Creative Collage Journalling Workshops are back 🎨⚡️
Explore creative play, collage as a sustainable hobby 🔄, and join me as I reflect on my personal archive of vintage magazines, paper and ephemera 📚
Hello friends!
I’m sending you this message to share that my Bloom workshop Creative Collage Journalling returns on July 13th 2024!
We had our first official collage journalling workshop this past April, where we got crafty at The Villij Studios. We sold out quickly, and quite a few people reached out to me with interest for more dates and opportunities to try out collage, reflect, and explore creatively together in community. Check out my highlight reel here.
This time I’m partnering with Bonanza Bites and Boards for complimentary treats and grazing snacks while we collage, and focusing on the theme: ⭐️ Vision and Values ✨
I’m continuing the tradition of adding my own therapy twist to this collage event by informing the values prompts and activities on therapy models such as Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, Narrative Therapy and Sensorimotor Psychotherapy ⚡️
Expect mindful somatic grounding, space to reflect and journal on your values and beliefs (with custom therapy journal prompts written by me), followed by collective creative time to manifest your very own values focused vision board using vintage and new collage materials! 🎨 You’ll leave with your values collage 🖼️ (of course), but I’ll also be sharing some of my most loved therapeutic tools on this topic for folks to take home with them.
This isn’t your regular vision board event is all I’m saying 😌
Can’t make it this time? Check out our additional Summer (August) 2024 dates! 🎉
In addition to providing all of the usual collage materials like glue, scissors, backgrounds and magazines, for collage journalling I share a curated set of materials from my personal collection, like one of a kind papers from estate sales and antique lots, creative and gift papers, stickers, found images, art books for reference and inspiration and more. If you love exploring paper and crafts, discovering new and old ephemera, and trying new ways to journal outside of the traditional pen and paper method, Creative Collage Journalling will be your vibe 🎨.
🔮 This offering is for you if you're curious about therapeutic creative practices, you love charcuterie, cheese, sweet treats and snacks 🍇, and want to explore your values while connecting with like-minded community.
So grab a friend, and hit the link below to join me. Hopefully I’ll see you there!
Recently (and relatedly) I’ve been getting into collecting vintage magazines like Ebony, TIME Life, and National Geographic magazines from the 60’s 70’s, 80’s and 90’s. Collecting these has been an exercise in restraint and exploration. The visuals, stories, advertisements, and overall messaging in the media of olden days range from downright shocking at worst, to nostalgia inducing and inspiring at best.
I don’t want to be too careful with this collection. Using these moments in history to help create and transform collages in the present has been adding energy to my history knowledge and making for some interesting conversation starters. I’m challenging my perfectionism bone by not being afraid to cut them up, share them with others, and hoarding it for hoarding’s sake.
Did you know that in May of 1979, Jane Goodall wrote a piece for National Geographic for on a series of aberrant killings within the Gombe chimpanzees she was living with? No? Me neither, until recently, when I used that 1979 Nat geo magazine for a Collage.
As a lover of sustainable hobbies and crafting with intentions of circularity, collage can seem overwhelming when you consider just how MUCH paper and written archived material is out there in the world that hasn’t been used or read.
Paper that today might be a purely online experience, reduced to a digital footprint, (which comes with it’s own environmental issues) instagram infographics, online ephemera and internet history that is potentially lost forever (RIP MTV News), used to live in physical form via photos, articles and historical records.
I consider it a gift to find these moments of history through the pages of the past. I’m learning so much, and I’m enjoying breaking them down into art, sharing them with my friends and community through my events, and bringing fresh life to things that most people would usually just send to the landfill.
Story time: I drove out to King City Ontario from Toronto (with husband and baby in tow) to collect the almost 200 National Geographic magazines I now own. We helped a very pleasant older woman get them out of her entryway. She was selling them for $50 on Kijiji. The most costly part about building a collection (imo) is the use of your time and energy to research and look for items.
Sometimes, the most interesting stories live outside of the pages of books and old magazines. I acquired all of my archive TIME Life magazines from the sweetest antique dealer near my home in Toronto. His name is Walter and over the last few weeks, I’ve spent multiple Sunday afternoons chatting with him about his life (27 years in the antique game!), how he got into “dead people’s stuff” as he calls it, and finding in him an unlikely friend, who now calls me every time he finds interesting paper and history books so I can come and look through them with him.
All of this to say: to meaningfully engage with history is to meaningfully engage with the life and the people that hold those stories. Keeping an archive is something I’ve been cultivating as a personal mission over the past few years, and has helped me discern my personal style, while pushing me to refine the ways I collect, bring new life to, and ultimately share old and beautiful things.
For now, my way of doing this is by offering myself and others the opportunity to explore, recycle and reuse paper of the past, add archival and unique images to the Bloom collage discovery library, and nurture a circular art practice by focusing on material that already exists.
Sending you lots of love and creativity,
— Meghan 🤎