DIY Recycled Travel Journal
My two greatest passions in life are traveling & photography - which together create a beautiful courtship that leads to boxes and boxes full of plane tickets, random momentos & instant photos with no where to go. If i'm being honest, travel journaling is completely new to me, i've always just cataloged the adventures and memories in special compartments of my brain hoping that they never disappear. But i've committed to a resolution of documentation. A challenge to document not only my travels but also the everyday. To use my own two hands to write, doodle, collage & get messy. To think less, write more. To slip out from behind my camera and capture feeling on paper, taking note of every detail, personal experience, & turning the whimsical thoughts in my head into a tangible thing.
The moment I got this deep revelation of documentation, I wanted to write & I wanted to write now! Of course that meant actually having a physical journal of my own, which I didn't have so I pulled together items from my home & an old American Threads shopping bag (represent) and fell in love with the magical creation I was not expecting to pull together. It was so quick & easy. Let me show you how...
SUPPLIES:
-Recycled Brown Shopping Bag -White Office Paper -Scissors
-Ruler Needle & String -Pencil -Paint -Paint Brushes
-Misc Collage Items (photos, tickets, labels, flowers, magazine scraps, etc)
Create the outside cover of your journal by cutting a piece of kraft bag to the size of your standard office paper.
After cut to correct size, I quickly and imperfectly trimmed the outsides of the office paper to create a jagged-uneven texture.
Time to bind your journal together!
Take around 10 sheets of office paper + your newly cut kraft cover and fold in half. On your fold line, mark two spots two inches from the outsides. These will be your stitching marks! Staring from the inside, puncture a hole going outward with your needle & thread and then return the thread through the opposing hole. Tie together with a tight little not (pictures above.)
Customize your cover with a painted design of your choosing. Don't be afraid to get messy or have imperfections, the made-by-hand-ness, makes your journal so special.
Then the worst part.... let it dry. Patience my friend, art takes time. Grab a cup of something soothing, put on a record, and get ready to put pen to paper.
Once dry, the rest of the creating process is completely up to you. Go wherever your journaling takes you. Fill the pages with imperfect color, nonsense doodling, impossibly messy handwriting, and heartfelt wording. Journal with no boundaries.
And the next time you find yourself in a foreign land, write down every detail and glue down every nicknack that makes your heart remember just what it was like to be in that exact spot. And you can experience your adventures over & over again.