first page or so. It’s a great book.

The Review:

The blurb provided on this book by the publisher, Simon & Schuster, makes a lot of promises. Phrases like—”In this beautiful, life-changing book, acclaimed artist and entrepreneur Sandra Magsamen will transform everything you think you know about art” and “You’ll learn how to connect with everyone in your life in inventive new ways …” and finally, “By giving yourself permission to be yourself, you’ll embark on a personal renaissance”

So this book was going to deliver me back to me, in a way to also make me friends, influence people, and give me permission to change my life? Seemed like a very big mission, to be honest, but I decided I might be up for it. Or at least willing to give it a shot, provided the thing was creative.

Admittedly, when I opened up the book I was shocked—no pictures! I had to do a lot of reading. Odd, for a creativity book. 

The book was no less intimidating once picked up. The back cover is full of praise by reknowned creatives like Sark, Betty Edwards (author of Drawing from the Right Side of the Brain), Dr Edward de Bono, and Dame Anita Roddick (my hero!).

Right, I thought, just get on with the reading then…From the jacket cover inner front -

Many people today are looking outside themselves for well-being and happiness when what they’ve searching for has been inside them all along” - Sandra Magsamen. 

I started reading this at work, an hour late into my lunch break, with many work conversations around me - admittedly possibly not one of the best environments to read such a book. I began at the preface. By the time I’d read the second example given - of a woman who sent a quilt as a present to the widow of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal war correspondent who was kidnapped and murdered in 2002 by terrorists in Pakistan - I was trying to keep back my tears. You can’t have a manager crying at her desk over a book, right?

It just hit the spot. All the little ideas towards how to bring joy to people with gifts of creative thinking, and crafts or ideas which we are all good at in some way, shape or form. After only the second page of reading this book, I realised that my own crafting talents, and those in digital scrapbooking (however untalented I may be) not only can serve a purpose in my own needful life in letting me create, but can also provide solid communications and gifts to others so easily.

I’ve gifted my scrapbooks before. I’ve not (sometimes) been very made aware of the joy those gifts  may have created in others (I guess I was looking for some appreciation), and that has sometimes put me off bothering again. But perhaps with further reading of Living Artfully, perhaps I can be convinced otherwise…

Sandra Magsamen is an internationally acclaimed artist and author who shares her meaningful messages and motifs through a widely popular range of books, ceramic gifts, cookware, stationery, home

The Links

• Sandra Magsamen’s website can be found at http://www.sandramagsamen.com/
• The book can be purchased at Amazon.com
• The book can also be found for purchase as an e-book from the Simon & Schuster Simons Say’s website
• Full PDF Download available here (5 pages)
  

Originally published 20 Oct 2006 on the Scrapability blog