Smashed Seattle

It's been a while since I shared some pages from my Smashbook with you, hasn't it? I've shared bits from my Smashbook here and here before.

Since I've been in the Seattle area, I've added a few things to my Smashbook (which is the greatest invention since ever!). I have almost filled it and am going to need to buy another one. It really appeals to my artistic nature more than regular scrap booking. I like the hodge podge, collage-messiness of Smashbooks. I used to take the same idea and apply it to shoeboxes and made one for every year of high school and filled it with things like my rose from graduation, my driving permit, wristbands from school events and the like. Maybe I'll share those sometime? That'll be in interesting blast from the past!

Since we've last seen my Smashbook, she's gotten tatted up a bit... And now it's so full that I need a rubber band to smash my Smashbook.

Here's two pages dedicated to the trip my friend Nikki made up here in early May. It's got a postcard from the Space Needle and my ticket, a ticket for the laser show at the Pacific Science Center, a ticket for the monorail, ticket for the ferry, voting card from the Mobile Food Truck Rodeo, and a couple business cards from Slave to the Needle where she got her ear pierced while here. 

My brother and I enjoyed the free day at the art museum...

Here's random tickets and pictures from the Experience Music Project Museum and Space Needle from when we first arrived here.

Here's one of my favorite new pages chronicling my first trip to see roller derby!

This spread is dedicated to Comicon back in March and has blurbs of things we did and celebrities we met.

Best. Scrapbook. Ever. 

Virginia Highlights

Hello from Crazyville! Today is cleaning day. Oh so fun. But, it's easier to clean an empty apartment, right? 

I thought it would be kinda cool to take a peek inside my Hampton Roads Memories pages in my Smashbook. I did another post initially on what I'd done in my book already but have since added a few things to it that will remind me of our time in Hampton Roads. 

I love to save those pamphlets you get when you visit places but, they used to take up SOOO much room. Now with my Smashbook, I just cut out important things like pictures of things I got to see like the USS Wisconsin and Norfolk mermaid statues (which, there's dozens of differently decorated mermaid statues all around town: mermaidsonparade.com has a gallery of them from all over; they're really cool). I also included cut-outs of restaurants we loved: Cal'z Pizza and No Frill Bar & Grille. 

I also included some tickets from when we got to see the Norfolk Tides play (on THE hottest day of the year) and the sailor homecoming statue near the Nauticus and USS Wisconsin. 

There's a cut-out of Harbor Baseball Park, The Virginia Zoo, Norfolk Botanical Gardens and a part of the menu for the most delicious sandwich shop ever: Taste Unlimited.

I also saved some voting tokens from the Neptune Festival Sand Sculpture contest and some pictures from the Stockley Gardens Art Festival recently. I have a receipt from Dog-n-Burger and a little ad from Cogans Pizza to remind us of our trips to the Ghent area (though, they were too few...).

So instead of having a shoe box or two of all these pamphlets, tickets, and mementos; I've got five pages covered in my Smashbook. It's also so much more convenient to browse through and I can actually look at everything!

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!