Portable Kit: Take 2

The ingenious idea of using a travel bathroom bag is a great idea for storing your scrapbooking/smash booking supplies when on the go...however we've found a new use for it...as a travel bathroom bag lol. Hubby and I often travel hours away from our home for numerous days at a time and having a small pouch to hold all of our things is a bit impractical, so we've decided to use the travel bathroom bag for what it was intended for. Boo-urns for my supplies.

However...while cleaning out my MONSTER of a bedroom closet, I stumbled upon a bible cover I had bought when my neighbor (more or less) dragged me to a "Christian" Convention in Toronto a few years ago. I mean, I had a bible, but no cover for it...and wanted to blend in (sue me lol).

...and while cleaning out this monster and stumbling on this find...I had yet another brainstorm: SMASH BOOKING!!!

All of my goodies seen here fit in this book (and I have room to spare...for when my books grow)

In the case (blue thing, bottom left corner) I have my colored pens, colored pencils, glue tape, two pens, two pencils, eraser, sharpener, a small smash book I am going to use to document my travels in a couple months, and a spare book in case I want to add more or inspiration strikes.

It's yet another stroke of genius for storing your portable smash book items. You can find these covers in book stores, Christian supply stores or even Amazon.

Portable Kit

I love pinterest. It's an awesome site filled with genius ideas, and one genius idea was a smash book travel kit, made from a toiletries bag. This blew my mind so much I had to go out and get one of my own. While the original poster of this idea only spent $14, I had to spend a couple of dollars more...but that's ok for such a genius idea.

At the moment, my scrap/smash booking supplies were sitting in a collapsible box; just thrown in there. I've somewhat organized the smash book kit I created of my own into sections. One section has all my sticker books, one section contains my scraps of scrapbooking paper, and the outside section contains my pens, pencils, bits and pieces (in the soap box), glue and scissors (I wish though I could fit my ruler in there somewhere).

Here is the original idea's site:
http://iowajewel.typepad.com/blog/2013/04/on-the-go-travel-smash-book-kit.html

...and here is my travel kit:

I may go back and re-organize everything, I just wanted to see if I could fit everything I thought was important for my crafting into it. And so far so good.

Composition Smash Book

I have taken my new interest in Smash Booking to new arenas. I've put my BoS Smash Book on hold until I can get a better grasp on this whole concept, and I think I'm almost there.

For the past couple of weeks, I have been pasting, and printing, drawing and writing random stuff into a composition notebook I bought from Dollarama (a local dollar store). In fact most of the stuff I've "smashed" into this book has been from this store lol. While it doesn't exactly look like much has been "smashed" into this book, I still think I've come a good fair way in regards to making this book. (You can click on the pictures below to have a closer look)

These three pictures below are the cover of my "composition" book. I took some black and white scrapbook paper and pasted it to the cover, then added some contrast with darker pink scrapbook paper. I really like this cover, but I think it needs something more...maybe a title or some embellishments. Keeping it semi-closed is embroidery thread...I may upgrade this to ribbon later on, as the embroidery thread likes to tangle.

This is the inside cover and first page of my book...while I think more needs to be added, I think it looks good. Naturally because it's a smash book, I can come back later and pin, stick, and glue whatever I want to add to this. I think this book may be a never ending process lol.

(Left) This is a random "challenge" page. The challenge said "Weather Today". It was April 25, sunny, and 7C (44F).
(Right) I thought this page just looked nice...I haven't put anything on it yet...not sure if I'm even going to...I like the swirl in the middle.

(Left) This was an inspired page. I saw a version of it on Pinterest so I thought I would do something similar. It's a page on the animals that live in my neighborhood. I have a lot more animals that live in my neighborhood than the ones I've put on this page, but these were the ones that I could remember at the time lol.
(Right) A quotes page. Looking at the smaller picture now, the corner curls kind of look like Quotation marks...this was totally random, I didn't notice this until just now lol. Anyways, it includes a quote from The Lord of the Rings in which Gandalf is trying to comfort Pippin when discussing the afterlife. I think it's a beautiful quote. The second quote is from Homer. I've always found this one to be quite funny lol.

(Left) This is a junk envelope. I have one thing so far that I want to put into it...the brochure for the Speedway just down the road from where I live. We only started going last year, and had such a blast that I can't wait for this season. I'll store the brochure for the starting schedule here.
(Right) Another Pinterest inspiration, I tried to make a 3D image of my hand...I kind of smudged it a bit while gluing pages together, but the idea is there lol.

I really like how this one turned out. I spread this one out over two pages. It's more or less a description on how to smash your book. Kinda in the middle of the book, but I didn't think of this until this point. I'm looking forward to actually "smashing" stuff into this book :)

(Left) This is a random page on what my Tuesday consisted of. Another inspired page. It took me a few hours to do (I'd say the whole day, but I had errands to do that day). I can remember what I was doing when I made almost each design/comment of this page: the border I was watching Dr. Phil lol, the "Tuesday" I was watching "Kitchen Nightmares" lol, etc
(Right) Again found on Pinterest (omg I love this site), I found journal prompt pages. I printed one out and filled in the blanks. I LOVE this idea...I have such a hard time writing in journals, and these "fill in the blank" journal prompts are fun :)

This is my May calendar. I originally wanted to make a date book out of this Composition book, but discovered there weren't enough pages for what I wanted to do, and because the calendar was already drawn in, I figured I'd create a section on May. Not really intended but a nice addition. I can maybe pin some examples from the tasks I've done this month here. 

I have a LOT more to do...so I'll update this as things go along, instead of making hundreds of separate posts. Be sure to come back to this post in the future to see what I've added. :)

Smash Pages

I just wanted to take a moment to show off one of my pages (you can see a couple more if you see my other blog)

Here is one of my pages for my Smash Book of Shadows. This is a Prosperity spell page (spell found here). The decoration of this page is inspired by numerous sources, mostly found on Pinterest. 

I created the background myself by pasting chapters from "Pagan Scriptures" onto a blank word document, washing out a "Goddess" symbol, then printing it out on a brownish card paper. I then burned the edges with a candle, printed out a picture of the bottle, listed the needed items, added some herbs, small instructions, and detailed the title of the spell and the washed out image. 

I think I'm getting better at this whole thing, each time I am more and more impressed with myself. 

Just thought I'd share :)

Adding Pages to a Spiral Notebook

Have you ever started writing a journal, or started a Book of Shadows in a spiral notebook only to want to add a page of notes but realized there is no spare page between pages you've written on??

Have you ever tried using paperclips??? I'm not talking about pinning them directly to the previous or page after, but looping the paper clip around the wire in the spine!

While making my "Smash" Book of Shadows, I came to a block in creation. I wanted to add a section on stones, but didn't want to glue page after page of stone information to the pages already included in the notebook. Sooooo...after getting inspiration from Pinterest, I took three paperclips (per page) and clipped them into my book.

Voila...instant page insertion.
For the type of book I have, I can pry open the spine and remove and move around the pages, but I've done this before only to have the spine wire become warped and bent, no longer allowing free movement of the pages. With this, I can freely add pages...and if I don't want these pages in these spots in this book, I can always take them out and move them.

So if you have a spiral notebook, and you want to add information to your book, fret not, you can use paperclips to hold them in :)

MC/WUP Crossover Post: SMASH BOOKING!!!

***This post will be posted both here and on my other blog: Walking the Unbeaten Path***

OMG I've never heard of this. Smash Booking. Kind of like deconstructed scrap-booking. I think this is almost the same kind of design and set up many Pagans use to construct their books of shadows...by randomly placing items and photos and discussing the subject of each page.

I think this is an absolutely great idea, not only for (un) scrap bookers, but for Pagans as well who just don't know how to create a book of shadows that doesn't look like a boring manual (like mine end up looking).

I'm going experiment and try to participate in a month challenge and create a smash book (once I gather some items). I'll certainly be sure to keep people up to date on them.

Know that, like scrap booking, you can "Smash" book on just about anything from vacations, to events like birthdays, graduations, anniversaries, or even just day-to-day activities. I hope this can be inspirational to all.
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Ok, I've found a 30 day challenge I'm going to do. All the topics seem to resonate with me well, so I'll do them. If all goes well with this challenge, I'll figure out how I'll do a Book of Shadows in this same format. I'm not going to do it yet, I'll wait until the first of April...just seems to make sense that way.

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Ok...I've changed my mind (something I tend to do a lot of). Now, considering I've found maybe four "challenges" and other "inspirational" ideas...I'm just going to do a completely random smash book, using these "challenge" suggestions. I might do one page a day, OR I might do two or three should inspiration strike. Look, I've already started hee hee hee:

Now, I literally just started, and this was the first page I did. I made another one, about me...but I'm gonna keep that one private. I also added my own little embellishment that says "SMASH" to the right side of this list. I think this might be fun. But I need more stuff. Boo-urns to not having money.