step two in the I am a Hoarder series....

I am a firm believer in the premise that the unexamined life is not worth living... hmmm spell check doesn't like the word unexamined.  I certainly think it is a valid word, if not a way to live :-)

In any case.  Years ago... Many many years ago I fell into the book The Artist's Way.  As a result of that I started doing the Daily Pages... 3 pages of handwritten braindump first thing in the morning. It was a habit that stuck and of course generates enormous numbers of pages.  I burn them, or otherwise destroy them on a semi regular basis but they do pile up.  I find them very helpful in purging a lot of things that I might otherwise obsess about.

I haven't purged in a while, so this is the current iteration:

I need to get rid of them soon, as the iron on the right side... its the best use I have found for an iron in years... is failing to hold them up and is getting crowded out of the windowsill. 

As you can see, tags go here too...Most of them are just the dates covered but every once in a while I add "big ideas" or whatever. 

Hoarders can be neat, but they don't have to iron.....

Hi, My name is Jordi and I am a hoarder...of sorts

I did feel the need to qualify the title because I live in a fairly clean home and there are no stashes of gross stuff, but I do hoard some things because "they may come in handy some day".

I was watching Hoarders or whatever the TV show is called the other day (OK, I was watching it because there was no channel playing old Law and Order shows) and I heard a guy who had a yard and a house you could not get into say exactly that phrase and it made me quiver with fear.

So I thought I would start documenting what I DO hoard... and you can judge for yourselves...

So this is area number 1. I have a few little machines (not quite as many as Gill!) that I use regularly and my absolute favorite is my Cinch ... probably not the most sophisticated binding machine in the world etc. but it is little, works well and does exactly what I want to do easily.  I have a zillion of those red coils and I am going to be binding using them forever.

Also, if you forget how to punch holes in larger pieces of paper because it has been 2 weeks since you last did it, it tells you right there on the machine how to do it.  What more could you ask??

I have taken a couple of online classes... You can see Jane Davies name prominently displayed on the tags there.  I tend to print out what I do in the class and the lessons so I can go back to them when the class is over and then I bind them all together.  The others are largely the result of a class I took years ago from SharonB which I don't think she teaches anymore but it was from this perspective.  She is a big advocate of keeping only one "journal" and putting EVERYTHING in the same place and letting the ideas cross pollinate with your grocery lists.  So there are dates and then there are things I might want to look up later written on the tags hanging off each one. 

I think this probably is a bit neat to qualify as a true hoard, but it is MY hoard and I love seeing them every day.  That was the other thing that the hoarder said... sigh.

A NewArt Journal

I made this Journal quite a while ago, out of a bunch of paint sample brochures that I got at the hardware store. They are different sizes, some have rounded corners, all of them had glued on paint samples, and I spread paint over all of them to start with.

It has been sitting around, mostly because I found it intimidating!  It is big, and it has mostly 3 fold pages, which I have not dealt with a lot before.  I guess I needed to ponder it for a while.   I loved the choices I made in binding it, and I will show you that at a later point, but I am going to post a few pages here now to push me to keep going.

This is a look at the whole spread:

Left side:

Center spread:

Right side: