Quick Long-Stitch Journal

I've carried a notebook/journal with me for as long as I can remember. It's a place to write down a book passage that I want to remember, or jot down the name of a book that a friend recommends, or to list my to-dos. For over a year now I've been making my own. I love the feeling of writing in a handmade book, especially one I've made myself.

I keep these books fairly small, usually no larger than 4" x 6", and the bindings pretty simple. Most of the time I make a double-pamphlet book. This time I used what I call a criss-cross long-stitch binding. I glued together two complementary papers of card-stock weight paper -- the paper has a distressed look. To keep the book closed, I used an elastic band I found in my sewing box. Then I hand-sewed a button on the front cover and voila! (or "viola!" as one of my friends says.)

Collecting Journals

I think more about journals now than I ever have. The reason, mostly, is a Creative Journaling class I took at BookWorks with textile artist -- and journal queen -- Heather Allen Swarttouw. I wrote about it here. And while blogs are a form of journal, they're nowhere near as deliciously tactile as the three-dimensional variety.

There's an item and a photo in a recent post in Notebookism that reminded me of how much I've enjoyed buying journals over the years. I now make many of my own, but it doesn't diminish the pleasure of finding just the right journal, and like the author of the post, I particularly like to bring back journals from places in which I've traveled. My favorite to date (I guess this means I'll have to take a photo of it and post it here sometime soon) is a dark leather journal from Venice, with a small piece of round millefiori glass set into its cover. The endpapers are a subtle patterned paper, and each creamy white page has small illustrations of Venice across the top.

And here's a different take on journals (and the people who fear them!) from artist Kelly Kilmer.

Creative Journaling

I'm coming to the end of a class I've been taking at BookWorks: Creative Journaling. It's less a class about keeping a journal than it is about being aware of the types of information that are important to you and making sure that the information stays accesssible so that you can find it when you need it. That usually means creating a variety of journals, each with a specific purpose. And it means thinking hard about what you'll house in the journal, so that the journal serves its content well.

The students are encouraged to address our "relationship to the journal," as our instructor (textile artist Heather Allen-Swarttouw) puts it, and deal with issues we've had with journals over time [The photo is of Heather (right) and Laura, one of our students, in class]. For me, a long-time, albeit intermittent, keeper of journals (I admit that I still cringe at bit at using the word journal as a verb, but I'm getting over it), it's not about getting myself to write, it's about using more images and fewer words. Heather, for example, is almost exclusively a visual journaler. Her journals are filled with sketches; some -- her "flip books," usually -- hold only images that she's particularly drawn to or that resonate for her.

So I've been working on preparing my journal pages in various ways before I write on them: painting with watercolor washes, making images with rubber stamps, applying inks, and otherwise allowing myself to "mess up" the pages. It's really a treat to write on color pages. The trick is to stay ahead of yourself by setting aside time to prepare surfaces in advance. The next step, I figure, is to doodle and find other means to create obstacles on the page so that I'm forced to write around them; anything to keep me from a constant diet of neat, text-filled, symmetrical pages.

I've ended up with a half-dozen or so journals. Initially, I thought I'd make them all myself, but in most cases I found notebooks and journals that I've collected over time that worked well. With those, I've personalized or am in the process of personalizing each cover with collage, paint or, in one case, recovering the journal using paper I'd painted in my class with Traci Bautista at Art & Soul.

Here's the rundown of specialized journals to date:

• Daily - this is the standard, smaller, carry-around-with-me-everywhere-I-go journal that I've been making for myself for at least a year now.
• Art Experiments - for trying out techniques, making mistakes and generally allowing myself to make marks on a page without judgment.
  
• Art Ideas - one-half of a larger journal (the other is for ideas on books I'd like to make). It's for jotting down my thoughts on projects I'd like to work on, techniques I'd like to try, etc.
• Book Ideas - takes up one-half of a larger journal shared with 'Art Ideas.' It's for random thoughts on books to make and for more specific plans and details as they emerge.
• Relationship with the Book - What is this journey into book arts taking me? How are my views, thoughts and process evolving? This journal isn't mean to be technique driven; rather, I'd like to focus on where the road leads and what I'm learning along the way.
• Flip Book - It's called a "flip" book because you flip through it for inspiration -- or at least that's how I'm going to use it. One side will house images I'm taken with, the other will include articles and other stories about women in (successful) transition.
• Techniques - details of techniques I've used and liked so that I don't forget them!
• Digital Art - more prosaically titled my Photoshop Elements notebook. I'm slowly, very s..l..o..w..l..y working my way through this program.
  

This is a good class to take in a group. I'm learning from other's styles and approaches to journaling and their issues with the process. Perhaps most important among these is that there ARE other styles, and that you're not doomed to walk in the same rut through eternity, by which time the rut is carved deep enough to be your grave.

The Discomfort Zone

I started a Creative Journaling workshop at BookWorks a couple of weeks ago. A primary objective of the class is to keep information that you collect easily accessible. That means dedicating specific journals to specific subjects. For example, our instructor (a textile artist with a penchant for organizing her thoughts and images on paper), maintains, among other journals, one for images that inspire her, as a resource for her work, and one on kelp (why kelp, I wonder?). A left-brainer in recovery, welcoming order for as long as I can remember (control issues, no doubt), I've taken to the class like a pig to mud.

Last week, we listed (aah, the joy of lists!) the types of journals that we saw in our future. I came up with a dozen (we are not surprised). Our homework over the next two weeks is to think through what they should look like and find sources for them. The journal should both match the purpose -- its content -- and also "feel right." "Don't force it," says Heather, our teacher. This will be the easy part. As an inveterate collector of notebooks/journals/datebooks, which feeds into my lust for paper and books of any kind, and my partiality to systems, I have quite a selection of potential journals of all shapes, sizes and bindings. Some I'll make myself, of course.

The more difficult part -- and a big motivator for taking the class -- will be to help me move away from the word and toward the image. My journals (or "diaries," as we used to call them before "journaling" became trendy) until now have held only words. As with much of what I'm up to this year, I'm hoping to inch closer to my "discomfort zone:" the visual, the intuitive, the instinctive and the spontaneous (by the way, did Jonathan Franzen make up the term "discomfort zone," or did he appropriate it from someone else? It doesn't sound original.). Paradoxically, I guess this means that the more uncomfortable I feel, the closer I'll be to succeeding. And since that sentence itself makes me uncomfortable, I guess I'm off to a good start.