Sunday, March 25, 2012

Inspired by

I was inspired by my favorite enabler to start journaling again. Janet introduced me to Smash Books, and I was smitten! It's a perfect blend of journaling and scrapbooking--more fun than the former, less fiddly than the latter. It's not really a new concept, but the entire Smash Book line is really attractively packaged, and I'm a sucker for their marketing. The only thing was that I had a hard time letting go of being able to control which papers were in the books and in which order.

Then I stumbled upon the Arc notebooks at Staples. These are essentially a more affordable version of the Circa notebooks I had coveted from Levenger catalogs years ago, and they're similar to Rollabind systems. As far as I can tell, they're all interchangeable. I love the flexibility of this system!

I settled on a pink leather junior-sized book (8.5" x 5.5"). I'm calling these my Smarc books--part Smash, part Arc!

As you can see, there's a pocket in the front and a pen loop in the back. The loop is not big enough to hold a Smash Pen, but it'll fit most other pens. The Arc notebooks come with ruled paper, but I took some of it out and added pretty printed cardstock. These were on sale at Michael's for just $10 for a pack of 48 sheets. I cut the cardstock to the size of the notebook and got 2 pages per sheet, with some decorative scraps left over. If I had gotten 8.5" x 11" cardstock, it would have been an even easier cut to get 2 perfectly-sized pages from one sheet. Then, I used the Arc paper punch to get my cardstock pages to pop right into the notebook. If I change my mind about the order of the sheets, it's easy to rearrange them.


I picked up a pocket divider to store little scraps in the back of the notebook, as well as a a zip pocket that can be added to the top of the notebook for journaling on the go!



I got some other fun Smash accessories--pads of journaling prompts, washi tape, clips, and paper pockets. I also picked up some other cute office products and brought out some of my scrapbooking supplies to assemble a little kit. The girls and I have had fun setting aside a bit of time most evenings to work on our journals!






7 comments:

  1. That looks like so much fun, especially to do with the girls!

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  2. I'm completely inspired! I hope you blog about yours once you start adding to your notebooks.

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    1. Thanks, Evelyn! I probably won't be blogging about my entries since my journal is more personal than what I'd want to post here. But I will say I've been thoroughly enjoying it! It's a bit of right brain and left brain stimulation at the same time--kind of like knitting!

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  3. While I might enable (often), you never fail to re-inspire when you tweak things! I love it!

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  4. This inspired me to create my own. I was smash-booking before there was this system for it in bound art journals. I like the concept, but your tweaks make the process brilliant and innovative. I LOVE the flexibility of the Arc system and have now converted my mom and sister to this. I'm going to add this to pinterest in hopes that others will see how AMAZING this can be.

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    1. Thank you, Tara! I'm so glad it's working for you too!

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