2018 Everyday Journal Set-up

I announced this past week (here) that I am co-leading a group with my friends Bernice and Valerie about using an Everyday Journal. After some great discussion in our Facebook group about how we are going to use our journals, I thought I would share my journal set-up and how intend to use it - or rather, them, as I have two! I started using a Traveler's Notebook last year and I am hooked! So in addition to using one for my calendar and life and work/ministry planning, I am also going to use one for my creative life this year.

The Traveler's Notebook system was designed by Midori in Japan and is composed of using a variety of inserts held in place by elastic bands that are attached to the spine of the notebook. I am using the standard size which has inserts that are 4.24 x 8.25". My current set-up in my Everyday Journal has 3 inserts - one with blank stationary paper where I am keeping track of notes and ideas for my art journaling. I ALWAYS need an insert for dumping notes and ideas in. Sometimes they spark like fireworks in my head and I just have to get them down on paper for future reference.

The other two inserts in my Everyday Journal are made with a heavy sketch paper. It's about the weigh of cardstock. I have a third which is the one I am working in currently. This is another feature I like about the Traveler's Notebook - you can take the inserts out which makes it easier to do art in.

Here is my plan for my Everyday Journal:

• I like blank pages because I don't like to plan too far ahead. I do art as the mood strikes and I don't want to be hemmed in with pre-printed and ordered pages. I use the sketch paper insert or, sometimes, a watercolor paper insert because I don't like white pages. Although I am drawn to the pages with white backgrounds I see on Instagram and Pinterest, in the end I usually cover my pages with painted paper or ephemera, so I need the heavier weigh paper to hold it all.
• I am going to do a hodge-podge of thing in my Everyday Journal: art journaling, memory keeping, nature journal, travel journal, commonplace book. I am going to keep notes and progress on my word for the year (flow), notes about spiritual formation and soul care, Bible study notes, quotes from books I'm reading, etc. What you won't find in my Everyday Journal is a calendar. That is what my other Traveler's Notebook is for. More on that later.
• It will be eclectic in style. As I've said before, I have creative ADHD. I like a variety of creative mediums and I go with the flow! In it you will see: lettering, art journaling, mixed media art, lists, collage, paint, photography, and on and on. 

That's pretty much how I will use my Everyday Journal. Not too structured - I save that for the other journal. In my other Traveler's Notebook I have four inserts: a monthly calendar insert.

A commonplace insert where I write down notes from various places - things that are significant and that I don't want to forget.

Then I have an insert for details. I keep track of what needs to go on our church website, my blog, details for my Etsy shop, etc. I have these great little stick on, writable tabs that I found at the office supply store. They keep my notebooks organized!

And finally I have the workhorse insert. This is an insert with a page spread per week where I jot down the details of what needs to get done each week. This is mainly for my job/ministry. This insert has taken the place of all the post-it notes I used to keep so I wouldn't forget things!

That's my set-up for life and work. It's highly organized and helps me juggle all of the balls I have up in the air in my busy ministry job. My two notebooks are a contrast of my personality! I am an INFJ on the Myers-Briggs Type. In my work world I function quite a bit out of the J (judging) - I like things orderly and structured. I like that at home also but because I am an Introvert and I work in a people heavy job, I restore my energy with things like art, where I can be creative and by myself. And I have found over the years that when I play I don't want to be as structured - although quite a bit of structure still exists by my nature! 

Later in the week I will post about my word for 2018 and my intentions with it.

Here are some of the products I use:

I get my calendar inserts and some other inserts from Yellow Paper House on Etsy.  Other products can be found on Amazon:

A note about Amazon links on my blog:

I am giving Amazon affiliation a try, which means I receive a small percentage off slals made through clicking on the Amazon links found on my blog. There is no additional cost to you.

A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the New Year

This week I am slowing down. Intentionally. This past month did not go as planned, with my hopes of slowing down and enjoying the Advent season with an art challenge. Too much life got in the way. But now we are past Advent, school is out for a few weeks, and my job at the church is on a sabbatical for a week. So I begin my annual habit of looking back over the past year. 

This practice for me over the past few years has produced an important motto for my life: Looking back in order to move forward. I try to make it a habit every few months to re-read my journals for the year and look for patterns of growth and areas that may require attention. This practice keeps me aware, and awareness is key for spiritual formation. We need to stay aware of the condition of our heart, mind and soul in order to be open to God's shaping work in our lives. 

A month ago I wrote this post about how I was going to use a phrase, Sacred Time, for my word for the year in 2018. I intend to follow the church calendar in 2018 and study it's history and theology. I want to join the flow of the church calendar from Advent through Pentecost. And so I thought my word for the year was settled. But as I began re-reading my journals from the past year a word kept popping up. It grew out of the workings of God in my life over this past year. It grew out of a deeper awareness of the Spirit's role in my life through my church's journey through the book of Galatians in the first half of the year.

I treasure this week of the year between Christmas and New Year's Day. The time of the year that author Shelly Miller calls "the Sabbath margin - a sacred stretch of time between what was and what is yet to be". I enjoy looking back over the past year and looking ahead to the freshness the new year. So, as I was doing this over the past few days my word for the year was revealed: flow. My intention now is to live with this word, flow, through the year in the midst of the theme of Sacred Time as I journey with the church calendar. And I intend to do all of this in community ~  here on my blog, on Instagram, and in a new group that has formed on Facebook called Everyday Journals - Living Your Word for the Year. I'm joining my friends Bernice Hopper and Valerie Sjodin this year on an adventure in using an Everyday Journal with my word for the year and everything else! I'm using a Traveler's Notebook again this year and plan to fill it with a variety of art mediums - a little bit art journal/bullet journal/planner/travel journal/memory keeper/nature journal, etc.

Below is a bit of information about the new Facebook group.

Do you choose a word for the year? Or does it choose you? When we ask God for a word for the year he gives us something that he wants us to work on, to include more of during the year? Do you know what your word for 2018 is yet?

Have you tried planners, bullet journals and diaries and found they don’t suit your lifestyle? Do you want a simple, completely personalized, no pressure way of journal keeping? Do you have lots of scraps of papers with your ideas written down but often lost in the detritus on your desk? Or do you file all your thoughts in your head and become overwhelmed with all the ideas and no place to flesh them out?

Would you like a more creative way to organize your word, your ideas, thoughts, prayers, events, or your projects all in one place? Let us introduce you to an Everyday Calendar Journal.

Through 2018, Valerie Sjodin, Bernice Hopper, and Mary Brack will be sharing insights through blog posts for keeping an Everyday Calendar Journal. We will be using the journal to record events, experiences and relationships; to explore our word’s meaning in visual and fun ways. It is our hope that you will make your journal your own, personalizing it to make it a beautifully useful and valuable tool.

Join us in our private Facebook group to find encouragement and support as we journal through 2018.

URL for Facebook group:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/203309083575277/

Valerie: https://valeriesjodin.com/blog/

Mary:  www.foundonbrighton.com

Bernice: https://newlycreative.blogspot.co.uk

We are using the following hashtags: #livingyourword2018 and #everydayjournals2018.

Join us!

New Things in the New Year

I can't believe it's been weeks since I last posted! I had great plans for my blog this month but something abnormal happened after the holiday slow down. I actually slowed down again! My calendar this month has remained relatively free of activity and I have embraced it. I've had three weekends in a row with nothing planned and I've been hibernating and enjoying it. This slow down in my calendar has fit nicely into the direction I want to go this year and has enabled me to bring back some soul practices that I let slip away.

Find a window of time that cultivates a restful heart.       ~Shelly Miller, Rhythms of Rest

This year restoring my spiritual health has to be a priority. As an introvert, periods of quiet time by myself are needed to restore my energy. A combination of slowing down at least one day a week and spending time daily reading Scripture, praying and journaling move me to healthier places. I've spent a lot of time over the past few years learning ways to try and keep burnout at bay, learning to understand how I am wired, and which activities best restore my energy. Yet, even with all of this knowledge, I find I can easily fall back into old habits of distraction, habits of over-commitment and running off of adrenaline - all of which result in unhealthy areas of life for me. In these weeks of slowing down I have found such refreshment from restoring those soul practices.

In the midst of all of this another strange thing happened - my word for the year changed. In December I had chosen the word "restoration" for 2017. It felt like a fit and I lived with it for well over a month, thinking about how it flowed nicely out of 2016's word "rest". I was doing some reading and journaling a few weeks ago and it seemed that the word "whole" kept popping up. This happened again and again over the course of a few days and slowly the word started resonating with where I have been lately and with where I want to go. Whole fits the picture of health I want for all areas of my life. This is the first time since I started the practice of selecting a word for the year that I've changed my word.

I am once again joining Ali Edwards One Little Word (OLW) community to develop ways to keep my word active throughout the year. Last year I used her binder system for journaling my word. While I enjoyed trying a different style, I found I wanted to return to more of my own style of art journaling and mixed media art. I had intended to make a journal but then I started seeing posts on Instagram of these wonderful Traveler's Notebooks that people were using for planners and art journals and I was drawn in! If you are not familiar with a Traveler's Notebook, it is a leather cover with elastic bands inside to hold a variety of mini notebooks, called inserts, that are like the signatures you make for books.The various notebooks you place inside can be used for a variety of things such as calendars, note keeping, to-do lists, sketching, memory keeping, and on and on. Japanese company, Midori, makes the original Traveler's Notebooks, but a number of companies and people have developed similar ones know as Fauxdoris. I read and watched a number of reviews and ended up purchasing a Nomads journal, which was about half the price of a Midori. I figured I'd start out with this one and see how I like using it before purchasing something more expensive.

Two things happened as I explored this new Traveler's Notebook (TN) world. First, I decided to do my OLW journal in a TN sketch insert. Then as I explored the many uses for the TN I decided to use it for a planner as well using inserts for my calendar, my weekly organization planner, and idea notebook for my blog art and creativity. I have been happily organizing it all! In the past I've had my calendar binder which held my overall calendar but then was mainly used for work stuff. Then I had a smaller notebook that I used to organize my art, blogging and other creative pursuits, as well as my Etsy shop stuff. The TN helps me pull all of it together in one notebook - ideally. I say "ideally" because I actually may need to add a second TN for my art journals, but I'm going to live with one for a while and tweak my system. But even if I do add a second one their size (4.25x8.25") is nice enough to fit in a purse.

I purchased a variety of inserts, some Midori and some from a shop I found on Etsy, Yellow Paper House.

I set up my notebook with my 2017 calendar, a weekly to-do insert, a insert for the details of my creative life, blog and Etsy shop, and an insert to record significant Scriptures and quotes (kind of like a commonplace journal). That filled up my TN so my OLW journal and other art journals are just separate right now as I sort out using my TN.

So that's how my new year has begun - full of slowing down, refreshment, and organizing! Next week is busy so I'll see how well I navigate while trying to keep up with my soul practices.:)

How are you starting your new year?