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

 

 

I like the idea of travel

This is the page I was talking about. It's made from a couple of photos from an Anthropologie catalog. The spread is from 2005. Text on the left reads: 

I like the idea of travel.

Road Trip

No particular destination in mind.
Finding out what makes this place
Different from all others.
Unique, worthy of the time.
Scenic wonders,
Yes - written large on the land,
But also the marks made by man,
Quirky, individual from place to place,
From ridiculous to sublime.
I want to see.

We actually got to take a road trip across Arkansas, Kentucky and Tennessee a couple of months later. I'm ready for another road trip, maybe this summer.

In the center top the text reads:

I prefer two-lane roads. Away from the interstate, slower, calmer - more to experience along the way.

On our trip we mostly took the two lane roads. They are lined with homes and farms. I love traveling this way when you don't really have anywhere you need to be.

Text where the model was cut out from the door reads:

Open your eyes to new sights,

 and your ears to new sounds, 

and your mind to new thoughts, 

and your heart to new people, 

and your wallet to new needs. 

There is enough of you to spread around, 

some to each sight, sound, thought, person and need.

The text is written really small in silver metalic gel pen and you can't read it until you hold it just right in the light. Then it's perfectly legible. 

I thought of this spread for the current Street Team Crusade, but it's also perfect, I think, for #28 Portion Control.

What if?

I could post a page a day for a long while just catching up on my journal pages. Maybe I will. I was embarassed, just now, to see that I've only made two posts this year. Both of those were this week. Michelle's latest Street Team Crusade has got me motivated to post. I just love adding text to journal pages. In fact my first forays into paper arts were altered books. I loved the fact that the books already had text on them. 

Anyway, I wanted to post the above page. I'd had the black birds quilt image laying around and wanted to get it into my journal before I lost it. The page was done last Labor Day. I love the way the writing turned out mimicking the stripes on the quilt. It's fun to go back and read too, now that it's close to the end of the school year.

The next couple of pages are more recent. I like the way the text flows on the one above. I did all three spreads in one marathon session, pushing myself to do just one more page.



The bit of text inside the photo of someone's garden journal was a bit of a mistake, brought on no doubt by my decision to journal quickly without thinking too much. I had the photo laying on my abismally messy worktable. In the rush to add images to the page, I cut the flowers from the back of it. When I turned it over to add glue, I realized what I had done. I flinched a bit and glued it down, and then grabbed what was left of the photo and glued it down too. I love the way the two pieces look together. They remind me of two ladies facing each other. I've used the technique of writing inside a photo where someone's body has been cut out on other journal pages. I'm not a big fan of gluing photos of just anybody in my journal. The person's face has to appeal to me. If it doesn't I cut the person out of the photo and use the spot to journal in. I'll try to look up one of my favorites and repost it.

When I first started adding visual things to my journal, I just changed the style of my writing. Page after page of the same looking text was starting to bore me. I love to write in different pens and  different directions when I change direction in my thoughts. I'm truly not a lineal thinker. My thoughts bounce all over the place. This style of recording them suits me.

Red shoes in my dreams

Michelle asked if the red shoes on my journal page were my shoes. They aren't. It's a great photo I cut out from a magazine.

In fact, I can only remember owning one pair of red shoes in my entire life. They were a damaged pair of Soft Spots that I got at a salvage store for a dollar. I wore them in the garden and loved them, both for their comfort and their color. I never had red shoes as a kid either. In the fifties and sixties redheads didn't wear red... at least not in my family. I wear lots of tomato red now and love it.

I used the other half of the magazine photo in this spread. I really need to be on the look out for another pair of red shoes.

My journals have words

I have been a bad blogger. I admit it. I finally have started back working in my journal and I've been walking on the treadmill, so I do have some redeeming qualities. 

I've been having fun with befunky.com. I love this shot of my granddaughter. It inspired the whole page. Fun, fun.  

My reason for finally hitting the blog this button though was the Street Team Cat Got Your Tongue crusade #30. My journal pages have words. Almost all of them. So much so that when I was working on a page for Crusade #29, which I never got around to posting, I wrote, "If I had anything to say I would put it here."

It may be because I started out as a text only journaler. For me it's about recording the moment and that just calls for words. It would be interesting to go back and see how many of the many journal pages I've done haven't had any words. Off hand I can just think of one spread. My.

If you are interested in what I've been up to in the months since I've posted, check out my flickr site.