“Green” Journals July 5, 2010

About a year and a half ago, I read Julia Cameron’s “The Artist’s Way” and started writing what she calls “Morning Pages”. Morning Pages are 3 pages of long-hand writing about anything and everything. It’s basically a regurgitation of everything in your head first thing in the morning. The theory behind it is that by writing these pages, you will get everything unnecessary out of your mind and leave you open to more creative thoughts. I decided to give it a try and have been doing it ever since. Well, last weekend I visited this great new store called The Green Corner Store. Someone (I’m sorry I don’t know exactly who so I can give them credit) made journals out of recycled items; receipts, gum packages, used paper, paper bags, basically anything that had at least one blank side. I considered it a bit of genius and was inspired! I immediately ran home and started cutting up every paper bag I had in the house. Originally, I thought I would make enough journals to do all my morning pages on, but it ended up being quite a task to complete each journal, so I decided to just use them as sketch books. I was able to make two of the journals (the large journal and the small one with the ribbon) out about 21 Whole Foods paper sacks (I figured I would eventually use those sacks for an art project, I’m excited that I was right for once!). The large journal has 90 pages and the small one with the ribbon has 37. For the covers, I ripped out interesting pictures from magazines and glued them on cardboard left over from cereal boxes, pizza boxes, etc…Even the ribbon on the one journal is a reused element, it came from a package. As far as how to bind these journals, I can’t even begin to tell you the best way (three journals, three different ways of binding, I’m still working out the kinks), but your local bookstore will probably have a great selection of books with binding techniques that are easy to follow and produce great looking results.

3 “Green” Journals

Small Journal-Open

Bags used in journals

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