All My Journals Part 3

This is my ongoing book-the current one. It is a re-purposed diary-a gardening one with lovely illustrations that I didn't use, and that is too lovely to throw away. I prepared lots of the pages with gesso or collage over Christmas, and have been using it since January. This is a selection of pages.

Thanks for your well wishes yesterday. I am keeping my fingers crossed.

All My Journals Part 2

The moon was full over Sainsbury's tonight. I was wondering what magnification my eyes have, as it looked much bigger than this with them, and only this big through the 5 megapixels and 4x optical zoom camera!

You would think I spend all of my time at Sainsbury's! Tonight it was a catfood and litter run-but I should have coordinated with Andy as he was at Asda doing the same! I am glad he went to Asda though, as he bought the most delicious pudding-banana and chocolate sauce-mmm!

Below is another one of my journals. This is a very new one-a Chrstmas present from Andy's sister. Thanks Helen! I have decided to use it to collect pictures I like, from magazines I want to recycle, rather than keep. So far I have done about 8 pages-some just have the whole page stuck in, maybe next to another page of similar theme or colour. Some others, like the horse and plant below, have been cut and stuck in a certain way. I may use it to write some things in as well but not really to paint or draw. I wonder if I will keep this one up. Time will tell!

All My Journals Part 1

I enjoy sorting and categorising, and think I should have been a librarian or worked in a museum maybe. I like to have different books for different purposes and have recently been looking at these and found that I have quite a few! The first one I wanted to show you is my book of books. I have been keeping a record of the books I read for quite a long time now-I think about ten years. My current book was started in 2007. At first I just wrote the title, author and date I finished the book. Then I read a book about a spy and this spy used the first and last lines of books to create coded letters. It gave me the idea of writing down the first and last line of each book. I don't review the books as I just want to remember what they were, and can usually recall how I felt about them. Each year I do a front page for the year. I use one side of the page to write on, and the back to stick in things of interest such as cartoons or newspaper articles, or bits of ephemera such as theatre or cinema tickets, menus and photos. As you can see I have run out of zeros!

The mouse is from a copper printing block I found on Greenwich market.

My New York snow globe provided the inspiration for 2010's cover.

Tracy commented that my book is like a Victorian commonplace book. I had not heard of one of these so have googled. Great explanation here. It is a way that people collected quotes, reflections on their reading, and other varied snippets of information-it sounds like a scrapbook/journal/blog/book of books idea-most interesting! Thanks Tracy!