Journaling gratitude

A little about notebooks.

I love notebooks. I love making them, I love buying them, I love writing in them, (I love not writing in them), I love abandoning them, (sometimes I even love finishing them). I'm not really a themed notebook person, though. I don't like the covers to be too opinionated and prescriptive. And I definitely don't like them to prompt me what to write in them.

So I surprised myself rather a lot when I signed up for The Positive Planner journaling workshop earlier this year. (Thanks for hosting, Athena!) I surprised myself even more when I got to the end of the 12 weeks of prompted journaling and had only missed a couple of mornings (and never an entire day). The thing that struck me the most though was how much I loved the final prompt on each day: My gratitude moment. In the workshop itself I resisted this activity like crazy. I must have come up with three hundred reasons why I was not a gratitude vibe kind of gal.

You know what though? That shit works. I genuinely look forward to coming up with my little moment of joy from each day. (I'm still struggling with the "three things I did well today". Hey ho. Baby steps.)

You still with me? Great! I will now introduce you to one of the coolest bits of kit JP has found on eBay. it's a vintage stapler, and it's perfect for making notebooks.

Our oldest stapler is specifically designed to staple in the fold.

To make a notebook, you fold the pages and the cover together, then hang the notebook across the arm, push down the handle and voilà! A staple that is perfectly centred in the ditch of your fold, and with that satisfying ka-chunk sound that we all know and love.

The Most Perfect Little Notebooks

The notebooks I've been making with our stapler are possibly the most perfectly imperfect things that we make. Their covers are decorated with the excess ink from print jobs. They can take as long as 3-4 months for the ink to dry completely. We don't always have them in stock, but when we do, they come in threes.

Each notebook has 32 pages, and is the size of a passport. (Yes, the kind that you need at international border crossings.) It is lovely in the hand, and not too overwhelming to write in. More specifically, though, it is enough that you can have one page for each day in any month.

I think they're absolutely perfect as a getting-started gratitude journal. Not too much, not too little. They come in packs of three because I like the idea of having a "season" to work with.

These are, The Season of Gratitude notebooks.