Sonya Cheney

Writer. Witch. Creatrix.

scenes from my art journal.

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Mixed media art journaling has become a major part of my life and routine over the past couple of months. I look forward to sitting down at my craft desk at the end of a few days throughout the week and making an absolute mess. A few months ago I managed to get two Jane Davenport mixed media journals for $5 each (the last in Michaels!), and since then I’ve been filling each page with paint, crayons, paper scraps, and so much more. I thought I would pop in and share a few of the spreads I’ve worked on since then.

This was the first page I did inspired by Roxanne’s (bybun) Lyrical course, and I learned so damn much from that course. You’ll see in the other spreads in the post that certain techniques have stuck with me since I first worked through it. At the time, I was listening to the Anne with an E soundtrack pretty much on repeat, so I had this song by The Tragically Hip stuck in my head for days. It only made sense to use it in the spread. To be honest, I’m not even sure if it’s finished. Technically, I got to the end of the course with it, but I can see some details that I could add or improve on. I may or may not go back to it in the future.

This one was actually inspired by the colors before the song. I was in the mood for a good pink spread, and I was struck by the idea of adding lyrics from a Hole song to it. I listened to a couple of songs from Live Through This over a few days, but it wasn’t until I got one of those special edition magazines at Target–this one all about witchcraft–that I figured out where to go with the spread as a whole. The image, the lyrics, and the contrasting bubblegum color was way too much fun in the best possible way.

Finally with this last one I moved away from the song lyrics and ended up with a quote by Maya Angelou. This spread is in progress, and it was a challenge for me because I don’t often work with most pastel shades of blue, but I’m loving the push outside of my comfort zone. It started with gelli printing on the two pages just to have a somewhat prepped background, and when I saw the butterfly page in the P13 Always & Forever paper pad, I knew I had to fussy cut them and use the butterfly imagery as a centerpiece. From there, I just googled “quotes about butterflies” until I found one I liked. I actually wouldn’t have ordered the pack myself, but it came free with a Scrapbook.com order, and I’m glad I added it to the order because I’m loving what’s come of it.

I’ve also started making mixed media artist trading cards, and that’s such a joy in itself. You can peek one at the top of each photo. I’m planning on sending them out with orders when I reopen my Etsy shop next month, and I’m having a fun time getting a collection of them ready to go.

I couldn’t guess how much this new hobby would mean to me when I first started on it, but wow. Wow. I am blown away by how positive it has been for me these past few months, and I’m so grateful to have jumped in.

finding my footing in hybrid scrapbooking.

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Target dollar spot glitter; an old Ali Edwards journaling card; handmade mini envelopes

I love crafts. It’s a blanket statement because I tend to bounce around from one thing to another: knitting, quilting, cross stitch, and, most recently, watercolor. I love having options when it comes to expressing my creativity and personality, and sometimes I just want the challenge of something new or less frequently tried. But–I also still adore my computer.

I feel like I’ve always been a computer person. When I was in elementary school and they started putting them in classrooms, I was hooked. I had a VTech personal learning computer when I was small. And some of my closest friendships have been made using the internet. Between, oh, 2006 and–um–last September I would be online until all hours of the night, sometimes watching YouTube, sometimes chatting with friends, sometimes just frying my brain. It’s part of why I love blogging so much, and why I love playing around in Photoshop and InDesign. There’s just something about the keys clacking and the cursor moving across the screen that gives me a dopamine kick.

Last year was the first time I started a scrapbooking project with Finn’s baby book (which I still have two or three months to finish within, but let’s not focus on that right now), and since then I’ve been inundating myself with options, styles, and inspiration. I’ve joined the Awesome Ladies Project and discovered this whole new world of creativity. And now? I’m doing December Daily for the first time. I started thinking about it in September, if not even earlier, and since then I’ve been hemming and hawing over how I want to do it. Fully digital and printed into a Blurb book? Pocket pages like Finn’s baby book? For a while I was set on the idea of just getting a spiral bound mixed media pad and assembling the whole thing within that. I really thought that was going to be the winner. But then, none of these options quite seemed to fit. I loved it all but it didn’t make me as excited as the final answer seems to be doing.

an Ali Edwards 6×8 album; a watercolor wreath I painted; more mini envelopes

That answer?

Hybrid scrapbooking.

I love kits. I love ordering kits and subscribing to kits, but I also know that I don’t always use all of the elements within them. Over the last few smaller projects I’ve worked on (an Art of Noticing book for the month of September and a Halloween/horror movie book for October), I’ve realized what kit pieces I like to use physically and which I can be happy to use in digital form. I’m not a big journaling card user, for example, but I love chip boards, die cuts, and papers. I love the texture and dimension that can come with adding ephemera to a page. I’m also a huge fan of physical stamping; I enjoy a good messy stamped background. If it’s not crisp and clean, I just think that adds character.

With a digital kit, I can include (and even print, cut, and attach) the elements and ephemera I want in a layout without worrying about wasting other pieces that I just don’t love. And can we talk about the typewriter fonts that you can get when typing journaling on the computer? How did I not think of that sooner when I was doing it for years in my zines?

I know; my lack of awareness is mind blowing.

a wood veneer from Elle’s studio; a set of dollar spot gift tags from Target

To say I’ve been obsessing over my December Daily would be an understatement, but to finally realize the best way to make it work for me feels like a nerdy game changer. I am still entirely new to this craft and creative outlet, but the fact that I can use it to combine so many other things that I love–let’s circle back to that recent watercolor endeavor–is just wonderful.

What kinds of crafts do you love? Do you scrapbook? How do you prefer to do your storytelling and memory keeping?

favorite books of 2019 mini book.

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Last summer, I joined rukristin’s Awesome Ladies Project online community to help on my scrapbooking journey, and one of my favorite projects that I’ve done so far as part of the site is her “Best of…” course. It’s quick and simple to fill out the sheets she provides (although choosing favorites isn’t exactly easy), and when I had my list narrowed down, I went through the paper books I already had from zine making, picked a few pieces I thought coordinated, and started putting together my first mini book.

I decided to go more with favorites than “best”–which there was a great conversation about on the ALP site, actually–because most of the time I’m reading purely for entertainment or to learn something. I don’t always read critically and can sometimes be pretty easily pleased with something even if it’s not objectively “good.” I’m trying to be better about that this year, in fact, by writing more reviews on Goodreads after I finish a book rather than just rating it, which maybe I’ll talk about in a later post.

Anyway, my list turned out as so:

10. Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah

9. Sadie by Courtney Summers

8. Keep Going: 10 Ways to Stay Creative in Good Times and Bad by Austin Kleon

7. Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy by Angela Garbes

6. Inspection by Josh Malerman

5. Stay Sexy & Don’t Get Murdered by Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark

4. The Lady from the Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Legacy of Milicent Patrick by Mallory O’Meara

3. Two Can Keep a Secret by Karen M. McManus

2. Doctor Sleep by Stephen King

1. The Girl Next Door by Jack Ketchum

For my first try at anything resembling a mini book, I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out. I like the size, I like the way I included the covers, and I really like the fact that I managed to use a lot of scraps to do it; I didn’t buy anything new for this. Even the yarn on the binding is leftover from an old sock knitting project.

I’m already planning a second mini album, this time with my favorite horror movies of the 2010s. I think that one will be a bit more challenging, mainly because I don’t keep track of the movies I watch quite like I do the books I read, but I think it’ll be fun nonetheless. Plus, it gives me an excuse to use the Halloween paper pack I got last year.

zines, scrapbooking, and storytelling.

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For months I’ve been obsessed with scrapbooking. It’s on my radar as a possible creative activity for years, since around the time 30 Days of Lists started, but it’s only recently that I’ve finally begun dipping my wallet toes into it, and as I was working on a mini book of my favorite reads from 2019, I realized part of what I love so much about it–scrapbooking is surprisingly similar to zines. Even digital design is similar in the way you layer, create text blocks, and just pour yourself into it to tell your story. The biggest difference, of course, is that you don’t really publish scrapbooks. At most, we share photos of our works on Instagram or blogs, but there’s no photocopying and distributing like with zines. The act is similar, though, in laying out the pages and telling stories.

I haven’t been writing any zines lately, even though I’ve had endless ideas over the past year. (Thank you, pregnancy.) To be honest, I’m not sure why I’m not working on zines more. I still love the thought of it, and as I’ve been working on daily pages and mini books at my desk, I’ve loved the act of cutting and pasting, but I can’t seem to do it in any way other than personal journaling in a scrapbook way. It’s not a bad thing, but it does make me think about how I’m evolving as a storyteller.

While I am working on my pregnancy essay collection, I can feel a lot of my memoir work becoming more internalized and intimate, journaling more for myself, for my personal scrapbooks, and just for more catharsis than greater publication. I think it’s been good for my storytelling as I dig deeper into myself and feel less inclined to hold myself back. Getting these personal stories out in an uninhibited way feels like it’s allowing me to think more about my fiction again, and I’m so excited about that. I’m even feeling enthusiastic about revising my novel, which is a big deal because revision is my least favorite part of the writing process.

As far as published personal writing goes, my current focus is on my pregnancy collection and my blog. One of my goals this year is to blog once a week, and I’m looking forward to seeing how that goes. I’d like to think this post is a good first step.