bonus crafty -- more little boxes

I still have a cache of things to mention from the time of my mom and step-dad's September visit. On my mom's to-do list for her trip was to learn how to make a box like the one I made for Paola's samples.

Because the box would have been delicate in traveling back to Michigan, mom said she would like to make one that I could use and leave it with me (bonus!). I decided I could really use some organization for a set or journal signatures I had made and written in a while back. After 10 minutes of dedicated searching, I finally found them and I set out to take measurements and figure out the dimensions for our new boxes. I originally used a template found here (which is a little confusing when they talk about cutting off corners, yet gives a good run-through of the basic technique). After making Paola's box, I have a good grasp of the steps and can free form with ease.

I made two sets of all the bits so mom and I would be making the exact same box, and we set to work.

we had to keep adjusting the table top because it's still just resting on the shelves below "oh! I forgot we can't lean!"

super sticky ATG tape is a crafting essential for pros like myself.

The finished products, they came out great!

inside view. I have a stash of this illustration board from an old housemate, it makes it easy to just use what I already have.

My journals are all at home and easier to store on a bookshelf!

Now they have their own space on my bookshelf.

The journals were inspired by "The Artist's Way" a fantastic book for helping guide your creative genius back to the surface. One exercise it suggests is to journal three pages every morning. It doesn't matter what it is about, just getting all those thoughts out of your mind can be very calming. Suddenly you don't have to try to remember 100,000 little things because there is a hard copy of it now. (Ian likened it to RAM vs Hard Drive if you have too many programs running and not enough RAM your entire computer will run slow and lag.) Some days an entire page would just be scribbles and even that was relaxing. Some pages just have one giant complaint (literally giant letters so one sentence fills the whole page) and screaming on the page like that helped to relieve some stress.

(You can almost see that I have two copies of the Artist's Way on that middle shelf all the way to the left. . . that's because one copy is for lending. And I'll happily mail it to you for you to borrow if you want.)