How I create my friendship journal

Hi everyone!

First of all, you might be wondering what I mean by a Friendship Journal and I'm thrilled to tell you about it.  :-) Christine Hiester shared a video on her YouTube channel last year where she talked about the journals that she and Heather Mattern had started creating and sending to each other.  I absolutely loved this idea and when an on-line, art acquaintance of mine reached out to me asking if I would like to share friendship journals with each other I was so thrilled and honored to be asked!  We only knew each other from Instagram and Facebook posts but there was definitely a friendship building between us and by sharing these journals with each other, our friendship is growing each day.  Art has brought us together....our miles apart doesn't matter, our age difference doesn't matter (I'm sure it's more than I want to believe! lol), none of it matters....just growing as friends does and sharing our lives with each other through our art.

You can watch me create the next friendship journal that I am going to start working in here.

You can find Christine's video about her friendship journal here and you can read her Journey to  True Friendship series here.

And Heather's video about her journal here. 

There aren't any rules to how you do your friendship journal.  We are both so busy that we work on ours and then mail it off when it's done, but you could easily set a goal to send yours to your friend at the end of each month, or every other month, whatever works best for you.  Since it's easier for me to express my feelings in a visual form through collage I tend to lean more on those types of pages in my journal so it's all collage and found word sentences.  If I do have more to say, I like to type it up and then either slip it in a pocket of the journal or adhere it to one of the pages. 

The best part of this for me is that I can work on it bit by bit and sometimes it almost feels like a diary.  I love having this safe place to share my feelings and know that I have a dear friend there to listen to me....even though we live so far away from each other. 

I like to use 9"x12" manilla envelopes for the cover of my journal.  Then, I fill the inside with random pieces of paper and scrapbook paper that I have collected just like a junk journal.  Just whatever I have on hand in my stash can make it's way into my journal like: calendar pages, small paper sacks, envelopes, etc.  Since I focus on collage work, I try to make sure that I am using thicker papers so that I can collage on their easily.  Thin paper is a lot harder to do collage work on.  I also add pieces of mixed-media paper torn from journals.

I hope that you enjoyed this and that it inspires you to reach out to someone and ask them if they would like to start sharing a friendship journal with you.  It's such a wonderful way to learn about someone, build new friendships and strengthen old ones, get your art on and creatively share your life with someone who wants to listen.

Thanks so much for stopping by and take care,

Dianne

Heart Journaling with Found Word - Mind Map

Hi everyone,

Today I worked on a mind map that was part of the January Right Brain Planner.  Since using found word is such a comfortable way for me to journal, I decided to incorporate it into my mind map.  For me, this version is a visual starting point to help get me motivated to start working on the things that I wrote out in the traditional style of mind map that I did before starting these pages.  I plan on using those ideas that were generate there on future pages in my journal.  

You can watch me create these pages on my YouTube channel.  I talk about my process as I'm working on these pages and also more about what these pages mean to me.  It is a real-time video and I hope that you enjoy it. :-)

In the video I talk about Teresa Robinson's Right Brain Planner and how she has Gluebooking Saturday where she talks about different aspects of planning and incorporating that creatively into our daily lives as well as several prompts.  The prompts that I talk about in this video can be found here.  The Right Brain Planner pages are available for a very reasonable price and they are all hand drawn and created by Teresa and they includes all sorts of goodies in the downloadable printouts including monthly prompts, quotes, planning pages and oodles of inspiration.  Gluebooking Saturday is open to everyone and I highly recommend you joining in on the fun!  We share photos of our creations on social media with the hashtags: #RBPgluebook and #freewillart. 

If you enjoy gluebooking or are just curious about it, I also highly recommend joining us on the first Saturday of each month on Instagram for the online glue book party hosted by Christine at Bare Branch Blooming. We have so much fun sharing our creations and there are several prompts throughout the evening and giveaways, too.  I look forward to this every month and had to start putting it on my monthly calendar so that I wouldn't forget, because when I did I was heartbroken!

Thanks so much for stopping by and I hope that you are inspired to get creative!
Take care,
Dianne

heart journaling with found word - Transform

Hi everyone!

My son had preschool this morning so I was able to work on a couple of more pages in my journal. One of my YouTube followers asked if I could do some real-time videos and I decided this morning was a great time to do one!  So, I turned the camera on and talked you through my process as I'm working on some found word collage pages that I like to call "heart journaling".  

The monthly word prompt for The Right Brain Planner is TRANSFORM so I created two pages representing what that word means to me.

I hope that you enjoy these pages and if you have time, grab a cup or tea or coffee, sit back and watch the video of me creating these pages that I'm sharing photos of below.  I tried my hardest to keep it under an hour, because I know how precious all of our time is.  

You can watch the video here on my YouTube Channel.

Thanks so much for stopping by and if you have any questions, please ask! :-)

Take care,

Dianne

Heart Journaling with Found Word - Every Day Counts

Hi everyone!

I spent the past couple of days working on the January Word Prompt with The Right Brain Planner.  I love having a word to focus on each month and even though I'm late, and it's almost mid-February....I wanted to do January's prompt.  I love looking up the definition of a word and then also use a thesaurus to find synonyms and antonyms for that word.  It helps me grasp what the word means better, especially when I can associate other words with it that have a similar meaning.

The word for January is EMERGE so I went through my stash of magazine images and clipped words/phrases and created the two pages below.  I love using images to help express the meaning of the word.  

The inside of the tip-in has a space for me to eventually adhere a small piece of lined paper.  I plan on doing a bit of journaling there and then it will be covered up with the beautiful blue water/floral paper.  I am really silly about my handwriting and I don't like it in this journal.  I am surprised that I added it to the page here!  But I really wanted to use the elements from The Right Brain Planner pages and the synonyms for the word Emerge, so I went with it.  So, the rest of my journaling will be covered up so it doesn't bother me, but there for me to see because it's important.  Makes a lot of sense, huh? lol

The gorgeous patterned papers that I used on these pages are printed collage sheet from Tangie Baxter's Art Journal Emporium.  These are my absolute favorite papers to use in this journal!  

You can watch me create these two pages on my YouTube Channel.

Thanks so much for stopping by and I hope that you enjoy seeing me work in this journal!

Take care,
Dianne