This Thanksgiving Weekend, Make A Gratitude Journal

Lotería Journal, altered Moleskine cover with ybonesy doodles (plus Caran d’Arch, gouache, and ink pen), design © 2010 by ybonesy, all rights reserved.

I love journals. I’ve written about my love of journals. I have doodle journals and writing journals, and I even have my first ever journal, a gift from my sister Bobbi, who got it for me as part of a Scholastic book order she made for her new class. She gave it to me about the time she started teaching: 1974. I was 13 years old, a newly minted teen, and my journal (it was actually more of a diary, although I’m not sure what the difference is) was the perfect place to log news of piddly babysitting jobs (for which it was not uncommon to make 75 cents!), swim lessons, and crushes. That early journal got me believing that any life—even one so boring as my own—was worth recording.

That’s the beauty of the journal. That it might collect the ordinary and occasional extraordinary goings-on of your existence. And that someday you might look back on it as one experiences the family photo album. Memory, insight, a looking glass into your world, or at least a snippet of it.

So it is not surprising that I’ve recently discovered the joy of making journal art. I’m not sure what else to call it. I take blank journals—the basic Moleskine works great—then figure out designs to create on the covers. It’s a fun project, one that can easily be done over a long holiday weekend.

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To make the Lotería Journal, which I fashioned after the Mexican Lotería cards, I used the following items:

• Moleskine or other journal – I like the Moleskine brand, but it is a bit pricey. Any simple journal will do; for this project it’s best to stay away from leather or cloth covers.
• Gesso – to apply to the cover so that you can color or paint the cover (the gesso acts both as a whitening agent to better absorb and reflect light in color, as well as a primer so that whatever you apply bonds well to the surface).
• Evenly sized images – for this journal I used my own, but you could cut images out of magazines or tear out cool papers and draw different designs on each one.
• Mod Podge – to glue the images to the Moleskine cover, and later, once the piece is completely done, I’ll paint the entire cover with Mod Podge to seal the design and give it a glossy finish.
  
• Paints and wax crayons – to add color.
• A black pen, preferably permanent, but if you use an impermanent one, just make sure it is completely dry, and when you do your final paint with Mod Podge, do a quick brush; don’t go back and forth or linger else the black ink will smudge.
• Brushes – a one-inch one for the Mod Podge and a small one for my paints (both of which I keep in water while I’m not using them).

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And given that we are in the Thanksgiving season, I can’t think of a better use of a lovingly created journal than to transform it into a Gratitude Journal. Now, folks out there may practice daily Gratitude, but for my part, this is an area that I’d like to improve. I want to spend more time giving thanks for what I have and less time wanting whatever it is I don’t have.

A Gratitude Journal can take several forms. One idea is to use it as a way to say Thank-You to someone in your life. My sister Janet once created this type of Gratitude Journal for me, although we didn’t call it that back then. But now as I think about it, that’s exactly what it was.

About thirteen years ago I organized a trip to Spain for my dad, Janet, another sister, and my sister-in-law. The five of us spent two weeks traveling all over the country, staying in unique and at times quirky places. An olive-farm-turned-bed-and-breakfast, a renovated monastery, and a former brothel, for example. We had a wonderful time, and afterward Janet made me a journal as a memento of our experience. Handmade paper adorned the front and back covers, and inside on a long single sheet of paper that she folded like an accordion, she made a collage of different scenes from the trip.

You could create a Gratitude Journal and inside turn it into a personalized Thank You to someone close to you. I know I often pull out the journal my sister made for me. It’s so much richer than a Thank You card.








A Gratitude Journal could also be something you keep for yourself over a certain period of time—say, the upcoming year—to help practice gratitude in your life. There are a lot of ways you can do this. For example, each day you could think about what it is you’re grateful for and then write about that particular topic. Or make a doodle about it, or do a collage on that page.

QuoinMonkey wrote a post at the end of 2007 titled Feelin’ Down For The Holidays? Make A Gratitude List. She made her list at the end of the year, as has been a tradition of hers for several years now. Here you can see her Gratitude List from 2007 looking forward to 2008, along with mine. And here are QM’s Gratitude Lists from 2009 and 2010. You could follow QM’s example and dedicate a sheet of paper to each letter of the alphabet and see what flows onto the page.

Or maybe your Gratitude Journal project is more about simply focusing this weekend on creating a beautiful cover for your journal. Maybe that in itself is the act of Gratitude, giving Thanks by allowing yourself to spend a few hours making art.

And speaking of giving Thanks, QM and I are immensely grateful for the community and inspiration we’ve received over the years from working together and from all of you.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday!

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Journal Art, mixed media journal covers—washi paper, Caran d’Arch, collage, small wooden canvases top two), postage stamp (third), stickers, etc., design © 2010 by ybonesy, all rights reserved.

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-Related to post On Providence, Old Journals, & Thoreau

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Host An Art Playdate

My favorite thing to do in elementary school was Art. Even when I had pink eye in second grade, and my mom sent me to school because she preferred possibly infecting my entire class to having me around for the day, and the teacher set up two long tables like the ones in the cafeteria, and I sat all alone making my collage at one table while the rest of the class crowded around the other table, I still loved Art!

I learned something from that pink eye experience, which is, making Art is a solitary thing. Even when you’re surrounded by other people making Art, you’re doing your own thing while they’re doing their own things. Which is why I love making Art with other people. You can work separately yet together. You can shoot the shit, listen to music, or gossip. Maybe it’s not so great to make Art with others all the time, like when you’re serious about producing, but working alongside others is Viagra for the creative process. Ideas! Feedback! Fun! It’s like being a kid again.

One Sunday in October I hosted a gathering of a dozen women at my place. They brought fixings for a quick and easy lunch, plus they came with unlimited enthusiasm for doing something completely new.

Ours was a resin playdate. Why resin? I’ve recently begun attending a resin night once a month with my sister and a group of her friends. Resin is so magical and fun that I wanted to turn around and share what I knew with my friends. A word of caution, however: Resin can be a messy and potentially harmful substance. Resin playdates are do-able as long as someone in the group knows what they’re doing and can assist during the process.

While resin may not be the best first playdate to host, there are plenty of creative activities that you could bring your friends together to do. This post is intended to offer ideas as to what some of those activities are and how to pull together the gathering so that everyone has fun. And, if readers are interested, I can follow this up with a later post specifically on hosting a resin playdate.

Just Play

If you’ve had a child in the past 20 years, you know exactly how playdates work. You call another parent, set up a time and place, drop your kids off or stick around and talk to the adults while the kids play, and for however long the playdate lasts, you forget about all your worries. Marvelous things, playdates. They’re not like birthday parties, where surely someone’s going to cry over not getting a gift or winning the prizes.

And so it goes with Art. Often I hear people say:

“I’m not artistic.”
“I don’t have a creative bone in my body.”
“I’m amazed by people who have artistic talent. I certainly don’t have any.”

With playdates, there’s no such thing as talent. It’s not a class nor a workshop. No one’s paying money (except maybe $5 or $10 to cover supplies) and expecting to get something out of it. It’s-just-play.

Don’t Eat the Glue

When you get people together, you gotta eat. It’s what you do. But when you get people together to play with Art, you gotta keep the Eating and the Art separate.

Come up with a simple menu—say, nachos—and ask folks to sign up for the different ingredients: shredded cheese, chopped onions, chile con queso, lettuce, tomatoes, chips. Our friend Linda, who hosts the monthly resin night, does it best. Her menus are easy yet coordinated. One night it’s Frito Pie. Another night, potato-leek soup and salad. Next month: tamales, posole, and taquitos. It’s served buffet-style, and if the weather’s nice, we eat on the patio. After all, we’ve taken up most of the table space for our art.

Once you’re done eating (and we always eat fast, because we want to get to the playing) clear the dishes, and you’re ready.

K.I.S.S.

Pick something you know how to do yourself. Or pick something you’ve always wanted to learn. You don’t have to be expert. There are many simple yet satisfying activities. Here are a few ideas:

• Collage: Tell your friends to bring a bunch of old magazines, scrapbook papers, doodles or watercolor dabblings that they don’t mind cutting up. It can be cheap picture books bought at garage sales, construction paper, photos that aren’t valuable. Provide a set of color markers, inks and rubber stamps, glue, and cardboard for making the collages. (TIP: ask your friends to bring scissors from home.)
• Paper products: Buy blank note cards and envelopes, a roll of white butcher paper for making homemade gift wrap, manila folders cut into gift tags. Carve shapes into Russet potatoes or sponges for stamping onto your cards and paper. Use the same basic materials as for collage. Walk away with enough items to hold you over through the holidays. Or swap with some of the others so you each go home with a wide variety.
• Decorate journals: Ask everyone to bring a composition book, and then do collage, stamping, and doodling or painting in those.
• Color mandalas.
• Decoupage something: My daughters taught me this—Mod Podge goes on white and sticky, but it dries clear and not sticky. All you have to do is glue images to, say, a small plain cardboard box like the kind you can pick up at a craft store. Once you have all the images and marker or paint decoration you want on the box, brush the entire thing in Mod Podge. Let the glue dry, brush it again. Let it dry and you’re done.
• The list is endless. You can work with recycled materials, beads, clay, Shrinky-Dinks, paper mache. Have you seen those beads that are rolled from magazine paper? Amazing.

Space Matters

Obviously, the amount of space you need depends on what you do, but whatever you do, make sure there’s plenty of space for each person to work. And protect the space by laying down plastic tablecloths or newspapers. If you’re using exacto knives, make sure people have surfaces to cut on.

I like the idea of putting the common supplies at one table so that everyone can access them. For example, if you’re doing collage, keep together all the paper materials.

Also, lighting is important. You may need to move lights from other parts of the house to sufficiently light up all the workspace. It doesn’t hurt to also ask your friends to bring desk lights if they have them.

Epilogue

This is basic stuff. I wouldn’t bother creating a post out of it if I didn’t know just how great it is to make Art with others.

When I hosted that resin playdate in October, at one point I went outside for something. I walked back into the house and the place was still. Everyone had heads down, working in quiet concentration. Some folks talked in low tones, and k.d. lang sang hymns on the stereo, but there was a calm energy in the room. I knew then that we were truly playing. Every one of us was a kid again.

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