A New Journal Page - Holiday Edition

Right off the bat, I'll admit that this new journal page is a little unusual. 

Remember when I made my first Day in the Life page way back in 2011? This new page is a variation on that original one, but with a holiday theme.

In recent years, I have avoided holiday themes in my journals pages. As a general rule, holidays stress me out. Sometimes I have trouble finding the bright sides of holiday celebrations, even though I know they're there. Also, there are a lot of holidays out there and we don't all celebrate the same ones. And even when we do have holidays in common, we celebrate them in different ways.

So, in order to avoid avoiding yet another holiday season, I thought I'd try to make the creation of a new page lots of fun for me by trying something a little different, while at the same time attempting to make it fun for you to journal with, while at the same time aiming to capture a little of the essence of a holiday celebration -- any holiday celebration -- so that you can pick the occasions that matter to you and record the memorable bits as you go.
 
After quite a bit of back and forth with myself, the colour-free version came together and looks like this:

The colourful version is going to be a bit more tricky. A single colour combination isn't going to work.

There are two options that occur to me. The first is to offer only a colour-free version of this page and ask you to add your own colours based on the holiday you're writing about.

The second option, which I think could be fun, is to create a selection of colourful versions. For this option, I'll need your help. Imagine your favourite celebrations of the year. What colour combinations would you like to see? Reds and greens for Christmas? Pastels for Mother's Day?

Let me know in the comments or on Facebook or Twitter and I'll give your suggestions my best shot. I'm not sure how many we'll end up with, but I'll be happy to offer at least a handful.

For now, you'll find the colour-free version here. For colourful options, I'll update as required. I hope you'll stay tuned!

A new journal

I made a new journal!

It's spiral bound and a little bigger than my two previous pocket journals; it's 5.5" x 7" whereas my pocket journals are 4.25" x 5.5".

It's 40 pages long and full of brand new prompts, including a new category of pause and reflect prompts in which you build upon your responses to earlier prompts. (These are my new favourite prompts. I love looking back and looking deeper. Lots of wisdom to be found within.)

I put together two photo montages, to show you a selection of the new prompts. You might notice that the design is a little different from my pocket journals and printables. I took a detour from hand-lettering and created all of my doodles and borders without my pen tablet. It was such fun to take a new direction and I'm really happy with the results. (My next project for the blog involves the pen tablet and a return to hand lettering.)

With this new journal and a couple of new projects in mind for the blog and the shop, I'm going to try, once again, to spend a little more time here and on Facebook and Twitter. I've been back to Pinterest lately and I'd forgotten how inspiring it is to see all of the amazing ideas and beautiful work out there.

Over the past few months, I've been trying my hand at developing an in-person workshop that combines journaling and goal setting. I've delivered it a handful of times and, to be quite honest, I'm not sure where it's headed. There are parts that feel really promising and parts that don't. I'm working on streamlining it and making it as impactful as possible. My primary goal for the workshop is to deliver a course of material that truly inspires people to create, document, actively pursue, and ultimately achieve the goals that matter to them. I'm not quite there yet, so, for now, I'm still plugging away.

I underestimate, at times, how very difficult it can be to launch our ideas out into the world -- to test them and defend them and accept criticism of them and work to improve them. It's exhausting and confidence battering (even confidence obliterating), and yet entirely worth the effort. I look warily forward to more challenges to come.