Monet and Me

are working with Lindsay Ostram's Creative Hand Lettering and Doodling group on Facebook. For the month of January, we'll be making a junk journal or altered book. Lindsay suggested getting a book with less than 200 pages at a thrift shop, yard sale, library sale.

I had a notebook I had purchased at the Dollar Store sitting around that I didn't know what I was going to do with. It will be my junk journal.

The first class was about decorating the book jacket or cover. I happen to really like the cover of the notebook. I did make a marquee to put the title on the front: Junque Journal January 2026

I also decided rather than just playing around in the book, I needed a theme. I think it came from too many years as a computer programmer with linear, analytical thinking. I decided the theme would be Winter colors and whining and complaining about the weather. Because that's so me.

The second day, Lindsay show us how to make paper beads by winding small strips of paper around a skewer. I used a pencil. I added the beads to a bookmark string I added. To keep the beads from falling off, I knotted the string and then used a polar bear snowman earring that I wore once because it was too heavy.

The back of the book had decorated endpages, but they were missing from the front. I photocopied them, printed them out, and glued them to the front cover.

I did a title page spread using a photograph I had taken this week of the snow in my back yard. Snowflake stickers and a small calendar page for January 2026 made interesting decorations.

Lindsay had found a quote from her book that she printed out. I wrote out: Now is the Winter of our discontent (Shakespeare's Richard III). So me.

I like how the pages don't need to be finished right away. I want to cover up the black boarder on the calendar and maybe add some thing. Maybe icicles.

We also folded a page over to make a pocket to hold the Prompts for the month. I covered the pages with some Winter themed paper and added enough dots to make signs for the polar bears to spell out Prompts.

We also spent time figuring out how many pages needed to glue together for a substrate and if pages needed to be removed.  We needed 25 pages as there is no live session on the weekends. I decided to make my book to fit the entire month of January.