30 Days of Thanksvember - Days 12 and 13

Day 12 - I am thankful for my creativity. I crochet, sculpt with polymer clay, write, draw, digital scrapbook, make beaded jewellery, and I'm just getting into knitting, sewing, and making little plush things out of felt. I'm beginning to integrate recycling and upcycling into my projects, too.

I've been artistic and creative ever since I can remember. I've never NOT been crafty! My mind is perpetually spinning with ideas, stories, and plans, so getting them out is not only a relief, but a tangible reward! And being creative has always been an escape for me. From life, from depression, from bad times, from myself.

It's a blessing and I can't imagine not being creative, because it's part of who I am.

*See my art here*

*See my ever-growing crochet and knitting projects here*


Day 13 - I am thankful for journals and diaries. Any blank notebook will do. Softcover, hardcover, covers made of raw silk, pretty paper, or leather. Lined or unlined, recycled cotton paper or regular. All of these books have been blank canvases for me, ready for me to spill my soul into. They are healing tools, discovering tools, creative tools and spiritual tools.

I first kept a diary when I was eight years old. It was a little lock-and-key diary, pastel blue in colour, with a fluffy tabby kitten on the cover and gilt page edges. At the age of 11, I used a Lisa Frank 3-ring binder with unicorns on the cover, later switching to a little red notebook where I would draw the daily weather and write about what was on my mind at the moment.

Unfortunately, I tossed those diaries during our move from Kentucky to Virginia in 1996, when I was 12.

In 1998, I started keeping a journal again, and this time I didn't stop. Nor did I toss any of them! I began with composition books and then moved to hardcover. I even did a scrapbook layout about them!


With the exception of a few that didn't make it into the pic, these are all my journals from 1998 to 2010. There have been two more since then!

These journals are full of dreams, realizations, memories, happiness, angst, fury, despair, fear, confusion, sadness, lists, weather, prayer, love, and discovering what mental illness was and how I fit into that category. My journaling slowed down as I began to blog more frequently, but some things are just better left unsaid in a public place, and so it's back to the journals I go, running my pen over their welcoming, awaiting pages.