Crafty Idea No.1: Personalized Notebooks, Journals and Memory Books

Five or six years ago, I found an old box of pictures from the 60s and 70s. They were of my parents, my grandfather, aunts and uncles back in the day when they were young and full of mischief. The photographs themselves were square, kinda cool in a retro way. Also, it was neat to see my parents in their twenties and thirties... the clothes, the hair, the sideburns... jeepers! I decided to use them in my journal but I didn't want to ruin the only copies we had, so I went to Staples and had them colour photocopied. The colour and atmosphere of the photographs turned out incredible and didn't even look like a copy at all. I even found some REALLY old photographs from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth of my relatives. Some were from the old country in Europe and several of them were taken in Canada. Again, I just photocopied them, still using the colour copier even though they were black and white because the image comes out really crisp. These photographs added so much charm and history to my journals that I started to brainstorm and rummage around in my shelves for something else to personalize my notebooks. I soon began to do colour copies of Waterhouse, Dali, and other paintings. They made beautiful covers and, to finish it off, I had them laminated. I did colour copies of my favourite novels, the covers of cd jackets, illustrations of favourite childhood storybooks, comic books I used to read when I was in grade school. Of course, if you were to do the same, your image library would be entirely different. Search through old photo albums and see what you find. You might come across a picture of your father in a pastel coloured polyester suit, which may be traumatizing, but that's the fun of it. Dig deep enough and the most interesting things can rise to the surface. You could use photographs of your own work to the pages of your journal and layer it with even more colour and imagery.

Check it out: Making Memory Books and Journals by Hand , Thunder Bay Press. It is full of inspiring ideas and cool techniques. One of the artists uses old corks from whine bottles to make modern stamps with plain black ink. Very cool.

Speaking of imagery and colour, a long while ago I came across a newspaper article about a collaboration between Salvador Dali and Walt Disney. This seemed like an odd pair but full of possibility. Who knew? Anyhoo, it's actually quite beautiful and, in true Dali style, very bizarre but I wouldn't have it any other way. Check out the video, Destino. It's quite the artistic project.