Vintage Journal: Heart-care and Earth-care
Introduction: Vintage Journal: Heart-care and Earth-care
Journaling can be essential because It is a gateway into yourself, finding yourself, affirming yourself, and just being more aware of how your thoughts, feelings, what's going on with your life, and so on. It's just a lot that you can do with paper and writing.
One of the most common things that go on when you are struggling with mental health is that you feel like no one understands you or you have a hard time expressing yourself and that's why journaling can really be a great tool because it can give you a way to express yourself. Sometimes we don't talk about things if we are like "Okay, wait. I am not even sure if I feel this way. I don't wanna say anything and jump the gun". Well, if you have your journal, you can absolutely say whatever you want to say, it doesn't have to be concise, it doesn't have to be fully formulated yet. You can just write. It's okay.That's why journaling can help you manage your anxiety, reduce your stress, and cope with depression.
Journaling helps you prioritize your fears, your problems, and your concerns. When you've already designated the time for journaling and so you're one with your thoughts. Like, this is your time to you set apart to write. When you are writing, the first thing sometimes that we want to do was write about what we're struggling with. And so if you have that time designated all the time, it's a time for you to talk about your problems, your fears, your concerns because it's your time for yourself. You are not pushing it aside, you are not caring for others, you are not doing all the day-to-day tasks that keep us away from focusing on ourselves.
But other than that, journaling can also an act of earth-care. How is that? Let's find out.
This tutorial consists of 4 main steps:
1. Preparing the vintage papers
2. Vintage Decorations
3. 487
How I made my nook (If you already have a notebook, you can skip this step)
4. Start Journaling
Supplies
* notebook
* teabags
* scissors
* papers (receipts, newspapers, printed papers, etc)
* tray
* glue
* marker/pen
Step 1: Preparing the Vintage Papers
Materials: tea bags, scissors, tray, hot water, papers (printed, receipts, newspaper, etc)
You can make your vintage paper using tea or coffee. But I prefer tea because I am not a coffee person, and with tea, I can upcycle the tea bags.
The first thing is, whenever I make a cup of tea, I collect the tea bags and dry them naturally. The stain of the tea will show on the bags after one or two days. When the tea bags are completely dry, cut the bag and collect the tea leaves in a cup/jar. Save the bags for later.
Prepare hot water in a container, I recommend you use a rectangle tray so that that paper will fit perfectly. Then pour the tea leaves into the hot water, and stir it. I added 10 tablespoons of tea leaves into 400 ml hot water. Just make sure that the water turns brown. The amount of water and tea leaves depends on how many papers will you soak.
Usually, I soak the papers for 5 hours, but sometimes for a night. Then I dry the papers by hanging them (it's okay if the papers are thorn). It only took about 2 hours for the papers to completely dry (sunny and windy day). Your vintage papers are ready.
After the vintage papers are made, I usually let the water evaporate and then use the tea leaves in the tray to fertilize the plant, or compost the tea leaves :D
Step 2: Vintage Decorations
Materials: Teabags, marker pen, scissors, stamp
For decorating, you can use the previous tea bags and draw something on them. Usually, I draw leaves and flowers, sometimes I wrote some words on them, even use a silicon stamp to add various things. The teabags are my favorite because of their transparency and also the stain is really natural.
Other than that, upcycling the tea bags for journal decoration is a nice thing because several tea bag brands use polypropylene, a sealing plastic, to keep their tea bags from falling apart. This plastic is not recyclable or biodegradable. So, even when you put all your used tea bags in the food waste or compost heap, it can lead to plastic pollution, as not all of it will be broken down. 294