Making & Keeping Creative Journals

...but what it isn't is a book about writing journals.This is mainly about crafting journals -- that is, putting together paper and covers, stitching and gluing and the craftsy part of creating a physical book. It does give lip service to information on why keep a journal and the different kinds of journals people keep: external or internal journey, healing and insight, confessional, chronicle for future generations, catalyst for creative expression. Techniques like freewriting and list making are mentioned along with narrative description, dreams, and poetry but the emphasis here is on putting together pages and covers; how to make booklets from different kinds of papers, etc.Illustrations are photographs of journals people have made and drawings showing various methods of folding, stitching, joining and binding. There are specific projects that include intricate instructions on how to make different journals: a travel, dream, yoga, poet's, grandmother's, painters, gardener's, bird lover's, etc. journals. The child's summer journal even has a spiral binding. The covers of the reunion journal are two gloves.If you want to hand craft books this should show you how. Each would make a special gift which you could give with pages filled with your own writing or as a blank book.

This is a lovely and inspirational book for making interesting journals. I was pleased to see that the projects in this book were fresh--not the same old thing, revisited. The photographs and examples are so beautiful I found myself thinking, "I want to make this one and this one and this one..."This is probably not the best book for beginning book makers. I would describe myself as an intermediate book maker with several years of experience in binding different types of books. In making the Gardener's Journal, I had some difficulty interpreting some of the illustrations and one of the templates is flat-out wrong; however, these problems did not prevent me from completing the Gardener's journal and the finished product is really beautiful. Also, some of the bindings and materials suggested are tricky. For example, several journals include leather covers and the instructions seem to gloss over what type of leather to use, how to prepare it, etc. For the less commonly used book binding materials, such as embossed metallic foil and dollhouse nails, a list of suppliers would have been extremely helpful--even if I had to go online to access it. On the plus side, this is a great book to get ideas on keeping different types of journals: bird watching journals, gardening journals, etc. Another fresh idea this book provides is the viewpoint of both the journaler and the book maker. The journaler defines the purpose of the journal and the book maker creates a journal to meet that purpose. Very cool.