Whitney Helms' Blog

This week in our Fostering Creativity class we started our group projects! I enjoy working as a team, but only sometimes. I am someone who always likes to work on things way before they are due. However, whenever I am working with a team, I always feel like it takes a little bit longer to complete the tasks or projects because we all work at our own pace. This can be difficult for me and I end doing a lot of the work just because I do not like waiting and I tend to get stressed out! This is definitely something that I need to work on and I want to become better at!  A positive of working in a team for me is getting to hear other's ideas or approaches to certain things. Sometimes I can get stuck on a certain task or project for a while, but when I am collaborating with a team, hearing different perspectives allows me to work more efficiently and it broadens my ideas as well! As of right now, this has been the second group project that I have been assigned since the pandemic of COVID...

The creative person I have chosen to study for my creative individual paper was James Balog. James lives in Boulder, Colorado, and is famously known as a photographer who expresses the relationship between humans and nature within his work. James had previously emphasized endangered animals, old-growth forests, and polar ice within his photography. In 2007 his art took a major shift. James wanted to further combine the insights from art and science to produce an innovative, shocking, and most eye-opening depiction of our changing world. He is passionate about climate change and wanted to express its impacts within his photography. It took him a while to figure out a way he would be able to express climate change within his photography, ultimately deciding that the world's glaciers are the best evidence for the climate's increasing temperature.  As previously mentioned, James set out in 2007 on his best-known project, where he began to study the impact of climate change on the w...

I have always loved Harry Potter. I remember being little and my mom reading the books to me before going to bed. When I was a little bit older, I began reading them on my own. I remember when "The Half-Blood Prince" came out, I literally had my mom and my aunt take me to the theaters to see it close to ten times! Then when the final movie came out I went to the midnight premiere, that will be a night I will never forget!  The First time that I visited the theme park in Orlando, Flordia I was only twelve. I was with my family and I walked in specifically with my mom and aunt. As a twelve-year-old at the time, I was in such shock! It was such a crazy thing for me to be experiencing. Now it has become something that I look forward to visiting each year! Every year since then in the month of October I have gone. Because of COVID this year I will not be going around the time when I usually always go. I was looking over many pictures I have of the Harry Potter World there at Unive...

A few weekends ago I went to a farmer's market while I was in Steamboat Springs here in Colorado. I love going to farmer's markets because you can find so many cool and unique things. I typically love buying local honey at the farmer's markets near where I live in Denver. This particular farmer's market in Steamboat had more than just food items, they had unique products like candles, jewelry, and art pieces. I enjoyed looking at all the art sections that they had there, I even bought a small card with a drawing of two whales on it. The market felt very welcoming and I enjoyed this fun Saturday morning activity.

After Monday's activity in class on September 28, I had never actually focused on my food before eating it. The point of this activity was to promote mindfulness in the simple things we do in our everyday lives. I am very grateful for food and often times appreciate the presentation it has. I went to a cafe this week and paid extra attention to the presentation it had. The cafe I went to takes pride in the presentation of their food and when I received it, the first thing I did was not eat it, instead, I took a few moments to appreciate the details the food had and the work they put into it. The prompt for this week's post mentioned something great, "Being mindful of what we are grateful for can help us be more attuned to what's happening in and around lives." After realizing how much more I appreciate my food after taking just a few minutes to study it, encourages me to now be more mindful of other things in my life!

  This weekend was my birthday and I went up to Vail with my boyfriend. While I was there the trees caught my attention. This idea of paying attention to something, in particular, was the main idea of chapter four of Tina Seelig's book, inGenius: A Crash Course on Creativity.  When I got up to Vail, the trees were so hard to not notice. All the trees in Vail are already changing colors, unlike the trees here in Denver. I took this picture from the hotel.  My favorite season is fall and so I always become so memorized by the sight of the trees changing. I feel as if I am a young child during this time of the season when summer is ending and fall is beginning and the trees are in their transitioning colors because I always become so mesmerized.  Coming from Denver to Vail, there was such a season shock. It was so much cooler and the trees were mostly already yellow and orange and so in this particular situation, paying attention to my surroundings and making observatio...

          Andy started out his career in footwear after he graduated from university 8 to 9 years ago. He went to Asia to work in footwear manufacturing, during this time he was having to travel a lot. He would always have to pack multiple shoes for short trips due to all the different weather conditions he came across. Then one day the thought came to him, why isn't there a shoe that does it all? Thus, now almost 10 years later, Andy is the co-founder of Vessi Footwear. A brand that has shoes that do it all. Vessi shoes are all, 100% waterproof, breathable, lightweight, and 100% vegan.  Vessi Website