A day or two ago, I mentioned a project I've been working on during this coronavirus lockdown. So today I wanted to give you a little peak. On one of our wedding work days, Christen and I were talking about COVID-19 and what an unprecedented time in history this was (this was before the order to stay home). Not unlike the Spanish Flu epidemic in the early 20th century, this time in our lives was something that people of the future would not understand unless we spelled it out for them -- you just can't grasp the scope of something like this from a textbook or a few photos. So we decided that it was important to keep a COVID journal to document our lives during this time. We are, of course, documenters and storytellers...that's why we scrapbook, right?
So in discussing this with one of our friends, we decided we needed to make a challenge of it. We needed to come up with daily prompts a la Layout-a-Day, that would keep us all motivated and inspired to tell our stories. I'm a little bit embarrassed to admit that I went back to an old Layout-a-Day list from the days when it was owned by Lain Ehman, and I repurposed that old list (with a few changes, of course) to be used for what we called our Stay-at-Home Challenge. For the entire month of April we had daily prompts (via automated emails) that led us through creating a journal of our time in "quarantine". The experience has been fun, creative, inspiring, and even a bit enlightening as we explore the many aspects of this pandemic and its affect on our daily lives.
We all worked in different formats, including pocket pages, traditional scrapbooking, traveler's notebooks, and even Happy Planners. I decided on a travelers notebook, and since this little challenge was something of a last-minute affair, I didn't have time to order one online, so I made my own. (I may do a post about that soon!) I love the traveler's notebook because it's basically a blank slate, and it's just the right size for either journaling or photos. I've actually already filled one notebook (we started on April 1) and am well into my second (I ordered the others online). There are so many stories to tell, I'm sure I'll have several of the books filled by the time this is all over.
When we started this project, we quickly found that there are a number of crafty celebs and others who are doing similar projects. I've been following Layle Koncar and Heidi Swapp on Instagram and via blog. They both have some great pages that are very inspiring. And, most recently, Christen stumbled across The Isolation Journals created by Suleika Jaouad. This article is a great read and shares how the whole thing got started and why archiving these stories is important.
The point of all this is to share with you what we're doing, and I'm really excited about these journals. You can see most of what I've done so far on my Instagram and Facebook pages (linked here). I'll leave you with a couple of pages below. Until next time, keep crafting!
Cindy Murray
Crafty Neighbor
