Winter journaling joy

It turns out that my favourite thing is running my Journal with me membership.

Not having a million other things to do has opened up so much space to enjoy using my journal as a creative work / play / planning space and to share what I’m doing with others – with mischief and delight. Thank you so much to everyone who’s joining me on this adventure: it’s so good to be doing this with you!

For those of you who don’t know anything about the membership or what we’re doing, I thought I’d write a bit about this winter’s journaling joy.

Last night we met for Send more love letters – a class exploring connections between keeping a journal and sending uplifting, joyous, kind and positive notes to the people we love. The class proposes that 1. the journal is where we practice encouragement, playing and kindness – skills that make for good love letters – and 2. the journal is where we can enable ourselves in a very practical sense to send more love letters by reminding ourselves to do so; by having addresses and birthdays/anniversaries at hand; by always stuffing a few stamps and decorated envelopes in the back pocket, and so on. I define love letters very broadly as all or any post that is designed to spread love, appreciation and kindness in the world.

Love letters can also be things we send to the year, to the season and, as I learnt last night from one of my members, to our journal itself. It was so wonderful to meet together, to talk about love letters as a meaningful extension of journaling, and to decorate envelopes; organise postal supplies; and reflect on how the creativity we practice in our pages can spill out into the precious relationships of our lives. Everyone was invited – as always – to use the time to their best advantage and I love that one person spent the class sensibly updating their address book meaning they are now all set for sending Christmas cards. Someone else researched the possibility of designing their own postage stamp (this is allowed in Portugal!) and decorated envelopes, and another member made a beautiful heartfelt card for a friend who is unwell.

In another vein, when we met last week to mark the ending/beginning of the month and hang out for an hour to journal together, I created a kind of visual guide to November. For the hangouts, we have a check in, then some making time during which I demo something to try in your journal, and everyone either mutes me to get on with their own thing, or follows along. This makes the recording useful for folks who can’t make the class in real time and, over time, will produce a large library of creative journaling demonstrations.

The visual guide grew out of a discussion during our previous hang out. Several folks mentioned they use a digital calendar to organise their days and so have no need to produce a monthly spread setting up their month.

This insight prompted me to realise that for me, my monthly calendar in my journal is a kind of scene-setting exercise and a chance for an emotional / mood check-in as much as it is about writing out my appointments and seeing what I’m doing and organising my plans. Since my course already shows you how to set up a monthly calendar and organise your priorities, I decided to use the hang out session to demonstrate making a kind of mood-board / visual guide to the month ahead. This is a suggested activity for folks who don’t need a calendar, but who might enjoy marking the end / beginning of the month in a more visual and playful way.

The images are a mix of rubber stamps I’ve designed myself, mostly stamped onto tissue paper and stuck in with pritt-stick. I then used my sticker-printer to print sticker-captions. The two classes I’m teaching this month – Send more love letters (last night) and Planning the holidays in our journals (15th November) – are represented with stamps and papers. So are various health appointments; continued annoying business-related admin plus my achievements in this area; my intentions to keep up the lovely movement classes I’ve been doing; the joy of edamame beans (which I’m putting in everything since I started reading about perimenopause and diet) and the music I’m loving most of all right now. My visual guide to November also includes suggestions of clearance and space – the beginnings of the idea that I might sell some of the yarn and knitting patterns I can’t use – and the hopeful joy that other things might take their place (woohoo!).

Looking at it makes me feel calm and happy; excited about the future; and also kind of grounded in a certain collage-images-pictures-ideas MOOD. The exact effect of making the visual guide is hard to put into words, which is why it is made of images in the first place: the clue is in the name!

So that’s a tiny taster of the kinds of things we’ve been doing in the Journal with me membership. Back in October I taught a class on how to carve your own rubber stamps, and we also looked at putting together special palettes drawing on some of the classes I created for Colour at Play.

Folks seem to be finding the rhythm of meetings supportive and useful, and we are all doing more journaling because we are doing it together. The magic of meeting regularly is that someone will say “I wrote a love letter to my journal” which inspires someone else to do the same… and someone will say “I don’t need a calendar” sparking the question “how else can we creatively mark the beginning and end of the month?” My visual guide prompted someone to ask if we might do a special collage class and, after polling my members, that’s exactly what we will do now for Marking midwinter – scheduled for 12-1 on December 20th. I’m already looking forward to what I know will be a beautiful moment of calm, inwards focus in the midst of the holiday craziness.

When you subscribe to the membership, you get access to recordings of all the classes so far as well as to the community forum; the dedicated mailing list; and – of course – KNITSONIK Bullet Journaling. I set this membership up to hold our journaling in community; to make space and time to connect over this grounding creative practice; and to create accountability through regular meetings so that the habit sticks. It’s like three nights out a month with friends who journal, and focusing together on how we can use tape and stickers, collage and lists, to show up for ourselves and for each other.

Join us here.

Yours in winter journaling joy xox