How Caatje got her journal mojo back

You all may remember that a few weeks ago I talked about the struggles I had with my journaling in the White Book. If not, you can read about it here. Well, I'm happy to inform you that I'm back on track and having a blast in my journal again! Phew, what a relieve!

I guess from the title you are now hoping that I have some magic formula as to how I achieved this, but I'm afraid I only have one advise to give you: keep struggling until the struggle is over. That's pretty much what happened with me.

Let's look at this spread first to give a little clue about how it happened (although I don't really have a clue, haha).

The page on the left I already showed you in my aforementioned post. It was me trying to find my style by emulating other people's. In this case I was leaning a bit towards Kelly Kilmer and trying to mix it with my own old style as done in the altered atlases. I liked the page well enough, but something about the process wasn't right yet.

Then later I did the page on the right. And the opposite happened, which was really weird. I'm not too crazy about how the page looks, but the process was all me and it was a lot of fun to make. That gave me hope somehow that things would turn out alright.

I think the key was that I used my own photographs and ephemera from my everyday life instead of from magazines, the poem for instance, which was posted on my online reading group. In my former journals the most personal element was the writing. I did add my own photographs from time to time, but mostly it was magazine images and postcards and such. That was okay, I loved working that way and the writing still made the pages me.

I guess this just set me on the right track. I knew then it was important to use my own elements, my own imagery and somehow mix it with the wonderful ready made stuff that I have like washi tapes and scrapbook stickers. I love using all the things that are available in art stores and in magazines and I don't want to stop using them in my journals.

And then I remembered how I had explored this new style of filling a spread in my Quinn Book. You can see some of those pages here. The point was to use this ready made stuff like stencils and rub-ons in an unusual way. And somehow things just clicked. I can't explain it any other way. 

So here are some of my latest journal spreads from the White Book. I'm showing you both the full spread as the separate pages, because I'm only doing one page at a time right now, not full spreads.

You can see familiar elements returning like my dashed lines, lots of little stickers and the use of washi tape. But as a whole I fill up a page more and I use pretty papers as a background together with watercolour. I think I'm actually sort of turning into an artsy scrapbooker! I don't mind, I love the look of these pages and what's more important: they are totally me and it feels really good to make them. They fulfill my need to make attractive layouts as I did in the Moon Journal for instance, but without the tons of writing (which I now do in a separate writing journal).

As soon as I have explored this new approach a bit further and find a bit more of a routine in my journaling I will definitely show you some step by step pages so you can see how they come together. For now I'm just happy experimenting and trying out things and seeing where I can take this.

I hope you like these pages as much as I do and I also hope I gave you some inspiration to keep going at it when things aren't going well at all. It will all work out in the end, keep trying. And remember that feeling good about the process is far more important than the end result.

Wishing you a wonderful and artsy weekend!