Wrecking My Journal

Have you discovered the "Wreck This Journal" trend, begun by guerrilla artist Keri Smith somewhere around 2007?

Some people go through whole stacks of her books.  There are challenges and clubs where people wreck their journals together and share their result, and loads of personal blogs and Pinterest boards where people post their approaches to all of the different pages.

I'm still making my way slowly through my first Wreck This Journal, purchased on a beach trip a couple of years ago.

Some of the prompts don't lend themselves much to sharing (for example, "Slide the journal (this page face-down), down a long hallway" and "Scrub this page"), but I thought I'd show some of the more colorful pages.

As I was doing this page, one of my daughters thought maybe I wasn't really trying to wreck the journal; she told me the page was much too pretty!  Even the back looks pretty cool:

From circle doodling to line doodling:

A real favorite was collecting fruit stickers; my girls got in on that one right away, and we had quite a rush on the fruit as soon as I brought it in from the grocery store:

I, of course, love all the prompts that have me cutting and pasting, my favorite pastime, like this one for collecting postage off of my mail:

And a page of good thoughts:

And four-letter words:

There are plenty of pages that are not particularly aesthetically pleasing, but they're in there!

Sometimes I like to be completely literal:

And for my most colorful and fun page to date:

My girls were absolutely obsessed with my Wreck This Journal, so their grandma got them their own copies for Christmas:

They sit around and pour over the possibilities, even more than they actually complete the pages.  They giggle endlessly over such prompts as "Chew on this" (with an arrow pointing down at the page), "Sleep with the journal. (Describe the experience here.)," "Collect your pocket lint.  Glue it here.", and "Tongue painting" (which always makes their Mommy squeal "Ewwww!").

The prompts are crazy and the possibilities are endless!