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