Filling my journal – and word stencils

16/11/2020 by UKMA 4 Comments

The first, not very good journal I made from Amazon packaging is one large tri-fold page from being finished. I am holding out for that much mentioned Good As Hell page! It may take till January 21st but I will make it one day LOL! Here is my last page, but one:

I haven’t completed any journaling on it, and am on the fence as to whether or not I will. I’ve never used such thick. dimensional letters (chipboard, old scrapping supplies, and not very nice ones at that) and I wish I had split the chipboard and made it thinner by doing so. This journal was always meant to be a bit experimental, not really filled with deep thoughts or intended to have strong emotions poured into it. It was a way to loosen up and try things out, after years of doing nothing artsy fartsy at all. So doing this page and thinking Next time I will thin those letters... really is what it was all about. It’s about learning what I am good at at what I am NOT good at.

What I know I am good at is making things for my journals that are unique to me. Like the word stencil in the background. Last month when cleaning up I found a stash of transparency sheets. They make good word stencils. I had done a couple of pages of typically British expressions, many that totally made me go Huh? the first time I heard them, and have been considering how best to use them for a while. The title came first, from the classic SciFi novel, then the rest flowed from that. Here are the two sheets of words and phrases:

A few things you can’t see, like upper case letters in the event I want to capitalize a word, and ! and ? so things like Alright become, as they should be, Alright?

So, back to the journal….while there are a handful of pages I really like a lot, like these two:

it also has some with techniques I tried that I am pretty sure I won’t do a lot more of cause I am NOT good at them. I don’t think magazine collage (as much as I love it when I see it done by, say Teesha Moore) is ever something I will do a lot of, for example. And the overly stylish, cohesive and pretty pages that people like Kate Crane seem to be able to crank out at will are unlikely to ever come naturally to me. If a page ends up being pretty, it is more often by mistake and not by design! Sometimes things look…forced. Like I am trying too hard to achieve a style that is not natural for me. So I’ll just carry on. Let my stress levels melt away for the few hours I am playing and hopefully the pages will please me, and if they don’t, I don’t have to share them, do I?

I’ll sign off with another phrase that always makes me smile:

Cheers, Big Ears!