Journal Jar...

In January, I started two year-long scrappy projects that were offered over at scrapbookgraphics.com: Art Journal Caravan (AJC) and Journal 365. I'll talk more about the Art Journal Caravan when I post some of my pages from that project... maybe next week. It's a very cool endeavor and I'm really stretching myself on that journey...if you want to read more about it now, you can get info here and here. What I want to talk about today is the Journal 365 Project. This is a hybrid project kit that includes sheets of journaling prompts and some extra things to help you create a journaling jar. You pull a prompt from the jar each day, attach it to a page in your journal book and start writing. And I saw an all digital example here where the response to the journal prompt was being documented on their blog each day. But for me, I wanted to have an actual jar and journal book... so here's what I made.

I collect journaling books, I don’t often write in them, but that doesn’t stop me from buying them. So, it’s nice to think about putting one to good use. I went to my large hat box that stores all of my unused journals and a picked out a cute little floral pattern one that I actually made from a kit I got PaperSource.

For my jar, I recycled a candle jar. I embellished it to match my journal by adding some flowers and ribbon to the lid and lining the inside of the glass container with a patterned adhesive backed transparency. I custom made the pattern for the transparency by modifying a digital sheet of patterned paper that comes in Rosey Posey’s Somedays Kit. I wanted something that had a pattern to it, but also had a lot of clear areas so you could see inside the jar. The top image below shows the original paper and the one below that is what it looked like after I modified it a bit. All of the white areas will be clear on the transparency.

So, at this point I have a journal and a jar, I’m well on my way with this project :) Since my journal book is small, I printed the journaling strips a little smaller than they are provided in the kit. I loaded four of the provided journaling sheets onto one letter sized sheet for printing. So, I guess that makes them about half of their original size. I trimmed them out and placed them in the jar and honestly…it just didn’t do it for me. I wanted them to look more like little candies or something yummy like that. So I decided to roll them…yes…roll them. I’m not going to lie, about a quarter of the way through the rolling, it wasn’t fun anymore. But in the end, I’m loving the little rolls and am really happy with the way it turned out.

So, there it is, I have my Journal 365 Project ready to go. I hope you all join in on some of these year-long projects with me. And if you decide on Journal 365 and decide to roll…invite some friends over to help!

Thanks for stopping by today! Patty