Journaling ~ What to Write?

I love the feeling of a pen in my hand.  I feel safer with a sharpie at my disposal.  That's part of why I love journaling, and letter writing, and writing blog drafts (on real paper).

It's addicting, almost.  Where most people nowadays find it hard to get off their devices, I find it hard to get off my journal, whether writing or reading it, and I am totally fine with that!  (Although, it is sort of a waste of time to sit for an hour reading my own thoughts when I should be doing homework...)

I recently wrote this post about journaling, listing all the reasons you might have for needing to journal.*  But, I did not go into what you could journal about, which seems to be a major roadblock to many people who would like to get into journaling.  So, I came up with this very long list of things to journal on, just to get you started!

*I'm not actually saying every single person absolutely needs to journal.  Maybe you like gardening, or building, or driving, or whatever else.  What I'm saying is, journaling isn't for everyone.  People say they'd like to journal, but either a) don't have time, or b) don't know what to write about.  Well, the fact is, if you really want to enough, you'll make it happen!  If, deep down, you really don't feel like journaling, and you have plenty of other things to occupy your time, then you're probably not going to get to journaling.  And you know what?  That is fine.  Journaling is a kind of therapy, and maybe it's not your preferred form.  That is okay.  Alright, rant over.  :)

For those of you who find it hard to think of things to write about, maybe this is what you find yourself staring at when you sit down to write:

And then, after staring at it for long enough, you decide to close it up, and you're looking at this:

You don't want that.  (I hope not, at least!)  So, I'm here to help you be able to look at something like this:

As you can see, you don't have to write all fancily or prettily, in words you say or the way they look on the page.  This your journal.

Sooo, here (finally) is a list of possibly all the things anyone could think up to journal about/on, so you can sit down to write, and write.

What to Journal About/On

• Lists
• Happy lists
• Sad lists
• Favorites lists
• Season (you know mine!)
• Colors
• Holidays
• Siblings (ha! jk)
• Shoes
• Memories
• Thankfulness lists
• Fears lists
• What do you wonder about?  Write about it!
• Secrets - duh.
• Prayers to God
• Letters to people, like...
• Friends
• Celebrities
• Your younger/older self
• Your children (whether or not you have them)
• Your spouse (^^^)
• People you'll never see again
• People you see everyday
• Total strangers
• Memories
• What you did today
• Imaginary conversations
• How (and why?) you don't want to eat your veggies
• All your problems with broccolli
• Rants on what makes you happy
• All your wonderments
• All you wanderments
• Quotes you like
• What makes you...
• Angry
• Jump for joy
• Nervous
• Sad
• Your life...
• Plans
• Ambitions
• Dreams
• Hopes
• Goals
• Special verses
• Devotionals
• Just doodle, or whatever.  Don't even write if you don't want to.
• Your crazy ideas that you're too embarrassed/ashamed to tell anyone else (or maybe you wisely decide not to?)
• Your plan to take over the world (gotta write these things down so you don't forget, ya know?)
• Whatever you're obsessed with
• What you're eating for lunch tomorrow (or yesterday, or right now)
• What if you lived in an alternate universe?
• Praises to God
• Observations
• Why you're passionate about whatever you're passionate about
• Mind map
• Brainstorm
• Experiences
• What would your perfect day be like?
• Ideal...
• Day
• Summer
• Week
• Pie
• Weather
• What are all the things you want to be "when you grow up"?  (Whether or not you've already grown up)
• Expectations for the future
• Struggles
• Free write
• Post on social media every day?  Write in your journal what you would post on social media.  (Probably all your friends don't mind if you neglect to tell them your two cents about life for just one day.)
• And um, so much more!

Hopefully this has whet your appetite!  Then, later on, you can look at this again, satisfied this time, knowing you done wrote in your journal!  *high five!*:

There are literally a thousand things you could write about in your journal.  This was only a few of them.  Or, this was all (?) of them, but generalized.  Okay, no, let's be real.  This only scratched the surface of what you can write in your journal!  Hopefully I've inspired you, and you can come up with even more things to write about!

Basically, you can write about ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING you want!

What are your favorites from the list?  What can you add to the list?

You Need to Journal If...

I didn't use to journal much.  It's not like I didn't want to.  In fact, I've always liked the idea, I think.  But for the longest time (meaning up until, like two months ago), I only kept a journal sporadically and only wrote when I would die if I didn't.  (Strangely, I very often now feel like I'll die if I don't write.)

It ain't gotta be fancy.  I use a plain ol' spiral noteook!

But lately, I've wanted to get into it more, not just as an occasional thing, but an almost every day kind of thing.  And man, I am so glad I've jumped into it!  When I used up my little purse journal in early August, I began a new purse journal, and simultaneously, a new start to journaling!

This "new" journal I began again in, was actually an old, unused journal I still had from years ago, that I had written verses in at the top of each page (except for the last few), which is just perfect!

If you're wondering why it's blurry, it's because no, you may not read my journal.  Ha!

Wewere at a friend's (multiple friends, actually) house last weekend, and amidst doing homework pondering life upstairs on Saturday night, I came up with a long list of reasons YOU need to journal!  Because I really think journaling is so beneficial.  All Most of these apply to meself too!*  Here's the list (I'm not referring to the picture...).  :D

I wrote this list for Jennie's Creative Play Challenge, week two.

*If all of these apply to you, please go turn yourself into jail before taking over the world.  Thx.

You Need to Journal If...

• You feel guilt when you write suuuper long letters to friends because you're afraid of boring them, but you need to write it all down.
• You have big dreams.
• You have words practically pooping out of your brain and YOU JUST NEED TO LET THEM OUT.
• You're an emotional teenage girl.
• You're an emotional human being.
• You have a disorganized brain.
• You feel like no one else understands you (this would also be a fantastic time to talk to God + read the Psalms).
• You want to practice your handwriting doing something productive.
• You want to be able to write and not care how your handwriting looks.
• You have lots of secret thoughts and must tell someone, but there's no one you want to tell.
• You have secret evil plans to take over the world.
• You are super duper annoyed about someone/something, but you don't want to gossip to others.
• You've pledged to keep a secret, but you HAVE to tell someone.  RIGHT NOOOW.  (And who better to tell than yourself?)
• You want your life story recorded for future generations.
• You want to be remembered in history and have your journal put in some cool museum for people all around the world to see.  After you die.  Duh.
• You want to record your thoughts, dreams, wonderments, wanderments, and joys, throughout the years to look back on later.
• You want to remember the small things, as well as the big.
• You want to come back later and see how your handwriting has evolved.
• You want to come back later and see how your thought process has evolved.
• You want to remember the good times, and the bad, and learn from them.
• You have any life problems, at all.
• You need to sort your thoughts.
• You discovered something amazing that will impact the rest of history.
• You're stressed about life.
• You want to talk to yourself, but you know it's more socially acceptable to journal.  (Who cares?  I do both!)  (They're basically the same anywho!)
• You want to talk to yourself, but you're in a situation where if any sound issues forth from your mouth, you instantly die.
• You need a productive way to procrastinate on school.
• You need a productive way to procrastinate on life.
• You're an introvert and people stress you out.
• You're an extrovert and people stress you out (does that happen?  I wouldn't know.)
•  You have a speaking disorder but love to talk.  A lot.  (AKA, you mumble and mix up words a lot so it's very hard to talk, and you find it easier to just write it all down.)  (AKA, me.)

I know there have got to be so many more reasons that YOU (and I) need to journal.  What are they?

P.S.  Should I do more posts on journal-y stuffs?  I like the idea...

How to Put Together a Simple Girly Birthday Gift {For a Girl of Any Age!}

It's almost summer.  Which means, in our family, it's birthday season.  And birthday season means lots of cake.  OH OH and also lots of gifts to give!

One of my sisters is somewhat hard to get gifts for, so you know what I did?  Well, I went straight to Thinking Outside the Giftbox by Lauren Lanker, and when I was done, I had several ideas to pick from!  I decided to use two, and put them together to make a cute gift in a jar.  Or a glass.  Or whatever you call this cool looking thing that came from a building in our woods.  What do you call it?  (Ooh, and it even has this cool glass top with four points that look like the points of a compass!  Coooool.)

The two gifts I ideas I chose were a "10 Things I Love About You" booklet, and a plain ol' letter, because everyone loves letters!  The "10 Things I Love About You" booklet was not originally Lauren's idea; she borrowed it from Ashley at The Creative Place.  It's such a simple idea, and yet so special!

Instead of using the printable, I decided to just make my own from scratch.  So I painted on watercolor paper, and used that as my "canvas."

I didn't do 10 things actually.  I did 9, only because, with the size of the paper I was using, it worked perfectly to cut it into 9 sections.  There are certainly more than 9 things I love about my sister!

 I hole punched and fancily numbered each one.

Now this is the fun part - writing out what you love about your person!  (JK, all of it is the "fun part.")  Lauren said in her book that the ones she and her husband made for their moms were so specific that they couldn't be said of the other.  That's what I tried to shoot for.  The more specific, the more specialific!

This is the tag I made to attach on the front.  It's just white cardstock and black sharpie.

I have this little jar of ribbon that is just! so! fun!  Actually I have three matching jars of ribbon!  One of them contains lots of thin, pretty, colorful ribbons, and it is where I fetched the beautiful teal ribbon used for the booklet.

You could tie it like this, with a long tail....

 ...Or you could tie it with a pretty bow like this, which is how I ended up doing it.

I wanted the letter to be fun and colorful too, so I wrote it on this cool, wrinkled, old looking paper I had, with all different colors of sharpie.

Since I write long letters, and since I couldn't write on both sides of the paper because the sharpie bled through, the letter ended up being two pieces of paper long.  Which I like.

Now the construction of each of the gifts is completed, and all we have to do is package them up!  That's one of my favorite parts.

I wrapped a ribbon around the letter so it's all nice and compact, and it fits in the jar.

Now, just because the making of the gifts is done, that doesn't mean the making is done!  Time to make confetti!  (That's part of packaging up, right?)  I have these cool fringe scissors that are perfect for this.  I used hot pink, light pink, and light blue tissue paper, and just cut it into about inch-long strips.

Now, just because the confetti making is done, doesn't mean the making is done!  Oh no!  We still have a tag to make for the jar!  Actually though, this tag was pre-made when I put this gift together.  Yes, it was pre-made by me, but still, pre-made.  So all I had to do was punch a hole and write on it.

Out of the same jar of ribbon as I fetched the teal ribbon from, I pulled this pretty green ribbon.  It happens to be the same ribbon I used for The Little Green Bow, if anyone remembers that!

Alright, now the making is finally done, and we can put the gift together!

First I put in the confetti.  Then the booklet and letter went in together, and on top of that, the top!

Don't you just love how old and antique-y this jar looks?

And the top is so cool.

As I said in the title of this post, you could do this for a girl of any age, and she'll love it!  I'm sure you could easily tweak this also to be a good guy's gift.  But...probably only if he's your sweetie or your brother.  Or your dad.

Who, in your life, could you make something like this for?

{P.S. Linking up here!}

Line It With a Letter! (And Decorate It With...Paint.)

Line what, you ask?  Why, an envelope, of course!

Y'all probably remember that for the whole month of April (yes, I do know that that was a month ago), I was doing a letter writing challenge that my friend Jennie was hosting (I even wrote a guest post for her!), and you can actually still do the challenge at your own pace, if you like!
I'm happy to say that I successfully kept up with the challenge the whole month long, although I almost didn't for the last week.  And here's why.

I was at first using Jennie's printable stationary and not-made-by-me cards that I already had, but for the last week I wanted to do something different.  I think it was on Pinterest that I saw the idea to write a letter right inside the envelope (not that I hadn't thought of it before), so that, combined with Jennie's post on decorating envelopes, gave me the idea for what this post is about!   I had planned to go easy on myself for the whole challenge, but whatevs.  I suppose I can't be trusted.

Supplies
White cardstock
Pencil + eraser
Ruler
Scissors
Acrylic paint (I neglected to include that in the picture.  Whoops.)
Washi tape (optional)

Each envelope I made is different.  I used a different paint for each, and even the sizes are not all the same, because I didn't go on a template or anything.

Hopefully you can see the pencil lines in this picture to get an idea of what I did, but basically I positioned an envelope I already had (you could use any rectangular shape - it doesn't have to be an envelope) in the middle of the paper, and traced around it, and then used my ruler to figure out where the center line of the envelope was, and continued that line all the way from one end of the paper to the other.  That way, I knew where to position my ruler so that the would-be envelope flap wasn't all wrong and mismeasured.  From there, I drew a straight line from the corners of the rectangle to the point at the end of the paper where my middle line ended.  I did that on all four corners.  Then I drew a another line about 1/4 inch outside of those four lines, and cut on those lines, so that when I folded the flaps, they would overlap.  I also cut in those grooves where the corners of the rectangle were, as shown below.  I thought it would work much better to fold the flaps after painting, so that's what I did!

I only told you roughly how I did it so you would have an idea, but really it doesn't matter how you make your envelope!  You could even use an already made envelope to write your letter inside!  What matters is the heart you put into decorating it, but more importantly, the letter itself.

Phew!  Now that that is over, we can get on to the fun stuff!  Painting the envelopes!  I was of course making five envelopes for the five people I was writing for the challenge.  For the first, I just did a simple polka-dot pattern with dark purple acrylic paint (I used one acrylic paint for each), using my index finger as my painting device (which I did for every one).  Woot for finger painting!

The second envelope I made featured this really pretty blue acrylic paint we have, and I just did random doodling all over.

For the third envelope, I chose a dark green paint, and to go along with that color, I finger painted trees along the front, and on the top flap, and then stripes on the other areas.

By this point, it was time for a pop of warm color!  I grabbed the red paint, and began playing around with triangles.

Now the last day was a bit different.  I had gone to bed late the previous night because I was completing that day's letter (I was not going to miss one day!), and the same was true for this day.  Er, night.  I was just too tired by this time to go to the trouble of tracing, measuring, cutting, an envelope.  I just wanted to write my letter and go to bed.

So...I did not go to the trouble of tracing, measuring, cutting, an envelope.  I just wrote my letter and went to bed.

Oh wait, did I say I "just wrote my letter and went to bed"?  Welllll, that may not be the exact truth.  You see, I can't go four other days doing something cool for my recipients, and then just leave the last one with a boring old letter that I was too tired to  make fancy.

I did, in actuality, write my letter and go to bed, but I had to write it all crazy-fun-like, so it wasn't boring.

I didn't leave it at that.  Oh no.  I got fancy with the outside in the morning (this is how I remember it, anyhow.  It was so long ago...).

What I did was, first, I decorated one side of a piece of cardstock with light purple acrylic paint.

Then I let that dry, and, since it wasn't an envelope like the rest, I folded it fancily.

It ended up being kind of thick, and hard to fasten securely.  But I got it done.

Just a quick note: does anyone else find it hard to comprehend that the address side of an envelope is suppose to be the front, and the open up side is the back?  That has never made sense to me.  I mean, do YOU walk into your house through the back door?  Do YOU drink your water out of the bottom of the glass?  Do YOU stick your head out through the bottom of your shirt?  Didn't think so.

Now, we're done with decorating the envelope, but we can't forget the most important part - writing the letter!  It's so fun to write right inside the envelope, don't you think?  And you don't have to write anything long either!  I, for some reason, don't know how to write a short letter, so I used up every inch of space I could, but that's totally weird you don't need to write more than you're comfortable with.  Also, I wrote my letters before folding, so I didn't have to wrote over the creases.

 Yes, I went fancy with the envelopes, and yes, I wrote long letters in each, but no, I didn't think that was enough, apparently.  So I made a little watercolor bookmark to put in each letter, sort of as a thank you gift for...being my recipient?  :)

I sealed each envelope with washi tape of some sort.

Don't you just love it when you have supplies that all coordinate so perfectly?  It makes my heart soar.

To make it easier to write each day of the challenge, I taped up the calendar where I could see it easily, and under it, all of my recipients' addresses, along with their day of the week.

This was such a fun challenge to do, and right up my alley!  Jennie really thinks the same way I do, and I am so happy to be her friend!

P.S.!  Man, have I missed blogging!  Things have been a little crazy lately, with my not being good at using my time well, and traveling, and such.  Maybe I will get back on track during the summer, but we will see.  Tomorrow I'm off to Tennessee, and BWSC starts on Monday!  Stay weird!

{P. P. S. Linking up here!}