I can't believe it's been ten months since I posted any journal pages.  True, I haven't journaled much in that time, but I have done some.  I will attempt to catch up starting today.

Catching Up

I did pretty well with the Art Journal Everyday until school started. I skipped the two weeks we've been in school, but I got back in gear today. We'll see. Here's what I did while I was actually journaling every day and a couple of older ones I had forgotten to photograph. I'm still journaling with limited supplies as I can't get up to my workroom due to the broken bone in my foot. It's been seven weeks, but I'm still in the boot.

Another challenge

I've accepted another challenge having to do with journaling. I think this one will be easier to follow through on. Journaling Everyday is the challenge. You don't need to finish a page a day or anything, just do something in your journal even if it is only 10 minutes worth of something. I signed on for August, but I actually started July 28. I love the spreads that Julie shares where she shows just what she added each day until the spread is done. Maybe I'll try that, too.

Click below for all of Julie's posts on Art Journal Every Day.

List 3/52

June 30 journal page, originally uploaded by Crazyquilter.

This was the hardest list. I pondered it for days and finally just sat down and wrote something.

Things I learned in Mexico

Things I learned in Mexico, originally uploaded by Crazyquilter.

Well, the 52 lists isn't working so well. There were some list prompts that were just hard for me. I did manage to do lists 2 and 3. I need to see what I've missed and work on them.

52 Weeks, 52 Lists

A new challenge is just what I need to get myself journaling. I actually wrote a page recently about doing a 365 with a list a day in my journal. This is more doable. Maybe I'll start slowly with a list a week and nudge myself back into journaling. Maybe...

I used a pre-painted page. Reminder to self, don't use such dark pages to write on. I still need to work on the facing page.

Journal on Black

If there is anything that can make me post a blog entry, it's a GPP Street Team Crusade. The current crusade, No. 34 ~ Come over to the Dark Side, is right down my alley. I love journaling on a black background. I've tried it lots of times in the past. As soon as I read what the new crusade was about, I had to head up to my craft table and get busy.

I recently retired a pair of shoes, and as I was tossing them I happened to get a look at the sole. I'm always on the lookout for a good background stamp, and the price was right. I grabbed a knife and cut the sole off the shoe. It became the rectangles stamp I used on this spread in gesso on the left side of the black and in black ink on the other page. I won't be discarding any more shoes in the future without checking out the soles for possibilities.

Vital Statistics

A couple of weeks ago I decided that I needed to know how many pages I have done in my journal since I started painting the pages with acrylic paint and thus bridging over to being a visual journaler, never to turn back. As I was counting (and perusing) my old journals, volumes 1 to the current volume 9, I also  decided to count the postage stamps and fruit stickers that are a constant add-in for me.  I wound up with 1,385 pages. Part of what got me interested in finishing this task was mentioning that I thought I had only done one spread totally without words. As I was going through I actually found two spreads. The second one only has the date on it. I guess I'm just a wordy kind of girl.

I wish I would get my act together  more often, like I did in March, and make a calendar page at the beginning of the month. I like this style where I can increase or decrease the date block size as needed.  A side benefit of doing calendar pages is that often once I have the journal in my hands to do my little bit of journaling each day, I wind up doing or at least starting a full spread.

We don't have much of the garden in yet, but this evening I hoed all that we have planted. My shoulders are a bit sore. That's last year's collards in the front. There is an advantage to not cleaning the garden up in the fall. Besides the greens we got from these, we also enjoyed the greens from the turnips that came back, and their flowers are making quite a show right now.

In addition to this bed, we have a row of snap peas,  half a row of spinach and a bed with more lettuce, a few broccoli, kale, and one cauliflower plant, also a largish bed of onions from sets.

One Hundred Books

I found this list on the blog of a Spanish teacher and had some fun with it. I thought I would share in case anyone else would like to check it out. I googled, but couldn't track down where it originally came from. A couple of other blogs had it and said it was from The Great Read, but I couldn't find it on their web site. The woman whose blog I found it on had read 52 of the books. Unless I counted wrong, I've read 51. Surprisingly there weren't any that I'd hated, and only one that I never finished. Anyone spot any that you consider must reads?

 

I found Middlemarch on LibriVox and am planning to download it. I have a 45 minute drive to work and I love listening to books while I'm driving.

 

I've been reading more lately and am looking for some books to read this summer.

 

***********************

Original blogger's intro, my marks.

 

This was a list of the top 100 selling books published by (some publishing house). The original post said that the average American adult had not read 10 of these books.

 

1) Look at the list and put one * by those you have read.
2) Put a % by those you intend to read.
3) Put two ** by the books you LOVE.
4) Put # by the books you HATE.
5) Post.

 

*1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
**2 The Lord of the Rings - J.R.R. Tolkien
*3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë
**4 Harry Potter series - J.K. Rowling
*5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
**6 The Bible (the whole thing, all 63 books)
*7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
**8 1984 - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
*11 Little Women - Louisa May Alcott
*12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
*13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (most but not all)
*15 Rebecca - Daphne du Maurier
**16 The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
*18 Catcher in the Rye - J.D. Salinger
*19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
%20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
*21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
*22 The Great Gatsby - F. Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
*25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
*28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
*29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
*30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
*31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
*33 Chronicles of Narnia- C.S. Lewis
*34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
*36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - C.S. Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini (I started, but never finished this one.)
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis de Bernières
*39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
**40 Winnie the Pooh - A.A. Milne
**41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
%43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
**46 Anne of Green Gables - L.M. Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
*48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
*49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
*52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
*54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
*57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens (listened to this one)
**58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
*61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
*62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
*65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
*68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
*71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
**73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
*76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Émile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - A.S. Byatt
*81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
**87 Charlotte’s Web - E.B. White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
*89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (all of them)
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
*91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
**94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
*97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
*98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
*99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo