Journal swapping with Sayuri

I always really loved journaling. I can't remember a time where I didn't doodle all over my notebooks and draw little comics. But I think the first "real" journal that I made was in the seventh grade. I remember picking out a plain spiral notebook with a blank kraft paper cover. I titled the journal "tête-à-tête" and included a page "about me" and such. It was very unorganized and messy and I think at one point I was just taping in anything that I found on the ground into the pages (gum wrappers, receipts, lunch passes, sodoku pages, free coloring books from family video,etc). The journal became so fat and accurately portrayed middle school me, unorganized, crazy about pop punk bands, and a bit weird. Despite all of that, I still pick up my old journal and flip through the pages fondly reminiscing on the past. I guess that's what I love about journaling. It's a great medium to showcase the positive side of my obsessive hoarding (haha).

Anyway, about a year ago, I made a journal out of an old cereal box and sent it to Sayuri, whom I was following on Tumblr. Sayuri posted some amazing doodles and sketches so I asked her if she would like to share a journal with me. She agreed and what manifested was one of my favorite snail mail projects thus far. We would each fill out a couple pages of the journal and mail it back and forth to each other. It was very interesting to get to know someone this way!

A couple days ago, Sayuri sent me back the journal with the final pages filled with magical doodles and thoughts.

The page on the left was the last one I filled when it was my turn to fill up the journal. The page on the right is the one Sayuri filled. It is a sketch of me!!! So cool! I never have had someone draw me so I was really excited to see such a lovely drawing of me done by Sayuri.

A lovely quote that Sayuri wrote on a polaroid. The page on the right was done by me when I was feeling a bit down one day.

There was a page where I drew little circles. I originally planned to make a bunch of badges and stick them to the circles but only got around to making one or two badges. Sayuri stepped in and included some rad stickers and an awesome jake keychain that now is hanging proudly on one of my cubbys on my desk where I admire it daily. 

I actually squealed out of excitement when I saw that AWESOME lisa frank sticker of a UFO and that AMAZING Sailor Moon sticker and instantly added them to my laptop sticker collection.

 

I chuckled a lot when I saw this little comment because I could relate to how Sayuri felt about Animal Crossing.

this was one of my favorite doodles. Haha old man in a hot spring.

It was really interesting because I included a little doodle page with my thoughts too and Sayuri reciprocated by doing the same style on a later page :) 

Sayuri included little doodles titled "daydream #(number)" with little thoughts that she wanted to do and I thought that was really beautiful.

When I first sent out the shabby handmade journal a year ago, I never dreamed that it would be filled with such beautiful thoughts and doodles and nick knacks! Thank you Sayuri for going along with a crazy idea from a stranger on Tumblr. I can't wait to do more journal swappings soon.