My next completed project - the Smash Book

Another month and another unfinished craft project completed - my Smash Book!

Actually this one isn't quite completed, as it's an ongoing project. Smash Books were very popular a few years ago and I'm not sure why they fell out of favour as I really like the concept. It's a sturdy, spiral bound journal with a vague theme. Along with it comes a combined pen and glue stick. The idea is that you grab bits of ephemera - ticket stubs, photos, magazine cuttings and so on - then glue them in and add some journalling with the pen. It's a fun way to quickly scrapbook things that have meaning to you or make you feel inspired.

I started my Smash Book a few years ago - you can see some of my first Smash Book pages here. I mainly used it to display mementoes from our holidays. But alongside I was also collecting a huge folder of bits and pieces, some of them collected over years and years. The folder was full of things that I intended to put in the Smash Book but hadn't got around to, and it was getting fuller and fuller. So I wanted to sort it all out, have a bit of a declutter, and stick in everything that I had so far to make it easier to keep up with in the future.

Some of the pages are quite obvious in their theme and relate to a particular holiday or event.

Some of the pages are just random collections of pictures that I've found in various different places and stuck together in a way that appeals to me. 

And other pages are a mixture of the two, with both pictures and mementoes.

There are still plenty of empty pages and so I'll still be adding to it over the years until there is no room left, but it's completely manageable now and I'm really enjoying flipping through it and seeing all my memories.

And now I'm actually getting to the end of my list of unfinished projects! I'm honestly not sure what to work on next. I'd like to find something small that I can finish quickly, as I'm using my extra crafting time to work on a very long term project, my cross stitch map. It would be amazing if I could find the time to make that December's unfinished project, and complete it before the end of the year!

What to do with old diaries?

I'm currently decluttering. I'm coming to the end of a February decluttering challenge (more on that to come!) and I'm also following a year long organisational programme - Declutter 365. I've always thought that I was quite good at getting rid of things, but I'm amazed with some of the things I've been keeping that I'd forgotten all about.

One thing that I unearthed recently was a big box of my old diaries. I did know that they were there, but the box had been pushed to the back of the wardrobe and I'd not seen it for a while. This is just a few of them...

I started keeping a diary around 1990, in my final year at primary school, and carried on pretty much until I went to University in 1998. There is a 2002 diary in the box, but I gave up around March that year. I always used A5 hardback diaries, beginning with two days to a page and working up to each day being an entire A5 page. I usually filled the page, and I stuck in various tickets, free stickers from magazines, and ephemera as well.

The diaries themselves are mainly pretty boring to be honest. They contain detailed descriptions of what I got up to in each lesson at school that day, along with plenty of teenage angst which makes me cringe when I read it back. It's like reading something written by a different person, and I can't believe that I got myself so worked up over such little things.

My instant reaction was to bin them, as I find them very difficult to read back. But when I asked for opinions on Instagram, almost everyone said I should keep them! I would hate for anyone else to read them though, so a note to family and friends - when I'm gone, burn them!

Although I stopped keeping such detailed diaries, I still kept a holiday journal with long accounts of our travels. But on my birthday last year I began keeping a diary again. I have a Five-Year Memory Book where I write just a few sentences each night about what I've been up to that day. In years to come I can bore Ram before bed with details of what we were up to on that day in previous years. I also have my Smash Book, which I've started to use as a way to keep a few notes about memorable days and holidays, as well as a place to stick in tickets and other daily life ephemera. This is a really quick double page spread that I did the other day for our recent holiday to Disneyland Paris:

Do you have an embarrassing box of old diaries? I'd love to know what other people do with them! I can't help feeling that I'd feel much happier if I just binned the whole lot, but I don't want to regret it!