I had been teaching homemaking classes in Relief Society, in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, my entire adult life in Utah and then.. in 2002 I packed my teaching materials and put it into a storage unit and I moved to New York. Not having my teaching materials in New York kind of forced me to writing my own lessons when I was asked to teach there. That’s when I realized how easy it was to teach these kinds of classes in Utah and how hard it was outside of Utah.
I was surprised I was struggling to teach homemaking classes because I had more years of experience than I wanted to admit. I decided if I was struggling to teach after all of my experience, there must be a lot of women struggling too and that’s when I was inspired to build a website and share my lessons. My goal.. I wanted to help other teachers.
I also had a hard time finding materials to use in class. In Utah we have office supply stores and craft stores on almost even corner but in New York it was a different story. I was hesitating to post some of my classes for that reason but then I decided to at least put links to products that could be purchased on the internet so that you would know what kind of product I am talking about. I don’t try to make money on product links and please notice that I don’t have ads on my website to make money either. My goal is still to help people/teachers find products that can be used in classes. This website has been very expensive for me and has also been a financial drain on my budget, especially since I’ve been single.
I learned how to change my website to wordpress in 2013 and taught myself how to manage it. I decided to call my website Homemaking Divas because I want to highlight women who are good in what they do. Every women is a Homemaking Diva in her own way!
I was teaching classes all around the Salt Lake Valley, including the State Fair and everything was moving forward until my father passed away in 2015. I had to start taking care of my mom who lived out of town and I was cancelling classes. I was inspired to start putting classes on video. My Patriarchal Blessing encourages me to enlarge and enrich my talents and when I actively do that, I grow in leaps and bounds. The past 3 years I had to buy all of the equipment; lights, audio, a professional camcorder, mics..etc. I built an overhead frame to take overhead videos. I learned how to take video and how to edit it. I learned how to do video with PowerPoint and used a lot of different software programs that were new to me. I even had to learn how to make closed captions… sometimes I felt like my head was going to explode. 🙂 This gal is self taught and a one man band/ production company. Every time I watch the credits at the end of a movie when they list the screen writer’s name, the makeup and audio crew.. I think to myself YUP..That’s me. I’ve had to learn how to do all of that. Its been overwhelming but I’ve grown in leaps and bounds… all while I was driving out of town to help my mom and I work full time.
2019 we started selling video class. Hopefully we can at least make enough money to pay the expenses to make these classes and manage this website. I need your help and support folks. Please put comments and give me feed back so I can improve our classes. I’ve learned that it is harder to teach on video because we aren’t get questions nor audience participation so please send an email with your questions or leave a comment.
It’s always interesting to me to look back over time and see how much I’ve grown and what I’ve accomplished. I’m so grateful for all of the talents I’ve been blessed with and the joy they bring to me! God has helped me every step of the way and I love sharing my website with all who can use it.
This past November I was in charge of an activity that I planned. We called it a Gratitude Dinner and I made a special video to play at this activity to tell the story about how my Gratitude Journal helped pull me from a deep depression (I call this video Unwritten). This video is probably the only video that I will make sharing a personal story about me (I’m still embarrassed to watch it ) Even though I found a 1,000 things wrong with this video, I’m still going to post it on youtube because I hope my story will help others to plan what they want their book to say about them. I try to live life… like each day is my last and I hope this video will inspire you to do the same. After I build the webpage about the Gratitude Dinner Activity, I will post the video and put it on here too.
