Wreck This Journal: The Good, The Bad, & The Wrecked.

Whether it be the flip-through of my completed journal on YouTube (which now has half of a million views, THANK YOU!!!), the one I wrecked in one day, the individual pages on my Instagram or something in between... chances are you stumbled upon me and my little home on the internet because of Keri Smith's bestselling book: Wreck This Journal.

I have come to the not-so-recent conclusion that much of my social media following is due to my Wreck This Journal (with the exception of tumblr where 85% of my followers are there because of either the Digimon fandom or because at one point it was cool to have a banner for your blog and I was one of the weirdos who made them for fun). I am more than okay with this because it's something I adore (Wreck This Journal.. although Digimon too haha) and I'm very proud of the pages (and the completed journal) that I have done!

I have posted on here about individual pages I've done that I wanted to add a bit of a story behind either the idea or the process behind the finished page that goes up on Instagram, YouTube, or Tumblr   with just a couple hashtags and a sentence long description... but for this post I just wanted to do a bit of an all-encompassing post kind of answering the who/what/where/when/why... or something like that.

The first (and probably best) link I'm going to throw at you is the link to my WTJ page on my Tumblr blog. I use it as kind of a command centre for my Wreck This Journaling as I have been less than consistent when it comes to the way I post my pages. For my first journal I started out scanning the finished pages and posting them as I finished, the quality gets continuously better as you go from 2012 to 2014. The links to my current journal aren't finished yet, but it has the playlist of all my WTJ videos as well as a FAQ.

http://ehdreeahnah.tumblr.com/journal 

If you're new to the whole world of WTJ, this is the first WTJ video I made:

It gives a bit of an intro as well as a look at my completed WTJ before it was, well... complete.

The other video I would like to include is my completed Wreck This Journal. Now if watching a flip-through video isn't your style you can also scroll through the pages on my Tumblr with the links on the journal page OR just click here because I like short cuts too

• pages sorted by page number/ order given in the book
• pages in the order I completed them (a couple of pages from my current wtj are at the end)
• pages in order from most to least recent (a couple of pages from my current journal are here also)

And for those of you who would like to sit back, relax, grab a cup of (insert your beverage of choice here) and press play on a video here it is:

Now a lot of people have felt it necessary to point out the shakiness of my voice/ how I sound like I am going to cry and as a tiny disclaimer: I talk about it HERE if you would like to know more, but I assure you I am not overly emotional in any way in the video haha. 

So that pretty much covers my first WTJ (if you don't count the DIY one I did in 2009 haha). Shortly after that I started a new one, which is what you see in my WTJ series on YouTube. Since my tumblr is run mostly on queued/ reblogged posts I don't post pages on there much anymore (I'll have to fix that soon!) but whenever I finish a page now, it goes on my Instagram! I do try to make videos for the majority of the pages I do but sometimes it just doesn't happen... so if you would like to stay in the loop with my completed pages, the best way to do so is to check them out on there!

Instagram is also where I've been posting better quality pictures of pages from my original WTJ (#tbt anyone?) as well as other Keri Smith book pages, such as Mess, This is Not a Book and Pocket Scavenger. I also have the Wreck This Journal Everywhere and a few of the lesser known books that don't come in the box sets. I'll try and get them all sorted and linked on the "control centre" page, but for now, Instagram is their home. 

Something I noticed people commented on quite a bit was how I failed to "wreck" my journal and it was moreso a scrapbook/ art book/ quote book. To be quite honest that was always my intention and it was the reason I purchased a WTJ. I love making things and being creative and making collages/ homages to things and words that move me and have affected my life and WTJ provided a medium for me to do that in a compact way that didn't impinge on my dwindling wall space. I try to address it over and over but people keep telling me how I am "wrong" in my wrecking. I did use a spare WTJ to try completely wrecking with reckless abandon and you can watch that HERE but at the end of the day it's my journal. Whatever Ms. Smith's intentions were or weren't, four pages into the journal it states:

INSTRUCTIONS:

1. Carry this with you everywhere you go.

2. Follow the instructions on every page.

3. Order is not important.

4. Instructions are open to interpretation.

5. Experiment (work against your better judgement).

My journal is my interpretation of each prompt. I follow each prompt and I experiment. Yes, it ends up being a little artsy-fartsy but that is cathartic for me. That is how I relax and unwind and I rip pages and I mess up and I deal with it in often very creative ways. I create and I destroy and then usually cover up said destruction creatively.

That being said, if you own or intend to purchase a Wreck This Journal it then becomes YOURS. You can do the journal as destructively or creatively as you want! Don't let anyone influence you on what you want to do, it's YOUR book and I hope you have so much fun with it! :D

Before ending this post I just want to thank EVERYONE who helped me with my WTJ: whether it be my brother who walked my journal with me in the snow and filmed the majority of my wreck-this-journal-in-one-day video, my boyfriend who helped me make my first WTJ series video in Cuba as well as being insanely supportive of me, Erica for being the friend who did something destructive to that page (I didn't look), and to you for reading this post, liking my pictures on Instagram and watching my videos on YouTube (and not minding this ridiculous run-on sentence). You have made this online experience so fun and exciting and rewarding and I am so, insanely grateful. Also shoutout to Keri Smith for making these books. I couldn't have done it without her, literally.

Thanks again!

Adrianna.

January 2015 Room Tour & New Room?!

I've always been in love with bedrooms. There's no way to say it that isn't ridiculously weird. Whenever I would go to friends houses in elementary and high school, I was always interested to see what their rooms were like. I think you can tell a lot more about someone by the space they spend most of their time in than, for instance, how they present themselves at school.
I was always fascinated by teenagers bedrooms in tv shows... All the posters and decor that just didn't translate into the room I had. I wasn't allowed to hang posters except for the kitten one I got from the book fair in grade three. My mom is a chronic redecorater. When we were growing up, a room got redone at least once a year. Usually with a theme.

My two brothers and I shuffled rooms around a few times.

I started with the biggest room. I think it was just a plain white room with mother goose wallpaper. When my brother was born we each got room makeovers, his being Winnie the Pooh themed and mine Minnie Mouse. I still have that bedspread in my bunk in our trailer. Here are a couple screen captures from a home video circa 1995.







When my second brother was born I was evicted so they could share the bigger room which was, as well as the majority of our childhood, dinosaur themed. I was about eight at this point and very fittingly had an obnoxiously girly flower room.

At the tail end of my time in that room my brothers and I filmed a house tour. Yes, a house tour in 2002 (maybe 2003?) before YouTube even existed. (What an obnoxious hipster I am). I filmed it with my dad's video camera, I had my own cassette tape for all the plays we made and filmed, while my middle brother (who is now 21) hosted the tour. Our quirk was that in every room my youngest brother would be "a statue" in some kind of pose that worked with the room, it was the best way to involve the baby of the family... who is now eighteen! You can view my room's segment of the tour in the following video:

In grade seven I was moved downstairs into what was once my moms craft room so the boys could have their own spaces. My youngest brother kept the dinosaur room and theme while the other one who was (unhealthily) obsessed with bows and arrows and fashioning them out of whatever possible got a Native American themed room. Now I don't know if this is politically correct but a teepee canopy and wall art that I got off of a Magic School Bus art program was pretty cool. This was the start of my moody I don't care about anything phase so I kept the decor my mom already had going in her craft room and stuck with the animal print.  But, as this was the peak of my sarcastic, moody, writing everything all the time phase: I actually wrote a room tour. Yup. That actually happened. It's from 2005 (or at least thats what Google days is when Incomplete from the Backstreet Boys came out). So, I'm just going to warn everyone: I was quite obnoxious.

            How many times can one song play in a day? That new Backstreet Boy song is driving me crazy; frankly…. The song itself is a bit Incomplete. Finally it ended, jeez took long enough. Now another weird song is on about some guy who heard some gossip about his ex who some lady sent out to her boyfriend of sixteen years. Seriously the singers of our time are seriously low on ideas.
 There’s nothing like sitting down to my computer at 10:17 at night writing some pointless thing that will just be sitting in some folder within a folder within a folder in my computer for the next two years until I decided to delete it. I’ve been listening to the same radio station for the past seven years and sometimes I wonder why. My room is a tannish color and an animal print border going all the way around with a black bookshelf, bedspread, beanbag chair, and calculator; it’s animal print… the room… not the calculator.

(continued)

1. I'm very sorry that you had to read that. 2. I'm very impressed if you read all that and do not blame you if you couldn't. 3. Again, so very sorry.

This was in between my two picture taking phases: post film and pre digital so I don't have many pictures unless you count weird webcam selfies. I apologize for the poor quality but these are screen captures from one of our plays: a Titanic remake. Also, the girl in the picture isn't a family member so her face has been blurred for privacy :)
What the heck was that at the end? WELL to go completely full circle I am officially moving into my mom's craft room. Now instead of getting down-graded to a craft room closet in the basement I am lucky enough to get one of the biggest rooms in our house. With my brother moved out my mom wanted to shuffle things around and down-size her craft room as she doesn't use a lot of the stuff and therefore the space.





You can kind of see some carry over between the rooms now!
Then, when I was in grade nine we moved to a new house. I was turning sixteen and had been given the okay to do whatever I wanted with my space, something that was not allowed in the old house unless it was attached with sticky tack. I could post about 1000 pictures of the different variations of my lime green bedroom but in 2011 I filmed a room tour. I did this video for a tumblr video challenge and the post can be found HERE :)

In early 2013 I decided I needed a change and wanted to purge my life (and therefore my room) of people that weren't in it anymore so I took down most of my pictures. I started envisioning completely changing my room, and took a shot in the dark and asked my youngest brother to switch rooms with him. I ended up giving him money to seal the deal haha but in April 2013 I was completely settled in my new room. Being in that room started to bring new things, including my new YouTube channel and doing a lot of social media. The following video is my new room tour that I filmed today!

So stay turned for ANOTHER room tour! ;) I am really excited about the opportunity to have a completely new space for a completely new year! My biggest goal is to get organized and accomplish as many of my goals (no matter how small) and I'm looking forward to have such an amazing area to do everything! Thanks so much for reading this super long post and I hope you've enjoyed the ride of my bedrooms through the years!
Adrianna.