Junk Journaling was my Destiny!
From the moment I opened my Strawberry Shortcake Diary on Christmas morning when I was 8, I have been hooked on journaling. Back then, the pages were tiny compared to my crooked handwriting but there was enough room to scrawl the basics of the day over the page.
Lucky for me, my aunts supported my writing habit over the years, giving me books like Little House on the Prairie and larger, blank volumes to keep recording my own story. While my days were markedly less interesting than those of Laura Ingalls Wilder, I started to write my own stories on the page, inspired by afternoons spent watching Guiding Light with my grandmother. My sagas were long and complicated, but they kept me writing up through my middle school days. In eighth grade, we were required to keep a year long journal and daily brought me back around to more formal journal writing. By this time, computers were more common in the average home and I’d transferred my creative endeavors to a digital platform. At the end of the year, my teacher flipped through our notebooks to make sure we’d kept up with our journals, and her delight inspired me to keep writing through high school.
As I got older, I definitely became more creative with the notebooks I was writing in. Blank journals gifted to me at Christmas were no longer lasting me more than a month and I had been logging my thoughts and stories in black and white composition books, purchased with babysitting money, and often writing while on those jobs.
College brought even more creativity to my process and I started decorating my notebooks, trying out spiral bound sketch books and other types of media to write in. I was introduced to Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way and instantly fell in love. She further expanded my creativity and introduced me to the idea of Morning Pages, three pages of stream of consciousness writing meant to clear your head in the morning.
Graduating from UCSB with a degree in English, sent me out into the world wondering what exactly to do with my life. At first I took some normal jobs, human resources, catering manager, executive assistant and while they paid the bills, this was not the creative life I’d imagined reading the Artist’s Way! I kept up with my morning pages though, and that was when an unexpected door opened.
While my jobs were kind of boring, my social life was not. Bars and coffee houses with local, live music were a staple of Santa Barbara and the surrounding area. As it turns out, bands need websites and posters and my career in graphic design was born. I quickly saw the value of combining my new graphic design skills with my journal making, and it lead to a lot of handmade journals that I gifted out into the world.
Years would pass and I would adopt two kids (after becoming a foster parent) before I discovered the world of junk journaling and became hooked! I have made a number of my own journals, customizing them with my own images and quotes but often found myself frustrated that I couldn’t find that perfect thing. So I just started making them!
I adore the time I spend in Photoshop creating journal spreads as much as the time I spend writing in them. Collaging images together, particularly vintage ones, is such a joy. In a way it is a lot like telling a story with pictures. I hope you will find similar joy as you craft with the pages from my shop.
I’d love to invite you to download a free Into the Woods Junk Journal Kit by heading over to my website: inkandpage.co/create.