Cover This Page With White Things

If you follow me on Instagram you would have seen this picture (although with a hardcore filter over top haha) three weeks ago. This is another Wreck This Journal page that you can see me "wrecking" in the first episode of my Wreck This Journal YouTube series, and you can watch that quick video HERE if you wish. 

The sand and shells on this page are from the beach in Cuba (insert stereotypical "take me back" throwback Thursday Instagram picture) in April of this year. Yes, April. The sand and shells have been sitting in a Ziploc bag on my desk for almost seven months. That, my friends, is procrastination at its finest. Even worse, ninety percent of my motivation for this page was to get the bag off my desk because it wasn't pretty and I would forget about it if I put it anywhere else. Yeah, I know.

So first, I covered the page in a mix of Mod Podge and regular school glue. Mostly because I'm running out of Mod Podge. Mostly because I spilled it. Moving on.

I was worried about how the sand would cover and if it would congeal to the glue and harden in a less attractive greyish blob. For my friend's birthday in July I made her birthday card with some of this sand and it was a nightmare to work with. If you are planning to deal with fine, white sand and glue I recommend covering the entire space you want covered in sand with the glue, putting it on a surface like a drop sheet or a piece of cardboard and dumping all the sand on top so it is completely covered in a thick later. After it dries, dump off the access and "spot treat" any areas that didn't get properly covered. It was easier with this page as it didn't require precise angles and corners and I was covering the majority of it anyway with the shells.

Next, the shells. I started with just using school glue but that was not happening so I pulled out the ol' glue gun. I like glue guns because they are quick and effective but because of them I have very little feeling in the pads of my fingers after burning myself and ripping layers of skin and glue off. Nice, huh?

My least favourite thing about glue guns are the glue threads. You can't see them too much on the picture but they were everywhere. It was like a hairy little animal. I pulled most of them off but they in turn removed patches of sand and even some of the shells. The shells were hard to attach as it had to be a ring of hot glue around the very thin curvature of each shell. I started having the shells very close together but gradually fading down into a shoreline ombre effect. 

My journal now officially doesn't close because of this page and that is an important milestone of Wreck This Journaling. 

I take this way too seriously. 

Thanks so much for reading! If you would like more information about my previous journal, this current one or WTJ in general, please check out my tumblr Journal page, which is a super cool hub of WTJ information. 

Thanks again!

Adrianna.

Crack The Spine // Leave This Page Blank on Purpose

For anyone who has done a Wreck This Journal, the page that asks you to crack the spine of the book creates the first real obstacle. It goes against every instinct of a book lover to purposely bend the spine of the book, but at the same time it's the first page you are presented with after the table of contents and "page numbering" page. It attempts to kill the perfectionist in you right away by this simple but meaningful task.

That being said, cracking the spine is actually the first thing I did in this journal. I actually did in in April and it is part of Episode 1 of my WTJ Series on YouTube.


The page included on the same DPS (double page spread... Yearbook lingo holla) instructs the wrecker to leave that page blank on purpose. This is reminiscent from a page that used to be included in all our provincial exams that said "THIS PAGE IS INTENTIONALLY  BLANK" which made us laugh at the black text on the "blank" page. Anyway, the challenge there is do you actually leave it blank or do something with some degree of devil-may-care-ness? If you scroll through the Wreck This Journal tag on tumblr its filled with various "no" memes plastered on this page. In my completed journal I decided to change it up and placed a sticker that said "beautiful" over blank, and left that page... well, beautiful.

This time around I went a similar route but made both pages go together. One of the movies we watched way too often as kids was the animated movie Babes in Toyland. The villain is Barnaby, who, like most villains in Christmas movies, wants to stop Christmas. Although, unlike the Grinch he is a bit more determined and enlists the goblins (who are absolutely terrifying if you go back and watch) to help. Again on the same track as animated villains, Barnaby also has an epic villain theme song. And of course, it's catchy as heck. You can check it out here!

So after watching that little gem, you'll get my inspiration for this page! Now my journal is as crooked as Barnaby, and I know I didn't follow the instruction to leave that page blank... but I guess maybe I'm morally askew too!

Thanks for reading!
Adrianna.

Trace Your Toes

Wow... summer's over! That went by way too fast. I started this page at the beginning of August and to make things more interesting,  I had a very swollen eye.

Turns out it wasn't an unfortunate bug bite but a super nasty infection called orbital cellulitis. I was on super hard core antibiotics and apparently if they didn't kick in when they did I would be in the hospital right now... or worse.

So enough of that! Luckily they definitely did work so I was able to finish this page. I decided to make the toe shapes look like clouds and after narrowing down several quotes/ song lyrics I went with this line from Taylor Swift's Dear John. 

I hope you enjoy the process I went through for this page!

Adrianna.

Smush Something Colourful Onto This Page

A lot of people wonder why I'm doing another Wreck This Journal (you can see my completed one HERE), especially my friends and family whom I begged for fruit stickers and watched me with pure judgement as I carried around the book doing things that made them question my sanity. As my first WTJ was from early 2012, it is actually different from the ones currently available: the extended edition. This means there are a dozen or so pages that weren't in the original book. One of the challenges for me is going to be doing the original pages a second time without copying the things I did in my first journal.

However, the new "extended" pages are going to be fun because it's brand new and something I didn't have to ponder over the last time around.

This page asks the reader to "smush something colourful onto this page" and some of my ideas were berries or paint. But then when I was packing my stuff to do Color Me Rad the other day, I remembered this page.

Color Me Rad is a Color Run, something that's become popular in the last couple years. In essence you run a 5k route and along the way people throw coloured cornstarch at you and you end up covered from head to toe (including some very awkward places) in a giant rainbow and get stared at like you're personally carrying the plague to spread upon humanity when you walk into Starbucks. 

I've now done three colour runs, The Colour Run (the original) in September 2013, Color Me Rad in May of this year and now a second Color Me Rad. I'm also doing another The Colour Run this September. There is also "Run or Dye" but I believe the date was the same as The Colour Run this year, and I got a discount on the latter from being a "VIP" who ran before. Essentially they're all the same.

For the May 2014 Color Me Rad my friend Erica and I made a vlog of it, which you can watch below.

This time around I decided it would be clever if I pinned the WTJ page to my shirt with my race number and ran through the route and smushing extra colour onto the paper. Unique and a pretty cool idea, I thought!

This is after running the actual course, but what may be deceiving is that you get the majority of the colour from the "after party" where there are colour tosses. You can see that in both the vlog above and quickly in THIS Instagram post. 

On the finished page I pasted some "colour bomb" packaging that I collected off the field afterwards (darn litterers). The colour bombs contain the coloured cornstarch that people throw in the air during the after party.  

Thanks to Erica for running with me and helping me smush colour, and to you for reading this post!

(and yes, that is a fanny pack!)

Adrianna. 

What Makes You Canadian?

Today in my province is BC Day, a statutory holiday for all of British Columbia! To celebrate I did a very patriotic tag video! Check out the video below to hear about my igloo, why Timmies staff writes ST DD on the top of my cup and what animals I see strolling around my town. If you are Canadian, I think this is an awesome tag to do for your YouTube channel or maybe just even in text form for a blog! Enjoy!

The original video was done by Tanya Just Talks and you can find that HERE :)

1. What do you order at Tim Hortons? 
2. Most annoying Canadian stereotype?
3. How many provinces have you been to?
4. Have you ever seen an igloo?
5. How many words do you say that people think you say differently?
6. Favourite YTV show?
7. One thing you wish you could buy in Canada but can't?
8. Have you ever seen a moose, deer or any type of wildlife?
9. Favourite winter product?
10. Favourite Canadian celebrity?
11. Why are you proud to be Canadian?

Adrianna.

Who I Needed

[The quote poster thingy in the picture was made with scrapbook paper, a dollar store canvas and my Silhouette Cameo. The lace vase is from Ikea (actually my church... my mom said I could have it, whoops).]

If you follow me on any social media you'll know I'm obsessed with quotes. I actually made a big long post on this blog that you can find HERE regarding my long-term love of quotes :) 

The way I've discovered quotes has definitely changed throughout the years as social media and the internet in general have grown. If you had told me I would soon be finding quotes that were screenshots of tweets on tumblr I (and anyone else) probably would have thought you were bonkers. Yes, bonkers. 

Yet here we are.

I forget what tumblr blog I found it on but it was in my drafts for about a month. It's one of those quotes that make you think. And it just sounds cool. 

Most of the quotes I collected when I was in elementary and high school were copied and pasted just for that reason, they sounded cool. I never really cared if they applied to me or my life but just enjoyed the way those words were strung together. And if they rhymed, even better.

But post-secondary has ruined me and now I overthink everything.

Who did I need when I was young?

I am not going to lie, I had a pretty great childhood. My family went on amazing vacations, I have a great relationship with my parents who have been married for twenty-five years and I never had to share a bedroom. 

But the whole friend thing was my problem. 

 All my life I was the "mother hen". Maybe it's from being the oldest child or always being a girl that played with dolls- from Barbies to Cabbage Patch and having a beyond creepy porcelain doll collection. When I started school I was a chronic befriender of the weird kids. I liked being nurturing and helping people and, well, being someone's only friend. 

I can trace it through all of my school years. I would make a friend, we'd get really close and then for some reason we couldn't be friends anymore (moving/ changing schools/ her parents fearing I was going to make their daughter into a lesbian... not making that one up, unfortunately). 

I was the weird girl. I always was. I liked Digimon and wore overalls and cornrows and wrote stories for fun.  I didn't listen to the popular music, didn't get clothes from the cool stores and apparently that doesn't get you friends. 

In grade five I made two friends (twins) that I decided were the real deal. We did everything together and even when they moved three hours away we stayed close. We're still best friends after knowing each other for sixteen years and this fall I am a bridesmaid in one's wedding. They were weird too. We played real life Neopets on the playground at recess and researched Ancient Rome for fun. Ten years after we met one of their boyfriends gave me two-hundred Digimon cards because he was told if I didn't like him, he would be single again. 

Theres nothing like meeting people that know you're weird and different and encourage it.

Once I started high school I stopped hiding the things I liked and actively displayed Disney and Digimon and everything else on my binders and in my locker. I figured if people thought that was weird, I didn't need to be their friend.

Acceptance comes in many shades and maybe my flavour seems very first-world-problem to you when there's so much other hate and exclusion based on sex, race, religion, sexual orientation, class and so forth but I figure when people have been told they're not good enough, it doesn't matter why. I know I am a white, middle class, CIS female and so I know I have not faced challenges that many people have and I don't pretend to have done so, but I try to be as accepting of people no matter what may make them different from me.  

It's okay if you like things or are things that everyone else thinks are not normal. If someone is going to give you a hard time for being different, they lost the opportunity to have a freaking awesome lifelong friend.

I wish someone had told me that when I was ten. 

Adrianna.

Close The Journal. Write/ Scribble Something On The Edges.

I'm pretty sure it's a requirement of an English-speaking human being to love Dr. Seuss. I even had a VHS of The ABC's of Dr. Seuss and I can still hear the narrator in my head: "Big A... Little A... What begins with A?" I honestly can't tell you why I watched that as many times as I did. 

For my graduation gift from my godmother I recieved a hardcover copy of "Oh, The Places You'll Go!". As did my boyfriend from his, and pretty much everyone who has graduated ever. It is a pretty perfect gift for graduation. 

It's filled with inspiring goodies and beyond perfect quotes. I think one day I'll have to go to Value Village and see if I can find an old copy and use it for an art project, but in the meantime I did a page of my Wreck This Journal inspired by it.

Something I found out (the hard way) from my first WTJ (which you can find HERE) is to do the page where you have to write on the edges of the book first. Or close to first. I did it early on but when I wrote along the edges the sharpie bled through the pages that were done (and a bit thicker) and were visible on lots of the pages. Now, it is a WRECK This Journal so it's not the biggest deal but I have major control issues. 

So on the edges of this journal I wrote part of Dr. Seuss' book, which you can see in the title picture. One of my favourite lines in the book is "Kid, you'll move mountains!" so both the writing on the edges and the quote shown on the actual page connects to that line.

On the left side of the page(s?) (I'm so tempted to call it a DPS... throwback to my yearbook days!) I just did a quick watercolour drawing of some mountains. Back in the day every picture I ever drew had to have a sun (with sunglasses, of course) in the corner and some stellar mountain ranges, so I was well practiced for this day. The watercolour set I got was from a dollar store, so hurray for being thrifty! 

On the right side page I made the cover of the book that I guess is supposed to be the journal into a quick version of Oh! The Places You'll Go. Both the lettering of the line on the left and the title/ author's name were done with leftovers from my Martha Stewart paper punch that I've kept from previous projects. I love how the mismatched rainbow letters give it a super Dr. Seuss-y look. If you'd like to check out those paper punches (one of my favourite crafting purchases ever!) I found them super cheap on Amazon and made a shopping "playlist" of all the things I used on this page of my Wreck This Journal! You can find it HERE :)

Also on the right side you can kind of see the blue-green writing that goes behind the book. This is one of my favourite techniques that I've used in art projects for almost ten years... and it's not going to be retired any time soon. On this one it's about the first half of all the text in Oh! The Places You'll Go. I think it kinda looks like grass which goes with the picture on the other side. Or something...

You can watch the entire process of me "wrecking" this page in the following video!

Thanks for reading!

Adrianna.