The rose petals are drying nicely and have kept their colour.  Of course, now I’m worrying about the possibility of fine clothes being stained by any dampness in the air and deep hued rose petals!  The airing cupboard has never been so sweetly scented.

In the meantime, I’m building up to our next road trip adventure with the usual journal prep.  I’ve been mooching about various websites, in search of paper for the pages but felt thwarted by an abundance of “cute” designs.  It’s not that I an anti-cute, but I was hoping for something with a little less personality than most and hopefully in a more sophisticated palette than primary colours.

I found the answer in my stash.

This morning, I’d decided to go with the “use what you have” concept and began to cut pages from a pile of paper leftover from other projects.  Deep into the pile, I was beginning to get picky.  Did I really want one pink page, a green patterned one, a black and white checked page followed by a turquoise blue stripe?  Not really.  But lo and behold, there, lurking at the bottom of the heap was a full set of 6 x 12 sheets left from a previous travel journal (this one)

Considering the itinerary of that road trip in the Pacific North West (a couple of cities, a bit of coast and some woodsy countryside) I could see why I’d chosen that design and colour palette.  This trip will be pretty similar – we are not headed for canyons or desert this time round, but to the state with the second longest coastline in the USA – 3288 miles.  We’re looking forward to exploring a couple of cities we’ve had on our list for a while and revisiting an all-time favourite, spending time with friends and, a first for us, experiencing lakeside life.

This year, we’re going to explore Michigan, driving a round trip from Chicago!

Having cut a good number of pages (which, together with some plain white sheets will be plenty), I needed to make the covers.  In my trawl through the paper pile, I came across a sheet of paper I’d created on some workshop or other which I thought would do nicely.

Ready to go.

But a girl’s got to do something whilst the paint dries, don’t you think?  A couple of my textiley friends have been pinning links to their pinterest pages that sent me looking for my Weavette.  I hadn’t opened that box in ages (or the other two, different sized looms!)

In less than fifteen minutes I was remembering just why I loved it from the minute I started.

Half an hour later, I just had to go and get on with things!  It’s so easy to get carried away with something like this.  It’s therapeutic in that mindless way, satisfying because it works so well and it’s so easy to achieve a great result from the off.

Surely, there must be a couple more projects I can get going in the meantime!?