The Really Real Travelling Journal

A while back Yetzirah invited me to take part in this project, which is a blank journal which has been travelling around DearDiary members, with each adding a couple of pages (kind of like the blank journal bookrings that are common in Bookcrossing). On Thursday it arrived, and I was stunned by the creativity of everyone’s entries (and a bit worried – I didn’t know if I could live up to that standard!).

I knew one thing I wanted to include on my pages was some embroidery, so Thursday night was spent cross-stitching a little patchwork cat that had caught my eye in when I was looking through a craft magazine the other day. Then yesterday I started planning my pages. I had so many different ideas, I was pulling out bits and pieces from all over the house until I’m sure I had enough to fill the entire book on my own, but still no real idea what I wanted to do with the two pages I’d been allocated.

Then I came across something we’d been given at the Dunedin convention: a box of little cards with quotations on them. My box had quotations on the theme of joy, and I decided to make the theme of my page things that give me joy – cats, cross-stitch, Bookcrossing, MrPloppy, travel, learning… So I collected together elements representing each of those things, and tried to lay them out on the page, but I couldn’t get them to fit together properly. Then I realised why – because I’d been trying to compartmentalise them too much. My life is utterly chaotic (in a (mostly) good way!), with different aspects totally overlapping, so its only natural that the pages representing my life were trying to do the same. So I abandoned my tidy design and just went with putting things wherever they felt like going, and ended up with a much more interesting page. It’s not as artistic as the other contributions, but it’s definitely me 🙂

And best of all, Yetzirah gave me permission to register the RRTJ on Bookcrossing, so Bookcrossing, which is such a big part of my life (does that sound sad or what?), is a part of the whole journal! 🙂 I’ve blurred out the BCID on those pictures above, but if any previous contributors to the RRTJ want to make a journal entry on Bookcrossing to record their involvement in the project, leave me a comment and I’ll give you the BCID number.

So now all I’ve got to do is tidy up the mess I made. I’ve always said you can tell how much fun you’re having with a craft project by how far the mess spreads, and I had *lots* of fun doing this one!

(Oh, and apologies to Yetzirah – I kind of ignored your rules about not putting bulky things on the pages. I was being really good, and then I came across some little plastic cat-themed scrapbooky things (technical term :-)) that someone sent me ages ago that were just crying out to be included and kind of accidentally on purpose snuck their way onto the pages… They’re not *that* bulky, but my pages definitely aren’t as flat as everyone else’s. Sorry!)