Well, now here's a blast from my crafty past. Actually, this is from before I started getting seriously crafty -- just before, as a matter of fact, when I was studying in Scotland. I've always needed to have creative outlets, but during my first few years of college, those outlets were music (both organized, in the wind symphony way, and not, in the teaching myself to play guitar way) and general artsy things. I mentioned this journal a while back, when I made that other organizer, so here it is:

I made the front and back boards by cutting up and covering the back of a pad of paper. I can't remember now, but I probably bought a pad of drawing paper extra cheap at Woolworth's and used the back for the covers and the cut the paper for the inside. I 'laminated' the covers with clear packing tape, so they've held up pretty well. The front has a picture of Mew Mew -- one of my favourite shots of her -- and some crocus petals from the grounds somewhere. We lived in a massive house outside Edinburgh -- one of the (many) real treats about meeting Cally was that she knew exactly where I had lived!

The front cover says, 'give your heart to somebody' -- a line from a Paul McCartney song; the back has a quote from Jack Kerouac: 'Write in recollection and amazement for yourself.' A lot of my friends were in art classes, and although I wasn't, I spent a lot of time playing with watercolours that spring. I discovered Winsor and Newton watercolour sets while I was in Edinburgh and fell in love. There's a little art shop near the George IV Bridge that sells all the individual little pans -- they're like candy!
The journal was part diary/schedule book, part scrap book, and I took it everywhere. It evolved into a treasure from my time in Scotland; it's just filled with memories and all sorts of bits and pieces. Like. . . photos I took and printed in the makeshift darkroom in our basement:

There's a magic in film photography that doesn't exist in digital, but I never shoot on film anymore. I like to take a million shots of something without feeling like I'm wasting resources, and most of my photos wind up on a computer screen anyway.
Let's see, we've also got teeny, tiny watercolours:

Painted while sitting on a hill in the Lake District, overlooking Lake Windermere. I saw Miss Potter last week (an unusual movie, but I'm in love with it), and Beatrix, if you didn't know, moved to and lived in the Lake District, so there were many lovely shots of the landscape. My mother asked if it really looks like it does in the film and it really, really does. Forgive me for being a complete sap, but it gets lonely sometimes, feeling like I've left a part of myself in the places I love. Part of me is forever hiking around Windermere.
What else? Well, there are my schedule/journal entries, of course:

I could have kept a better record of my days, to be sure, but it's funny to see what I did write down. That February, I was about as ill as I've ever been, and those days on the calendar read 'Sick' 'Sick' 'Sick' and so on until I was finally 'Less Sick' and 'Hardly Sick at All'. It wasn't fun being so ill, and I wound up being stuck in Edinburgh alone over a long (traveling) weekend, but now I can see how fortunate that was. Traipsing around the city, just as I was beginning to feel healthier, really made me feel connected with the place.
Lastly, there's a bit of scrapbookiness:

A lot of Americans study in the UK because there's not really a language barrier, and they treat it as their home base while they explore the rest of Europe. I was very happy to stay in the UK; I could spend a hundred holidays traveling only in Britain, and not due to any small mindedness on my part (so I say, of course).
This journal is my favourite memento from a favourite time of my life. I've never really got into the whole scrapbooking craze, and this is so much better in my eyes. It traveled with me, saw what I saw, and is part of the entire experience.