Journaling supplies i keep close at hand
First published on August 7, 2024. (See Wordpress post)
So a dear friend asked me recently how to organise her desk to help her get back into the habit of journaling regularly. What supplies do I have to hand, in easy grabbing reach, that make journaling so easy in my daily pattern…
Well, that’s a good blog post idea, I thought! So after I wrote back to my pal, I’ve taken some photos to share the same advice with you all.
1. My current journal. It lives right there on my desk, easy to access.
2. My small pink journaling pouch. Which is a Delfonics utility pouch, size small, measuring 195x142x55mm. Inside that you will find a smaller MUJI pencil pouch that has all my favourite pens and pencil in, plus a small glue stick. Also a teeny tiny cutting mat, and the smallest rotary cutter I own plus a tiny quilting ruler that came free on the front of a magazine. (These three things I use to chop down photos and ephemera.) Also a little pair of Tim Holtz snips. Having this small pouch packed with these things makes it very grabbable for journaling on the go! (I’d add in a selection from 4&5 to add in before I took it outside.)
3. My Canon Selphy Square printer (usually in a case that has its charging cable plus spare paper and ink for it in). So I can quickly print photos off my mobile to stick into my journal.
4. A pouch (that opens super wide) of washi tape – good for tip-ins and page desolation.
5. My sticker album. This slip album holds a lot of my fave vinyl stickers and also my fave PET tapes (I cut off one loop, then cut it into lengths that fit the width of the album). I use PET tape to decorate my pages, brighten up a boring page/day.
6. Watercolours. Personally I like to stencil big numbers for my journal entry date, and then paint them in with shimmery metallic watercolours. So there is metallic paint on my desk, along with the paint I use to prep my pages. (I find a paint plopped page less daunting to write on than a blank page.)
7. Date stamp and an old black tombow. As well as painting a big number, I like to stamp the full date (day, month, year) small m, at the top of an entry. I’m often too lazy to get out an ink pad and just use my old tombow to ink the stamp (shhhh, don’t tell my die hard stamping friends)!
But of course, you don’t need all of these things. All you need is a journal (whatever that looks like, it doesn’t have to be a fancy brand – it can be a cheap inbound notebook from the pound shop) and a pen you really like writing with left on top of it. Put that somewhere you “rest”. Might be on your bedside table, your desk or your lounge coffee table. Then hopefully you will be more likely to pick it up and write in it.
