Traveling makes taking a journal a bit harder. You don’t want to take a wire-bound journal in your bag, because the wires will get crushed. A hard-bound book takes up a lot of space. So I’ve been experimenting with loose-leaf journal pages.
Take a few loose-leaf pages on a trip, fill them up, bind them in some way in the future. With a date on them, you won’t lose the order, if that’s important.
Most recently, I’ve used shipping tags. They are just under 5 inches x 3 inches, so they are great for one-sentence journaling, capturing a quick thoughts and impressions.
After I filled up some manila tags, I decided to color some of them. What a fun idea! Using only a brayer and a credit card to apply paint, I colored a dozen or so tags. Once they were dry, I put a bolt and wing nut through the hole to bind them.
The poem fragment by Mary Oliver caught my attention, so I copied it down. Using a dark Sharpie on the light part and a white pen on the dark, the quote fills the page in an interesting way. The circles (done with the corner of a credit card) look like portholes. It says “Now, of all voyagers remember, who among them did not board ship with grief among their maps? ”
Practical, easy to take along, you can always keep the next blank one on top to work on.
The only thing that made this project hard is that the fluorescent bulbs we all have to use make the colors look harsher and more gray than they are. There is a good amount of gold in the pages, and it doesn’t show. That will teach me to photograph the blog images late at night.
––Quinn McDonald thinks there are no limits to what constitutes a journal.
QuinnCreative 