Gift Well Guide

Mother's Day is just around the corner and I thought I'd share a few of my favorite Noonday goodies for a Gift Well Guide! Each of these items are handmade and help to provide jobs, education, clothing, and shelter for women and children around the world. In addition to giving your mother something beautiful or picking out something beautiful for yourself, you're joining a movement that is creating opportunities for people around the world! 

I really love "all the pretty things" at Noonday, but I love the mission even more! And it's been super fun to see my family, friends, and neighbors catch the vision as well!

This first necklace is the Pambil and is probably my all-time favorite (right now at least!). It's handmade with love in Equador by an artisan group that is working to provide job opportunities for women escaping the sex-trafficking industry. The beads on this necklace are very soft and have a variety of texture and color. It can be layered with other necklaces, worn long, or doubled. 

This is the Minted Necklace- handmade with love in Uganda. It's a gorgeous mint color, super lightweight and can be worn as a long single layer necklace or doubled. Love, love this one! Plus, it's only $28- how can you beat that?!

This is the Bethe Rope Necklace, handmade with love in Ethiopia from upcycled artillery. This is another major favorite and a total best seller every season. It can be worn approximately 100 ways (?!)- seriously though, it can be doubled, tripled, knotted, wrapped as a bracelet, or used as an extender for another necklace. 

Favorite earrings right now are the Cow Horn Hoops (top) and Taj Earrings (bottom- get them before they are gone!). They go with everything and are super pretty. Cow Horn Hoops are made in Uganda and the Taj Earrings are handmade with love in India. 

Pictured here is one of my favorite bracelet combos: the Underground Cuff and the Metric Cuff. Both handmade with love in India. Somehow this combo goes with everything! And if you order any bracelets between April 6-12, you'll get 20% off! That's a great deal. Plus, the Metric is only $20 and the Underground $28. 

This is another nice combo: Metric Cuff paired with the Meera Bracelet. The Meera is great for spring/summer and has really pretty fuchsia and mint beads mixed in with gold.

This is the Tangled Beads bracelet, handmade with love in Ethiopia. It is made from up cycled artillery and has two gold strands and two silver strands. Looks great with everything and can totally be dressed up or down. 

Hands-down, all time favorite bracelet is the Very Versatile, also made in Ethiopia. It's a show stopper and goes with everything. This one is more pricey, but is sure to be a favorite for many years. 

Love this Pacifica Scarf! It's super soft and a perfect texture for spring and summer, but I can see myself wearing this into the fall for sure! It's handmade with love in Guatemala and is a nice chambray blue with a blush color stripe pattern. 

This is the Astrida Beach Bag, handmade with love in Rwanda. This comes in three different patterns. It's bold, lightweight, and holds a ton of stuff. I'm planning to use this as a beach bag and also as a library bag since we get to the library more often than the beach. It's $28 and is a great deal for a quality, handmade bag.  

To shop any of these goodies or to read more about Noonday, visit:

www.sarajones.noondaycollection.com 

And if you have any questions, send me an email!

Giving Freely

Have loved this book, Fit To Burst, by Rachel Jankovic for awhile now and probably read through it 2-3 times in the first week I got it. For some reason, I picked it up again this past week and was challenged by the idea of giving more freely... imitating Christ and expecting nothing in return. Free forgiveness, free meal-making and house-cleaning, and a million other ways that a woman can bless her husband and children. Here is an excerpt, with a link at the bottom to read the entire article. 

In Christian circles there is constant talk about free salvation. It is free, thank God. But it is only free to us. God paid a great price for it. Jesus paid with His blood. It is free to us because someone else paid a great deal. And this is why we do not work out our salvation by never doing anything that might be hard or difficult to us. We imitate Christ, and we make sacrifices for others. We do things that are hard, that cost us much, because we want our gifts to be free to others. 

It is so easy for us as mothers to look at the work we do on behalf of our families and resent that it is free to them. Look at those kids, thinking that the clean clothes just appear magically. Look at these people, not valuing the cost of my work. Look at this ungrateful family who just takes the food and eats it. Like it was free! But it is very important that we see the damage that this kind of thinking brings with it. 

When we want the cost to be shared by all, we are not imitating Christ. When we imitate Christ, we want to give what costs us much, and we want to give it freely. Of course we have short-term vision, and often we feel like when we freely give, we need to see right away that it is being used responsibly. We worry that our free sacrifice will make our children greedy takers. 

We want to know, within the next fifteen minutes, that everyone saw what we sacrificed, acknowledged it gratefully, thanked us profusely, reflected on it quietly, and came up with a way to repay us. But God thinks in much, much bigger story lines. 

So imitate Christ in your giving. Do it daily, do it in as many little ways as you possibly can. Find a way to imitate Him in the folding of the laundry, in the stocking of the fridge, in the picking up of other people’s socks. And then decide consciously that you are giving this meal, this clean room, this cheerful Christmas — that you are giving it all freely. And much later, maybe thirty years later, you would like to see your children turn a profit on it. You would like to see your kids taking what they were freely given and turning it into still more free giving. This is because God’s story is never little. He works in generations, in lifetimes, and He wants us to do the same.

http://www.desiringgod.org/articles/the-unbaked-biscuit