Hi everyone! It's day three of Blog-tember and we're still going strong! Given, all my posts have been late at night and I am in one of the last time zones so you might be seeing this on day four but regardless, thanks so much to everyone who has stopped by! Thursday, September 3rd, 2015: Create a collage or inspiration/ mood board that describes your blog. One of my favourite aesthetics lately has been simple: white, gray, and black with maybe some gold accents. You can see this from the desktop version of this blog, my tumblr, and even my bedroom. So, when I started compiling pictures and inspiration for my mood board I tried really hard to go with that... but it was what I find visually appealing and not so much an accurate representation of my blog or the things you'll see here. I am a creative person and while I love simple, clean looking canvases... that is just incomplete until I've attacked it with paint, crayons, scrapbook paper, quotes, or anything that helps it look... me-esque.
So this is my mood board. All the images are from my Instagram and of course the ol' Wreck This Journal is featured pretty heavily but you can also see:
-Me (hello!).
-Evidence of me doing Colour Runs (I've done four and definitely recommend giving it a try!).
-A green tea frappucino aka my greatest weakness. All I do is walk into my Starbucks and they don't even ask for my order anymore.
-The storefront of a yet to be opened Kate Spade store. I can't get enough, even though my wallet disagrees. My Kate Spade wallet.
My biggest addiction: scrapbook paper.
-Additions to one of my weird collections: this one is paint chips.
-One of my favourite prints from A Beautiful Mess with a quote that I consider to be my mantra!
This was my first try making a mood board and I'm excited to try it again! :) Thanks for reading this post and I hope you have a great day! The picture below will lead you to the main page for Blog-tember so you can check out the rest of the prompts and see everyone else's posts each day!
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.
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
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.
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.
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!
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!
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!
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!
