It’s basically a journal for scrapbookers. Instead of having lined or blank paper like your average journal, it’s got lots of different fancy patterned pages in it, and it comes with a pen that has a glue stick on the other end. Being sort of enamored with the whole art journal idea, I figured that getting one of these might be a good way to stick a baby toe into it. The only way I’ve ever journaled before is in a linear fashion, and I’ve always been all weird about doing things like drawing or writing things in big letters or pasting things in. The Smash book leans itself really well to get out of that liner mindset… Most of the pages are different, so if you want you can just pick a background that speaks to you and work off from there.
So, I was pretty excited to get my hands on this book and start journaling and pasting things into it, and I had big plans! My book was going to be totally as awesome as all of the people who’d submitted to the Smash Stories Blog.
When I finally got it, I found myself flipping through it and looking at all of the pages in awe, and then started feeling a pit of dread in my stomach. Despite the fact that the outside of the book seems to be covered with encouragements to use the book how you like and how there’s no right and no wrong, I found myself seriously intimidated. How was I possibly going to make my book as awesome as the books I’d seen on the Internet? My handwriting sucks. I don’t have a gigantic stash of scrapbooking papers at my disposal. What if I write something stupid? I couldn’t bring myself to do anything with it. If I’d been left to my own devices, it’d probably be left untouched indefinitely while I tried to convince myself that I wasn’t going to ruin it by writing in it.
However, while I was agonizing about these things I also happened to be explaining to James what a Smash book was, and when I got to the part where I admitted that I was afraid to deface it and he just said, “Give me that,” and grabbed a sharpie and started writing in it, and when he finished, he handed it back and was all, “Now, you don’t have to be afraid of starting.”
I looked at what he’d written and a fleeting moment of frustration at how imperfect it looked on the page. His uneven text askew over the top of the page, and another piece written with the book turned upside down… but despite the frustration regarding the imperfection, he was right… I wasn’t afraid of writing in the book anymore because I didn’t have anything to lose anymore. His handwriting might be imperfect and he might choose to write something unevenly on a page differently than I would, but it wasn’t wrong. It just was. So, I picked up my pen and started writing and reassured myself not to be scared.
I’ve made lots of mistakes already with it. I keep spelling things wrong when I write in the book. Most embarrassingly, I spelled something wrong when I was starting to decorate the cover which I didn’t really have room to make a nice recovery with… but, I’ve realized the past few days that this is going to be an exercise in patience and in letting go of perfection. In twenty years from now, I’ll look back on this book and smile… Happy that we took the time to capture some of the memories and I won’t care that our handwriting sucks or that I can’t spell worth a damn.
Yep! I hate scribbling in books too, mainly journals, because usually I pick pretty journals, I don’t land up maintaining them for more than a week…and then I am left with a really pretty book and garbage written inside it. I like the idea of a smash book though, I’m going to google it now
I feel that way with most of my journals… I think it’s because I tend to try and start them out with a theme, and then usually a week or a month or two into them I get bored with that theme, and then I don’t want to finish that book because that book is for that specific theme. I have a lot of half empty journals.
I totally hear you. I call myself a “recovering perfectionist,” but it’s a very slow recovery. Perfectionism is exhausting isn’t it? James sounds like a keeper.
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I had never heard of Smash books until I saw this and I totally googled them and bought one on Amazon just now. I had always wanted to scrapbook all of my random photos and items saved from special outings but, to me the idea of a regular scrapbook is so formal. I feel almost like a Smash book is a scrapbook meeting a wreck this journal.
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I too was extremely intimidated by my SMASH*Book when I first got it. It took me awhile to start smashing things into it too. I was worried I would ruin the pretty pages. -.- After I smashed and resmashed my first two pages it started getting easier. Especially after I smashed my hobbies page. My book is now pretty fat with all of the items I’ve smashed into it. I’m excited to see how it will look once I’m done. I’m leaving the cover until the end.