bookbinding, stuff i've made

Some very simple sketchbooks

The art shop where I work was recently sent a big stack of paper in mill packs. According to the manager of the main warehouse in Perth, the paper was not selling quickly enough and so the line has been discontinued. “Find a way to get rid of it,” we were instructed.

Always curious about paper, I opened some of the mill packs up, and was amazed to find a really beautiful text-weight paper from some mill in Japan. It has a delicate laid texture, and comes in 15 hues —from a dark blue-black to a pale cream color—with yellows, greens, greys, blues, reds, and tints of apricot in between. It reminded me a lot of the old Fabriano Artist Diary that used to be made in Italy by the nearly-300 year-old paper mill Fedrigoni. Those Artist Diaries used to feature 10 to 12 different colors of paper…not just the pale and muted hues of sand, fawn, and so forth, but also bright reds, greens, and a sunflower yellow that never failed to cheer me. Fabriano still makes its Artist Diaries, but the colors these days are restricted to pastels and shades of grey or brown.

I asked my boss if I could buy the paper from the business, a little bit at a time, to make some very simple, strong, rustic-looking journals with strong, unadorned calf leather covers, for use as field and travel sketchbooks. She loved the idea, and I used my lunch hour that same day to fold and cut just enough sheets of this gorgeous paper to make two books.

I figure I have enough calf nubuck from my last trip to Asia to make 20 of these A5-sized journals…and probably some smaller scraps of the same leather to make little A6 ones, too.

For as long as the leather and paper last, I’m accepting orders at my ETSY shop for these. The colors have been listed as options…you can get a book in just one color of paper, or a mix of all the hues available, as the books in the photos are. And if you want to select just two, three, or however many colors? Just arbitrarily pick the “Mixed” option, but send me a message to let me know which colors you want included. Some of the colors are in very short supply, others come in full mill packs (or two!) so it really is first in, best dressed.

For my own journal, I think I’m doing on that is just sunflower yellow and Prussian blue… ooh, yummy!

link to my ETSY Shop RIGHT HERE. Thanks!

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bookbinding, stuff i've made

Light an old flame…

Spark something

1. Untitled, 2. City of Light (907), 3. Gorgons Head, 2003, 4. Twist and Shout, 2007-, 5. Royal Purple journal, 6. book 910 – 5, 7. Buggery: Beetles on books, 8. Sailing the night ocean, 9. postcards from the archipelago : sea monster attacks black ship…, 10. Untitled, 11. Cup o’ Lovin’, 12. Pterynotus bednalli miniature book(1 inch x 1 inch), 13. Miniature book (Simplified Codex), 14. the finished book…, 15. NON-PAREIL I, 2003, 16. “Gladiolus Rag” (Book 885), 17. Fauve Sunset, 18. Spider Lily (detail of embroidery), 19. Langstich und kettenstich, 20. Recent journals 1, 21. SCALLOP Amulet Book, 2004, 22. Closeup of a recent journal I made, 23. Only the Pure of Heart…, 24. Sorceress of Serendip, 25. 891, 26. Crazy Circus Chair, 27. heart shaped doily doodle…, 28. Lagooned in Gold, 29. Pilar’s Journal, 30. 895, 31. headbands, 32. Moroccan Diamonds, 33. caramel (no.906), 34. puff (no. 908), 35. Relax: Robyn’s Journal, 36. 904 : : Pink hippies

I feel pretty lousy for neglecting bookbinding. Well, that’s not the only activity I pretty much dropped when I became obsessed with learning to paint…I haven’t embroidered anything for ages, either! I’ve got to find a balance between this new painting bug, and everything else.

In an attempt to rekindle my bookbinding flame I was looking at my Flickr bookbinding set this evening. Seeing all these very different journal and book covers—particularly the old ones that I’d forgotten about—made me happy and sad. Most of these books are with other people, now, and it’s a bit like looking at a photo album of children who grew up and moved away. On impulse I made a mosaic of a few of them—fd’s flickr toys only allows 36 thumbnails so I’ve had to choose from among so many journals, and probably chose older ones simply because I haven’t seen them in so long, it’s like they’re new to me again.

I’ve got one day left to stay home and do something creative…what do you think I should work on: embroidery? Bookbinding? :)

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aboard the M/V sonofagun, art + design, bookbinding, Inspirations, stuff i've made

Five beasts a week…

Tengu

“There is a kind of lazy pleasure in useless and out-of-the-way erudition.”

Jorge Luis Borges, from The Book of Imaginary Beings

A-lan

Kris is posting photos on his blog of each and every one of the hand-illustrated mythical beasts in his unique and personal bestiary, Teratologus.

I’m glad he’s finally doing this…there are over 200 beasts in it, and he has painted or drawn them all, as well as compiled as much information as he could about them (and not just from the internet, which is full of incredibly misleading, misinformed, copy-and-paste-from-each-other style research!) Because of the impossibility of reproducing this book with its full-color pages, it can only ever be shared this way. At least a few more people get to see these illustrations…until now it’s been a kind of household treasure that only a handful of friends have ever had the chance to browse.

It was a labor of love for him for at least 15 years…something that he did out of passion, with no other motives or promise of any sort of reward beyond the old-fashioned joys of research and scholarship, and the pleasure of imagining and illustrating each character.

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bookbinding, Ideas, stuff i've made

Seed Book

Seed Book

“The idea hovered and shimmered delicately, like a soap bubble, and she dared not even look at it directly in case it burst. But she was familiar with the way of ideas, and she let it shimmer, looking away, thinking about something else.”
Northern Lights, Philip Pullman (borrowed, with impunity, from Marita Alber’s blog, Midnight in The Garden of Evil Knievel)

Ideas. They come at the oddest times…in the shower or on a bicycle ride. Sneak up on you when you’re at a dinner with friends. Ambush you as you’re rushing off to work in the morning. I used to think “That one’s so memorable, there’s no way I’ll forget it.” And then I’d promptly forget all about it. So I started keeping track of these ideas in a journal devoted to such things, and called the first one a Seed Book. The name has stuck, and every new journal I dedicate to these slippery, skittish ideas is now called a Seed Book. I have a few.

Seed Book

What sort of ideas? Anything. Everything. Not just art, but any project or endeavor that I can’t start right away, but would like to hang on to for when I might need it. There are dumb ones, corny ones, vague and barely-there ones, the ones that show real promise, the terribly ambitious, grandiose ones, the simple little fixes for around the house or daily life.

Sometimes it’s just a title…not for any specific work, but a string of words that I like the sound of, and think “I might use that for a painting/an embroidery/a short story/a title on the cover of a journal.” A catch-all rattle bag. My version of a big drawer into which you throw all those little, interesting things that you don’t have a place or a use for yet. Sometimes I just do thumbnails. Sometimes I don’t even draw anything, I just write a sentence or two that explains the idea to myself, enough to call it back to mind when I read it again. There are photos (my own),  little test illustrations where I try out the idea, or test a color combination. Lots of diagrams, I seem to love diagrams of how something will be constructed…a diagram for sewing a shopping bag, or a new hybrid bookbinding format. It can’t be avoided, I doodle here a lot, too…mindless meanderings of ink or pencil lines, when I can’t remember an idea that came to me as I was going through the supermarket checkout, and I’m pretending to be distracted with something else so that the shy little thing will relax and come out of its mouse hole.

Over time, and across several seed books, I might refine an idea. Carry it forward from an older book, but in a slightly changed form because some time has passed and I am a different person now from who I was then, when I first wrote it down. Yes, some ideas have been with me for a long time. It can be hard to let go, and it can become a habit, in itself, to carry the ideas around for years without ever doing anything about them. I try to cull them, from one book to the next. As much as possible I try to find an opportunity to actually take one idea and implement it, make it real, bring it to life. And then I can cross it out (what a great feeling!) or, more likely than not, refine it to the next level, where it becomes something else again.

I had to start a new seed book this year. This one’s quite nice…some of the others I’ve had are just bound pages with undecorated plywood covers! One of them doesn’t even have covers and looks like a book that has had its covers ripped off (I didn’t…it never had covers, I never got around to making covers for it). I made this particular red book to go into the jacket that I designed for my Coursera Design: Creating Artifacts in Society course. But I won’t be traveling for a while, so I never really meant to use this particular book as a travel journal. Instead, I’ve dedicated it to being a seed book.

Seed Book

The covers are an old painting that wasn’t going anywhere. I liked a small part of the painting, but the rest was unfinished and rather meh. So I cut book covers from the two parts that I liked, and have since re-primed the remaining canvas to use as something else. The design on the seed book’s cover is from the Nivkh people of the northern half of Sakhalin Island and the region of the Amur River estuary in Russia’s Khabarovsk Krai. I remain fascinated by the Nivkhi because certain aspects of their shamanic culture involved the use of embroidery as a way to cast spells…a very similar casting of spells is practiced by the Ainu of Japan. This symbol has been found embroidered on fish skin cloaks of the Nivkh. Today’s Nivkhi are a dispirited and dwindling community, whose traditions and religious ceremonies are lost, who are plagued by alcoholism and other ills suffered by small minority groups that have been bulldozed aside by mainstream industrial society.

Anyway. I’ve digressed and am going all nerdy on you. Sorry.

The pages are entirely from scrap pieces of gorgeous printmaking paper. Deckle edges, watermarks, a mix of heavy, cottony white Hahnemuhle and creamy Arches paper. It’s an absolute luxury—almost scandalous—to be doing my doodles and messy thumbnail sketches on such lovely paper, but they were scraps pulled out of the rubbish bin behind the printmaking building at Charles Darwin University, and I’ve had them for years. It was time to put them to some use, however humble.

seed book collage

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bookbinding, classes + workshops, Creative Travel Journal, embroidery and textiles, projects, travel

Week 7 of Designing a Creative Travel Journal

This entire post was copied and pasted from my assignment submission page on Coursera.org…just to let you know where I am at with this project. This was the last assignment of the course…supposed to be the ‘Beta’ of my product, though it’s clearly nowhere near the beta stage yet! But this was all I could do in the one day I had to finish it all.
It’s midnight, I’ve work tomorrow, so this has to go up on the course site tonight…hence the hastily chosen “brand name” and the lousy photos taken with camera flash because it was long past sunset when I took most of these.
REISE
Travel Journal and JacketREISE is German for “journey”

The journal is bound using Longstitch/linkstitch (aka Limp Binding) The pages are stitched to a spine of strong leather, with plenty of space between them for the gradual inclusion of ephemera, postcards, photos, and other souvenirs of the trip. I cut slits into the leather spine to form “loops” through which the elastic strap of the jacket can be threaded.


This view of the inside of the jacket shows the elastic strap for attaching the journal, as well as three pagemarker ribbons, which are part of the jacket.

The elastic strap weaves in and out of the journal’s leather spine…

and is held down by a snap on the outside of the jacket:


Some features of the journal itself are a 20-page fold-out photo album:

A plastic template for square petal envelopes, to make your own little pockets for small things…

using interesting papers (newspaper pages, magazines, decorative papers) that you collect along the way.

Stick these petal envelopes down wherever you need them.


Also, you can rate your travel experiences and flag your entries using the three stamps that are attached to the ends of the page marker ribbons.


When your journal is full, undo it from the jacket, and strap down a new one.


IWWMW design a travel journal (and case) that conveniently combines an artistic/creative traveler’s tools and materials for collecting/recording during a trip, and the finished works of art and memory?

Primary needs:

  • Journal integrates collected souvenirs, and records (in the form of writing, art, photos)
  • Journal has storage space for art materials and journaling tools.
  • Journal is strong, hard-wearing, long-lasting and keeps contents secure.
  • Journal is customisable to a great degree.
  • Journal is convenient to carry.
  • Journal is easy to use/deploy.
  • Journal is a pleasure to use.
  • Journal is comprised of “artist’s grade” materials.
  • Journal has pages of information that is useful while travelling.

Submit a one paragraph description of what the next steps would be to further refine and develop the artifact:

I had one day in the entire week to do my journal prototype, so there are a lot of things that have been left out as I simply did not have the time. Obviously, the actual printed pages of the journal are missing—sections for foreign words & phrases, packing checklists, To-Do or Must-Visit list pages, shopping info (bought what, where, for how much) as well as cultural and foodie notes, and lots of important travel information (itinerary, time and currency conversion, contacts, and so on) It’s also missing customisable page tabs, for different sections.

I did not get around to putting a closure on the jacket. I hoped to add small D-rings for a removable bag strap. And I would have liked the final journal case to be made of very thin but strong leather, instead of linen. A range of designs for the journal jackets (or at least diferent colours) would have to be considered.

Other ideas I had at the start of this project, and which I think are still good, are:

  • a small pamphlet with 50 fun ideas for fresh, quirky, creative ways to fill your travel journal…exercises and such
  • a website where REISE users can upload pictures of their journal pages, share their drawings, photos, collages, doodles…and engage in forums with a community of other artist-travelers.

I know this isn’t “one paragraph”, but I have learned so much from this course, the journey really has been the destination, and its own reward. I don’t think I’ll even bother to find out what my final score is, now, or download some meaningless certificate of completion! What was of real value here, I have already received.

Thanks and good bye!

◊ ◊ ◊

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art + design, bookbinding, classes + workshops, Creative Travel Journal, embroidery and textiles, projects, stuff i've made

Week 6 of Designing a Creative Travel Journal

Travel Journal alpha

What happened to Week 5? I didn’t do my homework. :( The load was light, anyway, because of Thanksgiving in the U.S.

Instead, I started working on my alpha prototype in Week 5, because I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it all in just the one week of Week 6. I have a new job (tell you about it when I take some photos!), but haven’t managed to slough off the old one, yet…I’m giving my old boss till the Christmas holidays to find a replacement for me. So I worked 6 days last week, will work 6 days every week for the next 3 or so. Not so terrible, I’ll survive, but I haven’t had time to do any groceries or blogging or even laundry…it’s just a big grey block of work and, when I get home at night, The Prototype is waiting. So then I make a coffee and sew pockets until 1 or 2 in the morning, because I am not going to drop out in the last quarter, I’ve done way too much to just let it all go.

Anyway, the idea is still to make both a journal “jacket” and a specially bound travel journal, and for these two to work together. I have run out of time to make the bound book for this week, so I will present that as part of the Beta model, next week. Here are just pictures, and some notes, about the journal jacket part, which was a lot harder to put together than I thought it would be, though I have to say that I am thrilled to have learned SO MUCH about stitching all sorts of pockets, zips, even an expandable three-part pocket that fans out to a 90-degree angle. Go, me! (Hey, I can pat myself on the back…I have been living on rice with soy sauce and an occasional tomato, from the plant on the back deck, for 5 days…)

The photos with annotations were the ones I submitted to the course, but I’m throwing in a few more for this post, to give you all a better idea of what’s been included, changed, etcetera…

By the way, the photo at the very start of this post is shows pages of our old marbling experiments journal. For a few years in the Philippines Kris and I marbled our own papers and fabrics for the journals we made; we weren’t using any of the proper stuff—there was no carrageenan, or special marbling paints, or ox gall. We used rain water, cheap local acrylic house paints, and manioc starch for the size. Still, we managed to get our patterns to a pretty good standard, amazingly. The green marbled fabric on the cover of the journal, in some of the photos below, is one of ours.


TRAVEL JOURNAL (jacket only) ALPHA MODEL

I envision a travel journal (book), together with a sturdy “jacket” that I can put the journal into. The jacket has multiple pockets to hold not only the maps and paraphernalia of traveling, but also the art materials he/she might use to create a more personalised and artistic journal. Unlike the journal—which I imagine will become an inactive but cherished receptacle for the traveler’s memories and impressions when it is filled—the jacket is re-usable.

I work 6 days a week, so I didn’t have time to hand bind the travel journal (book) itself…sorry! But I’ve done so much work on this thing, already, that perhaps I should be viewing this “Travel Journal Jacket” as a separate design from the actual “Travel Journal”! Maybe I’ll just finish off the book part for the beta prototype next week.

NOTE: The rubber stamps are a heart, a star, and an unhappy face, representing “Like this” (or “Love this”), “Important” and “Dislike this”. The stamps are meant to be used to flag entries where the traveller wants to rate an experience. I found this solution preferable to Moleskine’s use of symbol stickers which, of course, always get used unevenly, and run out too soon.




NOTE: There are three of these large pockets with zippers that run along the edge of the journal jacket…see first illustration for placement of all three.

Just a final photo showing where everything is, from left to right: a  green journal has been strapped in, some maps and papers are in the expanding pockets, pens and brushes fit snugly into elastic loops, and there is a stamp pad and a glue tape gizmo in the tool pockets at the right. Also, yes, those are my feet, spread very far apart! :)


Travel Journal alpha
Travel Journal alpha

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art + design, bookbinding, classes + workshops, Creative Travel Journal, projects, stuff i've made

Week 4 of Designing a Creative Travel Journal

10 journal concepts

I quickly revised my problem from last week, and drew 10 new concepts for this week’s homework, submitted yesterday. In them, I’ve re-focused on the journal, with most of the storage space for things like postcards, ephemera, trinkets, pressed flowers, and all the other little bits and pieces that one collects along the way when moving through an unfamiliar place. Some of the books still have a little storage built in for things like a small tin of watercolours or pencils, pens, but I stopped thinking in terms of an entire bag dedicated to rolls of tape, glue sticks, and big fat tubes of acrylic paints or whatever else a person uses to artfully fill his/her journal.

I had to do these concepts the same week that I was actually supposed to be building prototypes. It took forever to make the leap from a concept, on paper, to actually making something. I dawdled ever so much! I think I was scared of finding out that my concepts were impossible to make in the 24 hours I had left before submission deadline. I’d done so well, so far, that I hated the idea of slipping behind, now that things were really getting interesting. My two chosen concepts involved techniques I didn’t have much practice in. Much of what I thought I knew was theoretical…like I figured it couldn’t be too hard to stitch a zipper on a pouch! But I’d never really tried, before. Finally stopped faffing around yesterday and put concept D together in three hours. Amazing how much theory and preparation you can do without once you stop overthinking and just do it.

Concept D: Journal and Jacket

prototype D

It’s VERY ROUGH, but the gist of the idea is there. A flexible wraparound cover jacket, with pockets and pouches on every available surface,
prototype D

and a leather strap that hooks into the book, through the little hollow between cover and text block that all my hand-bound books have, and snaps down on the cover to hold it in place.

prototype D
prototype D

This snap was a serendipitous find. I didn’t have any snaps, nor a snap setter, but as I was rummaging through an old toiletries pouch of buttons and buckles for something else to use, I saw that the pouch itself had a snap. Took a utility knife to that pouch in a flash, and stitched it on with rough and impatient abandon.
prototype D

Concept C is almost identical to Concept D; the only difference is that the book pages are bound to the cover in C. This sort of binding (a limp, or longstitch/linkstitch binding) would allow me to space the signatures out a bit more, accommodating the things to be added in by the user. But the idea of the re-usable jacket and journal refills seemed, on the whole, a more considerate and practical solution. I can work out how to space the pages in the journal itself later, I hope!
 prototype D

Concept I: Dos a Dos book and box

prototype

I used two books, bought at the second-hand bookstore years ago, intending to use them in altered book projects I never started. They’re very faux elegant, pretentious things…fancy goldstamping on some horrible ‘leather-look’ textured paper, and only one edge of the pages is gilded: the top edge, which visitors are sure to see when this deep red set of Australia’s Great Books sits on a bookshelf. The other three sides of the text block are left plain.
prototype

I took the text block out of Adam Lindsay Gordon, and replaced it with clamshell box ‘jaws’. They’re uncovered, in these pictures, because I had to submit photographs an hour later, but I went and covered them afterwards. Then I simply glued the two books together, back-to-back and topsy-turvy, to resemble the binding format known as dos a dos (two to two).
prototype I

Some letters, photos, and trinkets in the clamshell box, to heighten that feeling of travel treasures…
prototype
prototype

And the completely indigestible, utterly boring pages of that great Australian classic—that nobody I’ve met seems to have read, but of whom everyone here speaks in hushed and reverent tones—We of The Never-Never on the other side. I read three chapters. I am thinking it’s time to do that altered book project now, and paint or draw on these pages.
prototype I

So, which one do you like better, D or I? And if you had to buy a travel journal, would you consider buying one of these (provided it was made properly, not out of placemats or old books)? I’m only asking to test how successful the designs were, but would love to hear what you think!

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art + design, bookbinding, Creative Travel Journal, Inspirations, philosophy, projects

Designing a Creative Travel Journal part 2

New Years Day, 2003.

Okay, so here’s the list of user needs I came up with, as promised yesterday. The finished journal does not have to incorporate all these needs! In fact, some needs may even contradict others. At this stage in the design process, I don’t want to discard anything. Later I’ll have to narrow these needs down according to importance and practicability. I’ve interspersed some (pretty random) old photographs of journals, mail art, and whatnot, to liven the post up a bit…pictures do not correspond to anything in the text.

I’ve tried to identify these according to a model by Japanese design guru, Noriaki Kano, that Prof. Ulrich shared with us. So far this is the most interesting new thing I’ve learned, because I’ve never really thought about design and products in these ways before.

The Kano Model divides user needs into 4 groups:

  • Indifference—if you meet this need, user’s feelings are neutral. If you neglect to satisfy this need, user’s feelings are still neutral.
  • Linear (performance) needs—user’s dissatisfaction/satisfaction is directly proportional to the level this need is met (Note: price is often classified as a linear need)
  • Basic (must-have) needs—if you satisfy this need, even spectacularly, the user barely notices (neutral); but if you don’t satisfy this need, user is extremely unhappy…miserable, furious, disgusted.
  • Latent (Excitement) needs—this is the G-spot. These are unexpected features. If you don’t meet this need, the user doesn’t even notice it’s missing. But if you do meet the need, the user is delighted (and writes you chirpy fan mail, pins the product on Pinterest, blogs about it…you’ve struck gold.)

Needs in bold type are more abstract needs, followed by more specific needs that might fall under the more abstract one.
Needs in italics with an exclamation point (!)  are what I suspect could be the users’ latent needs.

Iban (Sarawak) scorpion design

Problem statement: How might I create a product that encourages travelers to write, collect, make art, take photographs and explore more on their travels?

Journal incorporates storage space for various things collected, recorded, and made during the trip
Journal has pockets for maps
Journal has pockets for small souvenirs like coins or charms
Journal has a place to store reading glasses
Journal has a place to keep the main writing pen handy but safe
! Journal has a place to store coloured pencils or watercolours and some paintbrushes
! Journal has a section for pressed objects and large drawings or visuals (ex. maps)
Journal has expanding pockets in the covers
! Journal comes with pocket of small tools—ruler, scissors, needles and thread, double-sided tape, glue stick, pencil sharpener…

Artistamp1 collage

Journal is strong, long-lasting and keeps contents secure
Journal has tough waterproof covers that can take abuse
Journal materials won’t rot or disintegrate in humidity
Journal binding is strong and pages won’t come out
Journal’s added contents are protected from the elements and don’t fall out
Journal pages accommodate a long trip (4 months to 1 year)
Materials are acid-free and archival

Journal is reasonably priced

Journal is customisable
Journal comes with ways to attach photos and postcards
! Journal comes with system of symbols to codify, personalise pages and flag entries
! Journal comes with pockets that can be glued down to pages where they’re wanted
! Options exist that allow user to order custom content to be printed before binding.

Untitled

Journal is convenient to carry
Journal fits into most handbags or backpack pockets
Journal is lightweight for carrying around and onto planes
Journal complies with airport security hand-carried baggage rules
Journal has a closure in place to keep it shut.
! Journal attaches to the body for easy carrying and access

from Kat

Journal is easy to deploy
Journal opens flat
Journal has at least three bookmark ribbons, and they don’t fray.
Journal sections are marked by dividers and tabs
Journal pages can be numbered and dated
! Journal has a table of contents or Index
Journal closures are quick to open and close

Andreas Hofer postcard

Journal is enjoyable to use
Journal exterior is beautiful and elegant
Printed text is in an elegant and readable font
Journal comes in several designs and colours to choose from
Pages are a mix of ruled, blank and grid-lined for different purposes.
Ink used to print lines is subtle
Paper used is of highest quality, for fountain pens, juicy inks, and watercolours
! Journal comes with ideas for fun entries and journaling techniques to use while travelling
! Journal comes with access to a community of  other users

September

Journal has useful travel information
Journal prominently displays owner information in case it gets lost.
Journal has an easy-to-access section for important information
Journal has pages for travel itinerary
Journal has world time conversions
Journal has pages for calendars
Journal has pages for budgeting and expenses
Journal has a directory for friends, contacts, shops, agencies, etc.
Journal has pages for most-used phrases in a foreign language
Journal has pages for transportation and lodging information
Journal has pages for travel and packing checklists
Journal has a section for plans and dreams, goals, or a wish list

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