 are you today? Alright this is for you all in my Facebook group or one of my sister groups only. The videos will including this one be on YouTube but they will probably be unlisted and the only way to get the link is to be a member one of the groups. Alright so what is this all about? So I've been documenting my year in a journal since about 2014 officially. These are those journals. Now when I first started doing it I was using the small delusions journal which are these two and let's see and I was dating them. That's 2015 this one must be 2014 and I was doing and still kind of do part our journal, part smashbook, part photo album documenting my year in bits and pieces, some journaling where I can squeeze it in, things that I find, things that come across my desk or my life. In the first two years I was really good about dating the pages. In my current version of doing these I haven't been dating but I'll show you why. You know there's a million different ways that you could do this and you know different just different things, different events. We went out to dinner, we went on vacation. I have a habit now of just picking up little bits and pieces pretty much everywhere that I go and there's you know there's pockets everywhere with things tucked inside of them. There's there's tip-ins and you know flip-outs and these are really cool. They're like picture slides. I don't even know if they're gonna show up on camera. I don't know maybe if I put them on something white. Nope. Let's see. Oh you can kind of see it's a bird. Anyway you can get them like strips like this. They're like bookmarks at Hearst Castle but I just I pick up little bits and pieces everywhere we go and then I carry this around with me traveling and I put things in it as I'm going. You can hear with the creaking that this could use a little bit more wax. There was something I meant to tip in and I just never did but so it's just kind of sitting in there which is fine. So this is 2014 and this was the first year I really did this and I got the idea for doing it from a number of different places. There's a lot of different people out there teaching classes and showing you how to do this kind of journaling or something regarding documenting your life like the documented life. None of them quite do it the same way I do. Everybody does it a little bit differently but my idea is for us to start a group-wide program that involves us sharing different ideas. I really have to wax this one. Sorry I'm distracted by the fact that some of these pages need waxing desperately so I'll be doing that as soon as I shut the camera off. Then involve us sharing how we're doing this, how we're going to do this and sharing pages that you feel comfortable sharing and ideas for what to collect and how to stick it in and that sort of thing. I really want us to encourage each other to use our journals for more than just creating pretty pictures. Let's combine the idea of doing a scrapbook with doing a smashbook with doing in our journal and why can't we put it all together in one place. That's 2014. This is the next year. This is 2015 and in this one there were some things I wanted in the journal that wouldn't fit and so these journals have a pocket in them so I put them there. These are my little daily sketchbooks where I do it literally do a little quick sketch every day. Some of them turn out well, some of them don't and I started it in 2015 at the end of the year so I wanted to keep those in this journal that documents the rest of that year and there really wasn't any place in here to put them so I put them in this pocket that's in the front of the journal and again this year starts off very similarly to the last one. You know I've put receipts in pockets, created the pockets out of things that I had or tea bags or a favorite thing to make a pocket out of. This one as you can tell by how much less creaking it's doing has a lot more wax on it so I need to wax the 2014 journal. I have a little small photo printer that I take with me when I go out of town and do different events and I print the pictures with it and I stick them in here and this has made it through you know a number of, both of these have a number of you know plane rides and boat trips and different things. They do very well. I usually carry the journal itself in a backpack and then I carry a little suitcase full of supplies to journal in here with. I love to do pages memorializing people who I know who have passed. I started it in this one with my grandmother and that's what prompted me to start the whole idea of journaling my life and with my grandmother's passing in the beginning of 2014. This is a page dedicated to her. There's a couple pages in here dedicated to her and this is another friend of ours who passed in 2015, someone else. They wait a few that passed close together and this is just a nice way to document that event and different important events. What I discovered by doing this was I was able to document important events that were happening. I'm notoriously bad in my family for remembering birthdays. I am notoriously bad about that and this is a way that's helped me remember those things and document those things and keep track of those things and have a permanent memory of them. This is 2015. My problem with the delusions journal is the same thing that I love about it, which is how fat it is by the end of the year and the end of the journal. As you can tell, you're starting to work on pages that look like this and so you end up having to do this with your journal, which is okay for working on it and looking through it, but when you're talking about taking it with you on trips so you can journal while you're away from home, carrying this like that in your backpack is that's kind of a pain. So this year, when the documented life started and they said that they were going to work in a binder, I thought that was a brilliant idea and I already had these little binders from Michaels and a couple of them and I went out and picked a couple more up of them up because I realized I could just do a few months in one binder and then move to a new binder and that's what I've done. So this one is January, February, and March. I made my own inserts using copies of my own artwork. I've put little pockets into the journal, into these journals where I could and in the pockets are more of my little daily sketch notebooks for that month. I have sections for each month so I don't have to worry so much about dating the pages because I know everything that's in this section has to do with January. So this whole section has to do with January of this year and I made sure to include a calendar page in these so that I could write down different important things that happened in that month in this year and that for me that was really important. So I did switch it up a bit and I'm really loving journaling this way. This is a scrap of paper that I did on some live broadcast I think and I just used it and stuck it in there. Programs from different events. There's another just random scrap of paper. Some candy that my daughter brought me back from Spain. I think that was Spain or from something. Different events that we went and like where we went out to dinner. We went walking, went hiking. Pictures that I took here's February. I made I had some of these pages with little pockets in them so I ordered prints from Instagram and they come on these little squares and I have a whole bunch of them so I thought I would use them in here in these little pockets and document some of my favorite memes. Some that I've created some from others in different artwork and things. I've had companies send me things to try on camera and some of them send me little notes so I put them in here. Why not? I have discovered that I still have a habit of putting a lot of things in my journal and as you'll see when I flip this one up they get really fat. There's still all kinds of you know I make pockets out of a candy wrapper and stick the this is from my husband. This was the Valentine's Day card and the note from him is inside. Different things. Here's another sketchbook. Now we're getting into March. This is the month when we did our little art retreat in Las Vegas with Cindy Eider, Michelle Mitchell and and Williamson and we did a lot of fun things and this was where the journal started to get really full and I made a pocket here out of an envelope and then this was something that our room key card came in and I got an extra little folder and I used it as like a mini album and I documented different things that we did on the different pages and journaled on it, put pictures on it and I did both sides and the nice young man at the counter even gave me an extra key card to like use to you know for gluing and still in here. I didn't have the heart to take it out. This is our favorite, our favorite flyer. I mean you know who doesn't love a good boomerang. So anyway, no we didn't go see the show we just like the flyer. So I saved you know little bits of everything. You know the tag from my suitcase, the luggage tag, the wrapper from the sushi that we got the first night that we were there. This was off of a flyer or magazine or something I forget now. This is Aaron, Imperfect Impulses. We did meet up with him while we were there and yes the two girls are pinching his face cheeks and I'm not I'm pinching a cheek too but it's not a face cheek. This is pictures of our tattoos. We got all about the three of us got tattooed while we were there. This is a label from a bottle of wine that we shared. Just different fun things. Takeout menus and labels from things that we bought and notes and here's some more of the printstagram cards. Some that have my artwork on them and some that have memes on them. More of another reprint of my artwork and I stuck you know a label on there with a word that I found that I liked and some washi tape and scraps of paper and this little modeling paste Butterfly, Lacey Butterfly that Anne Williamson gave me. I stuck that on there. We went to Viva Las Vegas Stamps and there's another fun postcard. We saw Mr. Here is our the calendar for that month and different fun things that you know I documented the important things up to me that month which was the trip to Las Vegas my brother-in-law's wedding and my mother-in-law's birthday. There's another picture of us with Aaron a closer shot. There's us in the hotel room. There's the four of us hanging out in the car. Here's a tag I did with different things from that week and what we did that week and it was a really tiring week for me because we flew in I flew back a day early before everybody else and flew into Sacramento to go to my brother-in-law's wedding before I could ever come home and I was let's just say I was tired. My bags got inspected so of course I saved all of that because you know that's what you do right and things for my brother-in-law's wedding so I've been doing this this year for 2016 and I'm going to continue now. This one only has two months. I am noticing just like with the other journals that I save a lot of things or can and my journals sometimes some months have more stuff going on get really really fat because I just am saving all kinds of things and taping them in and it really I love the chunky look it's hard to take around with you so for 2016 I'll be doing something a little bit different but maybe you all have a way that you are going to do it too maybe it's completely different than what I'm doing maybe you're following a program really closely like documented life yeah whatever it is I would love it if you decided to share with me in the Facebook groups what you're doing and on not on a daily or weekly basis just like once a month do a flip of what you've done this is our trip to Alaska share creating a page share your ideas whatever it is that would be great I think it would be fabulous and it would it's I think it would be wonderful to encourage everyone to do with something a little bit more with their art journaling and documenting their year and recording their year I don't know what we're going to call it yet so if you all have any ideas let me know I have some ideas of what I'm going to do for the 2017 setup they're not completely fleshed out yet but when they are I will be letting you all know this is just sort of a flip and a share of my current year's journal and prior years I would love it if anyone who wants to share in participating in our whatever we end up calling it program here that we do in the Facebook groups to let me know message me and let me know admins of all the groups are welcome to be some of the first ones to join in that would be fun and let's see what we come up with and even if you don't participate documenting your life and documenting your year keeping you know journaling your year whatever you want to call it I think is a fabulous idea and if you do nothing else think about going over to the documented life and joining them and doing their their version whatever their new version is going to be but this is a lot of fun and I find that this is easier to take with me on vacation because it's thinner but it's still too big so I have some ideas of how I'm going to do 2017 that will make it even easier to take around and travel with it but also to store it so as soon as I have those fleshed out and I'm ready to set up for 2017 there'll be a new video look for that towards the end of this year probably like in October November ish in the meantime anybody who wants to join me in this sort of video challenge again it would be right now my thought is that we would do it in the Facebook groups only and that we would load the videos to YouTube but have them unlisted of course we can change our mind on that but I would love this is sort of an all a call out to people who want to help me share the love of documenting our lives and our year yeah all right that's it for today don't forget the most important thing