Journalling, (it's a) Challenge

This March I want to look at journalling on layouts, specifically the handwritten kind. I struggle a lot with adding journalling. I worry about it 'messing up' a page especially as I tend to leave it as the last thing to add. It's important to me to try to use handwriting as much as possible because I just think it makes the pages feel more love. Typing is great but it's also kind of impersonal - like writing in a book. For me handwritten things are always more intriguing to look at. One of my favourite heirlooms is the stash of letters and postcards looking back over 100 years into family life past and I hope that a small portion at least of the pages I make get to be looked back on in some way in the future. Maybe no one will handwrite any more in the near future, (I mean who doesn't love voice controlled stuff now, it's so going to take over the world!) so it could be something that's looked back on down the line in wonderment! I digress. So yes handwriting, important stuff. So onto the actual process. I did a double challenge with this. I looked at photo's I've had difficultly looking at for a while because of a lost family member. When I did get the photo out I just didn't know what to write so that gave me the idea to do kind of a stream of consciousness thing where I just looked at the photo and wrote down the first things that popped into my head to get my feelings both out and to put something down onto the page.

 

Writing it out on a scrap piece of paper first also gave me a chance to make mistakes off my page so I could then copy it out. In the main kit this month we've got these small alpha stickers and I decided to mix some of them up in my handwriting to really make a feature of the journalling.

 

 

 

I didn't like the floatyness of my writing so I then decided to add some stitching underneath the writing to ground it and also it'll help to keep the little letters down too.

 

 

The background I built up using squares of paper, (both from the Jan/Feb 2018 Quirky Kit Lite) I'd made with a paper punch and added across the centre of the page. I added two of the Jan/Feb 2018 Custom Card kit cards then my photo over the top. Then over the top of those I added one of the frames from the main kit with foam pads to give it some dimension off the page. I finished it off with a few of the stickers from the lite kit, (picking out all those blue/green jewel tones from the kit).

 The title I made up from the acrylic word in the main kit I added by hand stitching it down with embroidery thread along with some of the leaf trim from the main too. The dotty bit is washi tape from last years' May/June kit.

 

Hope you'll have a go at creating your own layout with lots of hand journalling. I'll come back next week with another style journalling filled layout and process to share.

Challenge

Try out incorporating some word or alphabet stickers in with your journalling if you'd like to play along with these posts as challenges and pop in the group to share or if you're on Instagram use the hashtag #quirkykitgallery to add your page to the website gallery.