My Life in 30 Days

I owe it to my friend Kay Dixon for encouraging a swap with 5 people called Thirty Days. We were supposed to find a suitable journal and write and/or illustrate 30 things we didn't want to forget. Then we would do a round robin and send our books around to each other until we all had a chance to read through each others lives.

I had a real hard time trying to pick just 30 things to enshrine in this book. I'm a deep thinker and started more than once to make a list. Parents, childhood, teen years, marriage, parenting, weddings, grandchildren... I couldn't just pick out thirty, so I did what I do best, I procrastinated.

Although the journal was always on my mind, I could not get my thoughts together enough to satisfy myself. I started with 2-3 stories, but I still couldn't get into it. The last thing I wanted in a book was stark white pages filled with just words. This isn't how I saw my life. Then one day Kay let me off the hook. She said make it what pleased me. Put some art in it. It didn't have to be longhand, it didn't have to be in any kind of order, it could be typed. That took the heat off me and she also gave us an extension in time.

Here's the front of the book so far. There's room for more when I find the right thing.


After I got going on the cover I started to do what I really like to do and collaged the next couple pages and then made an introductory page with my picture on it.



From here on the collages and entries are about my childhood, trials and errors in trying new art techniques, and using interesting pictures I have had in my files for years. I thought this would be a good place to bring them out and save them.

















This is the inside back cover that is not finished.

This is the back cover:


I have mailed my book to the first person and when he is finished looking through it it will go to 3 others before I get it back. I'm already setting things aside that I want to add to it when it comes home. I'm anxious to see what the other four books look like. I'm going to be like a dry sponge ready to soak up a lot of new ideas.

An Art project I got suckered into

I belong to a group of wonderful women who PIF (Pay It Forward) and Snag items related to scrapbooking, rubberstamping and altered arts. There are three levels of trading,Low Level value $0-$4.99, mid level value $5.00-14.99, and High Level value, $15 to $25.

First you decide the value of the item you want to trade off and place it with a good description on the right level database. If someone "snags" it, they pay 1 creditfrom their account and you earn 1 credit for your account on that board. Then you can use your credit to snag something of interest to you perhaps pif'd by a completely different person.

Ok, that's not too hard to understand. Well, one week we were having a game called Hand Made Hoopla sponsored by one of our members, Kay. She's a real live wire! Everything she does is done with excellence, and she urges us to do things like PIF with generosity, and do Random Acts of Kindness. Well she Piff'd a 26 day journal of what she called her ordinary life. Well, I snagged it before anyone else could! What a great way to learn more about a new friend.

Well, what I quickly learned about her is that she is really sneaky. Right after I snagged her journal she writes back and says, "well, you know, now you have to keep a journal for 26 days too." It didn't sound so hard. I've kept spiritual journals before so I thought this would be pretty easy, but I was wrong. I don't do anything easy.

The book had to be at least 3x5 inches. I'd been wanting to make a book using tabbed index dividers so that's what I settled on. I also found a tablet of paper by K&Company called Classic K Margo, and used these papers to give the book a little continuity.

Above are a few pictures of the journal. The first is the cover and an idea of how thick it is. The next is an entry about procrastinating on my Crow pages for a Fat Book project, and the third one is a fun quote I found after seeing some beautiful rainbows this summer.