Creative Practices that keep on giving

At the beginning of November I drove to California for a beloved cousin’s wedding—he got married surrounded by friends, family, and beautiful big redwood trees—and I took the wedding as an excuse to fill up with awe in the wilds of Northern CA and Southern OR.

We got to be hobbits one night

Besides seeing redwood trees and the ocean, I stayed in a Hobbit House Air B&B, A treehouse, A caboose, a log cabin, and an airstream trailer. What a fun adventure!

This treehouse is called the “Majestree”

My younger son (who was with me for the whole trip) and I made a journal as we went, we painted and drew everyday, and we even printed out pics for our book using a Selphy portable printer every night.

Pages from our journal

Journaling is my longest standing and most consistently active creative practice—I love how playful I can be in my journals, how they help me remember things, how the very act of journaling makes me somehow seek out doing things that are interesting and worth writing down, and how they often make me feel like I experience the joy of adventure twice (once while living it, and once while recording it). I realized lately the obvious—that journals are kind of the glue that holds all my other creative work together. And my travel journals are about my favorite.

While we made the pages as we went, I finished the cover of this book over Thanksgiving weekend. In my family, we call the day after Thanksgiving Craft Friday—we spend the day (and then the entire weekend) making crafts and laughing and eating lots of good food.

Our finished travel journal

So this past weekend I not only finished the travel journal I’d started earlier in the month, I actually made several handmade books including a happy fat new regular journal with colorful pages.

My new journal, ready to start filling!

And so here I am. With one journal just finished (actually several because this was just a travel journal, my regular journal is just about finished too), and a new one sitting, with lots of big empty pages waiting to be filled.

And I suppose here is where I hopefully can be helpful to anyone else who journals who stumbles across this. When I’ve talked journaling with people, I notice a lot of people are intimidated—what if they mess up a nice journal, what if they don’t have anything interesting to say, what if they draw something and it’s ugly.

And I guess my response is who cares? I mean, yes, what if? What if I do any or all of those things? Who cares? What if I do any or all of those things but in the meanwhile I have jumped in and started playing with my creativity. What a delight!

A journal is one of the easiest places to lower the stakes with my creative work. Because it’s just for me. A journal is a place where I can set aside any worries that anything is perfect and instead just play. Like a kid just having fun and not worrying about the outcome. It’s a yes space. Where anything goes. And because anything goes, in my journal I learn to open up and unlock blank pages. Through practice. Because when you practice something you get better at it. So by practicing my creative work with low stakes, I get better at my creative work. And Ironically then it becomes more interesting to actually share.

Anyway, those are my random thoughts that I thought I’d share in my public journal as I dive into my new private journal. If you stumble upon this and have a journaling practice or regularly keep travel journals, drop me a line or leave a comment. I’d love to hear about your time with journaling too.

Happy World Elephant Day!

Happy World Elephant Day! This is a picture from many years ago of of me and my son Oscar in Sri Lanka at an elephant orphanage. We lived in SE Asia for a few years when he was small, we traveled a lot, and to keep him engaged I sought out lots of experiences that would delight a kid. So we had a lot of elephant adventures. This is mostly how I fell in love with elephants and came to write my book, THE ELEPHANTS’ GUIDE TO HIDE-AND-SEEK. 

During this particular adventure in Sri Lanka, we learned that elephant dung is great for paper-making! Seeing as I’ve made lots of paper in my lifetime and even often use my own handmade paper in my art, this was particularly interesting to me. The reason elephant dung is great for paper making is that it’s full of munched up fibers—kinda like the elephant’s digestive system acts as a pulp beater.  Gross, but cool! 

The photo album in these pictures is one of my handmade travel journals, I used a batik I bought in Sri Lanka for the cover, and a lot of the papers inside are elephant dung papers I bought there. Also that cute little elephant stuffie is one I bought at a fiber store in Columbo. 

I also wrote a blog post about elephant dung paper-making way back when I went to Sri Lanka. Here’s the link.

SUMMER FRIDAY TRAVEL JOURNAL SERIES: In Crayon

THANKS to all moms everywhere who save kid-art.
When I was about 14 I decided the few travel journals I had kept when younger were "so embarrassing." I tossed them.
Or so I thought.
It was like Christmas when my mom drug these out of a box for me a couple years ago.
The drawings pictured here are from one of the first road trips I ever took. While I sat in the back seat of the car, I drew stuff I saw along the way.
One of my favorite pages isn't pictured here. It's of a traffic jam. I was from a really small town. A traffic jam seemed exotic to me at the time.

The other journal my mom saved was a gift from beloved teacher. She gave me the journal below right before I left for a month long road-trip my extended family took in Europe when I was 10 years old. We met relatives in Sweden. We went to the original LEGOLAND in Denmark. And most memorable of all: My Grandfather revisited places he fought in WWII, including the beaches of Normandy, where he landed on D-day. He told us stories. Old people hugged him in the streets and gave us free hot dogs. Wow.

It's funny. I wrote about things like the quality of the water in the showers instead of Grandpa's stories (although I did write quite a bit about Legoland). I guess that's why I tossed the thing when I was 14. I felt I hadn't written about any of the real stuff.

But I'm so happy now to re-read what the showers were like on that trip.
I'm happy to see my old hand-writing and remember the trip through the lines.
Thanks Mom, for saving me from my own inner critic!

Hopefully I can do the same for Oscar.

P.S. Okay ya, you are right. It is Saturday, not Friday. I'm a day late. And sad, but true -- the summer is winding down it is just about time to bid farewell to my Summer series and cook up something new for the fall. How about 2 more weeks of travel journals though? After all, summer isn't quite over yet...

SUMMER FRIDAY TRAVEL JOURNAL SERIES: Notetaking in Museums and Art Pilgrimages

Have you ever taken a pilgrimage for art? How did you document your trip, if you did at all?

In 1999, fresh from graduating from college, I was lucky enough to go to Europe to spend 3 months looking at art (I spent all my frequent flier miles to get there -- I had a lot, I was an out-of-state student, plus I also think I used some of my mom's miles, thanks mom!).
I spent on average about 8-10 hours a day in museums (honestly), planning my day around what museums opened earliest and which ones closed latest. I often didn't stop for eating (not a good idea -- unless you want to loose a lot of weight fast, which I did; my sister wanted to know if I had an eating disorder when I got home).And everywhere I went I bought postcards. While I was at the museums and galleries, I took copious notes that I transferred onto the backs of the postcards at night. I thought I'd have a little booklet of postcards by the end of the trip. HA! I had 4 enormous binders full (I ditched lots of stuff from my pack as I went along, to make room for my journals, by the end of the trip I was REALLY sick of my 2 shirts).
Anyway, it was a dream trip. I spent days in places like the Prado, the Louvre, Musée d'Orsay, and countless others. I spent entire hours in front of single paintings (like Guernica).By taking notes, I forced myself to slow down and really look at all sorts of things, color, texture, composition. The notes were silly (and are tedious to look back at), but the act of taking them helped train my eye to look. After all, I had to look for something to write about.I also made a point to never spend longer reading or writing than I spent looking. Looking took precedence. And making a point to spend more time looking also trained me to look. By the end of the trip I took hardly any notes at all. It was like meditation. I would just loose that side of my brain and be a part of the colors and vistas before me.
Because I only had three months, I edited lots of locations from my initial itinerary. I wanted to enjoy the places I did go, and look at ALL the art I wanted to see in each of those places.

My biggest regret from the trip (save for missing things that were closed for renovation -- it seemed that many places were closed for renovation in 1999 -- prep work for 2000?) was that I skipped out on a few amazing art towns in Spain.
Like Toledo, and Bilbao.
While I planned the trip I took to Spain this past February, I swore I would make up for lost time.
It didn't end up working for us to go to Bilbao, But I made my Grandma skip Madrid so we could spend time in Toledo.
Unfortunately when we got to Toledo, quite a few places were closed for renovation (go figure!) but what was open turned out to be the perfect amount to see in the amount of time we had there anyway.
This time I didn't take notes while I looked at the art at all. I just soaked it all in.

P.S. Interesting side note to this post: I took something home other than 4 enormous binders of art postcards from my trip in 1999. I fell in love on that trip. No kidding. My husband and I met in Rome and then again in Venice. And then again in Paris... And then again in Seattle. Bryce was touring around checking out the spring classic bike races (his biggest passion is bike racing). Our first kiss was in front of Claes Oldenburg's Buried Bicycle sculpture in Paris:

SUMMER FRIDAY TRAVEL JOURNAL SERIES: Another Tool For The Journaling Tool Belt

CONTINUED FROM LAST WEEK...

Last week I shared about my magical day in Morocco, a strange and wonderful interlude from my trip to Spain. I also shared the ugly collages from my journal that I made from that amazing day. I expressed my disappointment and also my cherished rule of letting go.

So like I said last week, I let it go. Or so I thought.

When I got home, I made a few different sorts of collages. I couldn't help myself. I'm crazy crafty Kjersten and sometimes I have a hard time letting go of fun crafty projects. Especially when they relate to my travel journals. (It doesn't matter if I have tons of other stuff to do. Don't visit my house. It's always a mess).

So partially out of my frustration with my Tangier collages and partly due to the fact that when I added my photos to those of my camera-happy sister I had about a million photos, I decided to make a second journal altogether. I actually do this with travel journals quite a lot, I'm a bit ashamed to say.
Anyway, I made a blurb book of our entire trip as a gift for my Grandmother. Blurb books look like traditional coffee table books, but they're your own. Blurb makes the sort of self-published books that self-publishing is good for: family albums, family histories, family recipe books etc. They print on demand and their prices are awesome. Here's the Tangier pages from my blurb book:

I felt like I was cheating on myself at first to make a photo album from my trip that wasn't handmade, ordered off the internet no less. Gasp! But I had read about blurb books from a few other blogs and decided to give it a try for the photos from my trip. What I learned: They are just one other way of making a "hand-crafted" book. One more tool for the tool-belt.

Why limit myself? I have a personal pet-peeve against using the exact same kind of album or journal for every thing you ever need an album or journal for (sorry, I know for a fact that I have a lot of beloved artist and writer friends who are stuck in their journal selection and like it that way. But I have a hard time accepting this. It makes me more playful to use different sorts of journals all the time. I'm a bit evangelical about it. I don't like the idea of getting stuck in a rut. I dare you to buy a wacky and weird different kind of journal next time you fill yours up and go to replace it with that same boring old same-old you've been using for years. I've heard all your arguments for sticking with the same kind. I still disagree. But I digress).

I love my blurb book and if you have a gazillion pictures from a trip you should buy an album from me, another crafty artist and/or etsy. But if you're looking for something you can make a small print run of (say if you want to give a travel album to everyone you traveled with and you don't want to physcially make the book that many times), I highly recommend Blurb books.

Here's my two journals from Spain displayed on my wall using plate holders (why not?). The blurb book is on the top, the Collage Journal is on the bottom and underneath is a photo of my Great Grandmother cuddling my Grandmother who was then a baby.
I've often found that I end up having two books after a trip, one for photos and one for writing/art. They feel like a team. Here's my blurb book next to my handmade journal:
Thanks Grandma Muriel! For inspiring our trip with your dream. And also for passing on that travel bug you've always had.


Oh ya. P.S.
My house is cluttered with a few different collections: handmade books, puppets, pottery and weaving. Forgive me for being a tourist; I bought a weaving in Tangier:
Isn't it beautiful?

NEXT WEEK: PLANS VS. SURPRISES; IN TRAVEL AND IN TRAVEL JOURNALS

SUMMER FRIDAY TRAVEL JOURNAL SERIES: Sometimes my favorite "rule" in journaling is that it's okay to let something go

My Grandmother had always dreamed of going to Morocco. It was a request of our trip to Spain. "Can we go to Morocco, too?"
I wanted to take her there with all my heart. But I knew the kind of travel I most enjoyed would probably not be comfortable for her in Morocco (she is in her mid-eighties!) no matter how adventurous she is.
So I spent many a long night after my son had gone to bed researching just the right way we could take her on a day trip to Morocco without it being cheesy and without it being uncomfortable.
I found a woman in Spain who owns a guesthouse near the ferry to Africa who lives and breaths all things Morocco. We stayed at her guesthouse, a magical and tranquil place called Dar Cilla, which is decorated peacefully and perfectly with Moroccan handicrafts and antiques. Even if we weren't going to spend the night in Morocco, I wanted Grandma to relish the flavor of the place.
The people at Dar Cilla arranged for a private tour for only my family. It was a beautiful and perfect day. I never imagined a day-trip tour could be so fulfilling. Our guide listened to things we cared about and walked us (or drove us) to see such things. That's how we ended up in an apothecary shop learning about spices (my husband loves to cook) and in a communal bread baking oven underground. It's also how we saw many of the sites Matisse had painted when he lived in Tangier (There are unassuming diamond shaped cobbles in the roads wherever Matisse painted). These colorful string bits are tied all around posts and doorknobs in the section of the market where thread spinners work:
We weren't pressured by any heavy duty salesmen but we didn't have to worry about the stresses of transportation and we had a guide who taught us lots of fun and interesting things. We also ate one of the best meals I've ever eaten in my life with some crazy brewed fruity juice concoction. I felt like the day was a trip on a magic carpet ride back in time to the days when silent movie stars and Parisian artists came to Tangier for the color, life and magic of the place. My Grandma beamed all day. I was thrilled that I made her dream come true.

And here's where I sigh and bring us back to journaling. My journal pages from this magical day are anything but. How frustrating.They are boring. And un-colorful. In a sense, I let them go before I even started making them. I was too busy taking in all the color and life and magic to collage about it later that day. But even though it's frustrating, it's also okay. Sometimes my favorite "rule" in journaling is to just let something go. So I didn't do it justice. Move on. At least I had that magic ride.

If I beat myself up about every time I didn't do some experience justice in my journal (travel or otherwise), it would mean I wasn't having enough magical experiences (I'd rather be having them than recording about them).

So consider this a permission slip from a journal junkie. If you are ever journaling (or blogging) and you really really wanted to capture it all, but you also really really wanted to do something else, do something else -- especially if that something is magical. Journals suck when they become dreaded obligations.

All that being said, I did bother to make some different sort of collages from my Tangier magic carpet ride when I got home. But that's another post.

TO BE CONTINUED... NEXT FRIDAY

SUMMER FRIDAY SERIES: Travel Journals and The Stories they Tell

Every story is, in some way, a journey. And every journal is, in some way, a story. But unlike more polished stories, journals don't always have beginnings, middles and ends. They are messier. More organic. More like a big pile of seeds that haven't been planted. Or else like a big pile of weeds that have (or haven't) been pulled.

But travel journals are a bit more linear, no? They (at least kind-of) have a beginning, middle and an end. And like characters grow in stories, travel often changes people. You don't return home the same person you were when you left. You grow.

(At least so with journey kinds of travel. Maybe not so with lazy vacation travel -- don't get me wrong, lazy vacations are good -- just not usually adventurous).

Maybe due to my Adventure-ess spirit I can't help but often favor travel journals amongst all the different kinds of journals I have kept. I love the unknowns, the risks, the challenges, and the fun discoveries. I love creative play, discovery, and most of all, engaging in wonder. So, duh, I love travel journals.

So anyway, all this is to say that for the rest of the summer (through labor day), every Friday, I'm going to put up a blog post about travel journals. I'll be mining lots of pictures from my personal stash, but I'd love for anyone to send me pictures or links to post of your own if you have them. I think it will be a fun way to keep some focus to my blogging and a way to enliven an old regular feature (journal of the week) that I suspended recently.

And to start? Let's finish up with those collages from Spain...

For those newer to my blog, I went to Spain in February and shortly thereafter started posting pictures of the collages from my travel journal alongside pictures of the stuff that inspired me to make the collages.

Well I left off about half-way through my trip, right before I visited Bodega Tradicion, a sherry bodega with an owner who has a passion for art collecting.

The tiles behind my Grandma were painted by Picasso:

There's an intimacy to small, semi-private, art collections that's often lost at big museums. The owners of Bodega Tradicion display their art in a beautiful long private gallery. They have pieces by Velazquez, Goya and Zurbaran.
And they have delicious artisan sherry. Cheers!

A Travel Journal Kit

Goals while packing for Spain (a few weeks ago):
1. Bring hardly any extra clothes
2. Bring way too many art supplies

I've gotten into a habit of making travel journals as I go. Instead of showing up at my destination with a book ready to be filled, I show up with supplies. Loose paper. Pens. Glue. Scissors. Paint. I brought it all with me on my recent trip to Spain.

I've got some fun arty/crafty/whimsy inspiration to share from my trip. Lots of collages. I'll post travel stuff in-between other posts for the next couple of weeks. Join me for the trip!



First...
Travel journal packing list:
-colorful pens
-scissors
-pencils
-pencil sharpener
-erasers
-colorful pen case
-funky pattern-cutting mini-scissors
-watercolor set
-small tubes of acrylics
-glue sticks
-photo squares --ESSENTIAL
-new travel water color brushes -- AWESOME! LOVED THEM
-scrappy acrylic brushes
-colored pencils
-date stamp and ink
-set of mini-letter stamps and ink
-lots of mix-match paper
-sewing needles
-string

Oh ya, I also started with a cover this time. I made it using an old poster I bought when I was in Barcelona 10 years ago. I also used my sewing machine. Having the cover ahead of time gave me some guidelines for size as I collaged the pages.

To be continued...