Smashbook!

I've kept a journal pretty much since the age of ten. I now have a biased record of my life from fifth grade and it is so entertaining to flip through every once and a while and read a few pages. I believe that one journal, emblazoned with a smiling picture of Winnie the Pooh, reads, "I found a dead bird today." I'm not sure why that was a noteworthy event but it is in there.

So as a avid journal-writer (usually) that kept with the blank, lined page, I was a little skeptical that I would even need this thing called a Smashbook that I saw advertised at Michael's one day. But, then one of the blogs that I read, Happy Together, had a post about the author's Smashbook and all the awesome things she collected in it.  I knew then that I had to have one because I have a bunch of miscellaneous things accumulating in a shoebox that I want to keep that doesn't fit anywhere. 

And my Smashbook is pretty much perfect for everything I want to keep. And for $12.99 it's around the same price I'd pay for regular journals at Barnes & Noble (which are usually much more than that anyway). 

There's a bunch of different themed books, I got the "doodle style" with the red spine and a few extra notepads that contain sheets of paper that give me spaces for quotes and other things.

The pen is glue on one side and a pen on the other, ingenious. 

All my trip items I tend to save like cards, postcards, tickets, maps and such fit perfectly and beautifully in my new Smashbook.

Or things I want to save out of my Psych magazines that I use for self-diagnoses... :p I hate keeping around magazines forever and now I don't have to! I can just clip out what I want to save and toss the rest. 

This is such an awesome idea, a book perfectly suited to my journal-writing self. I'm surprised I didn't hop on the bandwagon earlier!