Junk Journaling

Documenting, Findings, and Creating…a hot mess!

~ Patty Radish ~ 3 Comments

Last month, Paul and I (and Lily our pup) drove across the upper U.S. to visit our daughter and grandson in North Dakota It was a wonderful trip, and boy do we miss them, but it is so nice to be home!

Almost as soon as we got home it was time for a visit from our son and his wife’s family, so much fun. They booked a house on the lake for the Labor Day weekend…more memory keeping, Yay!

But I digress as per usual, on to the N.D. trip…

Documenting: Organizing Memories in my Happy Planner

This is how I organize memories so that I have a place to refer to when I’m ready to document them into my Pocket Memory albums. (I use Becky Higgins “Project Life” but there are few other choices out there for pocket style memory keeping, Hobby Lobby, Ali Edwards, and a few options on Amazon.)

Anyway, the first thing I do is pick out a few photos of highlights, then I arrange them in a collage in my photo app before printing. I’m not concerned with the quality of the print at this stage, this is only for reference. As you can see I had fun decorating. This is not necessary unless you really need to use up years and years of sticker collecting…guilty! The next step is to fill your pages with as many memories as you can fit into those small spaces. If I run out of room on these weekly page spreads I’ll insert a 3/4 sheet of dot grid paper for more photos and journaling. I use a pdf. I purchased from an Etsy shop, I punch holes with my Happy Planner punch and pop it in. I’ll share more on that process in a future post.

Findings: A garage sale treasure

If you have been following my blog for a while, you know that I have a slight obsession with ‘Wilhold’ containers. Although this isn’t actually a Wilhold, it’s from the same era…and it was a dollar. I love these vintage plastic containers to hold my craft supplies. The memory that goes along with this is spending the day hanging out with my daughter, something we didn’t have a lot of time for even when we lived in the same town, sigh!

Creating: The “Hot Mess”

Friends, this is not what I imagined when I created this. My vision of how this was going to turn out was completely different; meaning I have a pretty good imagination! I’m not going to spend a lot of time on making excuses, but I will share a short video of how this went down:

Note to Self: Quit when you’re ahead

Not my finest hour, or 60 seconds! I’m thinking about calling this “Collage Compost” Lol! I think I was just having too much fun and got a little carried away…does it show?

Until next time,

Thank you so much for stopping in,

Talk to you soon,

~Patty

(p.s. I have been filling my shoppe back up, so check that out with the link in my sidebar and use the coupon code ‘CUSTOMERLOVE20’ to receive 20% off your purchase.)

Goal Setting and YouTubing

~ Patty Radish ~ 6 Comments

So, the goal setting thing kinda took off. My goal for 2022 is to Downsize!

Now, to me “downsize” has taken on a lot of meanings:

*Stuff=Self explanatory

*Projects=Finish up

*Chores=Delegate

*To Do Lists:Do

*Purchases=Use

…and here is where we pick up the story.

I’ve had a lot of plans over the years, and along with those plans were purchases of some pretty pricey items. Some of these items were just gathering dust for one reason or another. For example, my Silhouette “Portrait” cutting machine. I don’t know about you, but some of the simplest technology can throw me for a loop. So it became a dust collector, until I decided to spend a day wrestling with it, and I won!

Now one more project is knocked off my list! (and I have a box of stickers I need to downsize!)

And that brings me to the other subject of this post, YouTube videos. You will find the videos to these journal spreads on my channel, the link is in my sidebar.

This goal was twofold: Finish up half-done art journals (also called the “Art Journal Stack Wrap Up”) and use the video camera that was gathering dust. Check!

I thought that if I’m going to accomplish the goal of getting 6 pages or 3 page spreads done per week, I might as well record the process, which brought a whole other bag of technological worms along with it!

Social Media Downsizing: Use them or delete them

Over the last couple of years I’ve been on the fence as to whether or not social media was worth the effort, it can be a real time vampire, setting up the photos, photographing, editing, links, writing captions, but the payoff is building a community.

I don’t have crafty friends in my life, so I have to reach out digitally, which I don’t mind in the least. I consider myself extremely lucky to have these platforms to share my love of crafting and meet so many awesome people!

So, I’m jumping back in again, and I couldn’t be happier! I’m sharing on all the platforms I used to share on now…I’m not adding any more though (twitter=gone).

I’ll try to post here about once a week about my videos, with photos. I don’t video all of my page spreads, so I’l be popping those in here too.

As always, thank you for stopping by,

Have a great week,

~Patty

Holiday Journal: Journaling Pages

~ Patty Radish ~ 4 Comments

The last installment of the Holiday Journals series, Yay!

I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to move on.

I used my journaling pages for memory keeping and devotional tracking. The library cards tracked the date and scripture I read that day, and the tags are for memory keeping. Between social distancing and the weather, we didn’t get up to much, but there were a few things worth noting.

I had so much fun making these pages and decorating my tags that I’ve decided I want an entire journal of tags and pockets. Coming to your local blog soon! (The ugly sweater tag was a gift from a sweet friend=memory)

A selection of the tags from this journal. I loved having painted backgrounds with an addition of tissue paper or clear sticker paper, and then playing with the tags and pockets.

And now it’s 2022! Well at least in my journal.

Like I said, I’m really chuffed with these pockets. So much so that I went thrifting with my daughter and picked up as many “Discarded” library books as I could find, just for the pockets…so much fun!

Well, I hope you enjoyed this series as much as I did, but I’m ready for something new! How about you?

There’s so much inspiration out there, but so little time!

As always,

Thank you for stopping by,

Have a great week,

~Patty

Holiday Journal: Coffee Dyeing

~ Patty Radish ~ 4 Comments

Well, I’m still plugging away at my “Holiday” journal. Today I’m going to share a few thoughts about coffee/tea dying, whatever beverage you prefer.

This post is very photo heavy, so I’ll keep the narrative minimal.

There are a lot of super cool dye techniques out there, but my main objective is to take the glaring white out of some of my paper bits.

Before and after: I love how “aged” the stained paper looks.

I also wanted to share how I sometimes print in black and white to use a printable in a different way and make it look a little more vintage. I love the gradations of black and gray.

As you probably know, I use a lot of doilies in my back grounds, and they’ve gotten a bit pricey. I’m really more interested in using what I have on hand at this point and not buying more. Plus, white doilies are so much more readily available, hello Dollar Store! (I’ve dyed them with food coloring too, super cute!)

Journaling spots: that piece of paper in the middle is from a larger piece that I used to dry some coffee dyed bits on, they made all kinds of interesting stains on it. Then I cut some of it down to 8.5″x11″ (letter/A4 size) and printed graph paper on it then cut out some tags

Tags and such: sometimes I’ll switch out the string for bakers twine on these and use the stained string on my colorful scrapbook paper tags, just to mix things up a bit.

My collection of dyed ephemera. I try to dye in batches so I have a selection to choose from…or give away 🙂

If you made it this far, I’m impressed! That was pretty darn dry!

This is the basket I throw things into for future dyeing projects. Sometimes a good “staining idea” will hit me and I’ll throw it in here, the seam binding being a case in point.

I was able to get quite a few pages done this week, thanks to my organization!

And I have at least one more technique I’d like to share from this journal.

So, until next time,

Thank you for stopping in,

Have a wonderful New Years!

And I’ll see you in 2022!

Advent Art Journal: Using Downloads/pdf.s

~ Patty Radish ~ 2 Comments

It’s been a while since I’ve taken the time to work in an art journal. There was a lot going on this fall: I was on a creative team,  wrote an article for “Art Journaling” magazine, did the bi-annual iHanna postcard swap, plus working on several crochet projects…then there’s my shoppe. Then to top it all off, I reopened my “home decor” Etsy shop. Clearly I have had a lot to talk about, but getting in front of the keyboard seemed to be a struggle.

I try to make a “Holiday Memory”  journal every year because I have come to rely on them for my Project Life albums (which are still gathering dust…ahem!). This year I decided to combine my Advent journal with memory keeping. Here’s the page I made for Thanksgiving:

A  little about how I will be sharing this journal. I used a lot of elements that I had planned on blogging about this past year, but procrastinated about…yep that’s the truth there for ya. Anyway, here are a few things I plan on sharing about in the next few weeks. I’ll start out with the pdf’s I used, then the painted backgrounds, coffee stained elements, pocket pages for memory keeping, and anything else that pops into my head as I go along.

Now to the downloads: This year I have been relying on these more than ever. It started with phrase stickers printed on clear label paper, to using black and white florals like ink stamps, then wanting something to add to my painted pages without covering the painted bits. You know I love my layering, but I don’t like always covering everything up.

I use Google Docs to play around with phrases and quotes, fonts, sizes and such. You can spend a lot of money buying words and phrases from people, it’s just as easy to make your own with the fonts you like, not to mention the words.

I find most of my florals on IllustratedFaith.com and KellyBangsCreative.com and just set my printer on black and white. I print them in color too, but not for this project. The angels, Madonna and Child, and the floral page I purchased from Etsy shops, I’ll link those at the bottom of this post.

Nov. 26-27: I worked in this journal all day Friday, ate leftovers, and napped, so a super simple page there. On Saturday I went to evening Mass, so I wrote out one of the Scriptures from the reading. I had started out in a different direction with these two pages before I figured out what I wanted to do, but it was fun to find work-arounds.

Journaling Page: as I have mentioned before, I’m not a huge fan of sharing my journaling, so at the end of each week I’ll have a pocket page with tags and journaling cards to jot down thoughts and memories.

There are a couple more pdf.s I use quite a bit, but I plan to share more about those in a later post.

This is just the beginning of this “Advent Journal” series, so if there’s anything else you want to know about these pages or have a post suggestion, please write them in the comments. 

As always,

Thank you for stopping by,

See you soon,

~Patty

For digital paper and images:

Romantic Arts

Nativity Images:

Illustrated Faith

Clear Label Sheets:

Avery at Amazon