Today I was office-based, which is to say, working at home. The beauty of working at home, although it isn’t something I often take advantage of, is that I can organise my time around client work to include some play during daylight hours. Today that mostly involved making a ‘mess’. Creatively, of course.
I’ve been creating these little ring-binder journals for the past few years, born out of a need to combine visual and verbal journalling and use some of the tonnes of creative stash I’ve collected.
Let’s talk about the stash for a moment. I’m not just talking about the irresistible impulse I have to buy washi tape and stickers and all things stationery whenever I can but also whenever I travel, receive gifts, flip through magazines or even get junk mail, I have this habit of hoarding bits that visually appeal to me or are memory triggers. I’ve done it my whole life. And, as my life gets longer, that amounts to a LOT of stuff! Nothing is beyond being kept – I even have some pieces of dried paper towel that I once cleaned paint brushes on because I love the pattern that was created. A happy accident… too pretty to bin!
For a long time, I kept these bits in boxes and carried those boxes around with me whenever I moved; houses, cities, countries, continents… that stuff came along – decades’ worth. And, for an equally long time, I felt the guilt of collecting, storing and transporting all this “rubbish”.
But, not anymore. Time has taught me that being able to lay my hand on exactly the right bit of collage material when I need it or the perfect ribbon for a gift I’m wrapping, far outweighs the silliness of having held onto that tiny thing for years. Stash = Treasure! I believe that creatives everywhere will know what I mean.
The flipside of this is that I also don’t want to die like a hoarder, buried under a mountain of junk. And I don’t want to inflict it all on whoever it is that has to clear out my stuff when I’m gone. So… I have become more selective about what I buy and what I keep, I do go through it at intervals and cull (makes great bonfire fodder) and I actively try to recycle, upcycle, use it in some way. If it no longer sparks joy, it goes. If I still love it, it stays but not just to languish forever in a box. Some gets incorporated into arty projects but most is really not that worthy. Finally, circa 2010, enter conscious and consistent journal-page making.
These pages are not art, but each is a collage, a mini assemblage of ephemera I’ve gathered, or a collection of words – either my own handwritten musings or quotations and phrases gleaned elsewhere. I have about a dozen of these little A5 ring-binders full of pages of prettiness. It provides the perfect way for me to combine some of these bits into pages that either become the bottom layers for my journal musings or just a pleasing visual interlude between them. They too get sorted and culled every now and again, and it keeps it all manageable. The boxes are reduced, the collecting has purpose, and I have an easy creative outlet and an endless supply of space to blurt my insides out onto.
What I couldn’t have imagined when I started doing it is just how much I love these pages. I love making them and I love using them. They’re a place to play, to ponder and to wonder. To dream. I don’t often wallow and wail in these journals. My plain paper journal is where that tends to happen. These are a happy place.
So, that’s what I was doing today. I’ll be collecting some ideas for #the100dayproject in them and they may form the basis for some other things I make down the line. Today, just creating some new background pages with bits I’ve collected on my recent travels IS the thing.
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