More Journaling Done Last Night

Last night while my husband was cleaning the dinner dishes I played with my kids. Then my kids went off to play with each other. (Later they showered themselves and got ready for bed all on their own--what a great thing for them to be able to do at ages 5.5 and 8. Hooray!) My husband began making a mincemeat pie for Christmas. I sat down at the kitchen table to do some collage work in my journal. I also wrote one page. He had the news on as usual which I don't think necessarily is good for my creative juices as honestly what goes on in the world of politics often makes me angry.

Anyway what I did was go through some papers from my daily life and added them to pages that I had already written on, such as adding borders. I also put some ephemera on blank pages. I also added things to the front cover and the end pages of the journal since they were still pretty empty.

I have a little plastic box which held organic salad mix. As I gather papers such as stamps and interesting papers from junk mail I toss them into the box, which I keep in my kitchen. I went through this box last night. Here are some things added to my pages:

Reproduction of vintage Santa Claus from a chocolate wrapper

Gold foil that lined chocolate candy that I received as a Christmas gift

Andes mints foil wrappers, intact and some which I cut with decorative blade Fiskar scissors (this is a family tradition to eat these candies at Christmas time)

Papers which I tested my new wine cork stamps on

Scrap papers from testing rubber and foam stamps on

Cancelled postage stamps from junk mail and Christmas cards

Decorative papers from Christmas card envelopes

Fancy handwriting featuring our family's name and address from Christmas cards and other mail

I also did a scrap paper swap with someone from the Gluebooks chat list and went through that envelope and picked out some papers.

The decorations on the pages are not necessarily tied in to the written content of the pages. The decorations are reflections of the papers that were coming into my life right around the date in which I was writing, so some of them show snowflakes and Christmas themes. Sometimes I found words that expressed the emotion that I was feeling at the time that I was writing.

I still am a bit confused about how to write and glue. It doesn't always work for me to do both in one day. I don't really like gluing from my bed but I do enjoy journaling while in bed at the end of the day.

I keep telling myself what I read that Teesha Moore said about journaling, there are no mistakes in journaling, just do it.

However let's say that I glue down images on one day and then want to use that space to write in, but the images conflict with what I am writing, that doesn't feel right to me. Another issue is that I had used watercolor paints to make the background pages and while doing it I had fun. Most of the pages are very vibrant. However a red and hot orange flame colored page didn't jive with the day we were snowed in due to a huge snowstorm. Do you see my challenge?

I don't like journaling against a blank white page or even into a gluebook which is a white page with collaged elements on top of it. It feels to stark to me.

I am just going to keep plugging away and having fun and maybe someday it will all jive. I have this idea that everyone else feels their journals are perfect and in sync. If someone thinks I am wrong will you please share that with me?

The best thing about last night was that I got into that flow mode which doesn't always happen.