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!