This week I re-discovered gluebooks. If you’ve never heard of them, a gluebook is a book (with me?) that you glue things into.
What’s it for? you may be asking.
It’s for …wait for it… fun.
A gluebook might be a place where you stick all of the pretty pictures you cut out of magazines and don’t know what to do with them after that.
Or a place where you put cut out photos of your favorite dreamy actors.
It’s a book into which you glue stuff. Simple as that.
I used to do gluebooks stuff a long time ago. And I guess my Everyday Book journal is a sort of gluebook, when it comes right down to it. But I haven’t consciously worked in a gluebook for no reason for a very long time. The thing I love about gluebooks is that there is no pressure to create great work. And it can be a nice collage exercise. Or it can be nothing at all. Is there anything in life that creates less pressure than “nothing at all”?
Here’s a spread I did today in under a half an hour while I listened to inspiring Todd Henry podcasts:
gluebook spread
The theme was “blue.” I got the theme from the gluebooks group I just joined on Facebook. This group popped up in the sidebar on Facebook last week and it made me go “oh yeah, I love those!” and I joined the group without thinking.
I have made two rules for myself in working in this book (which is just your ordinary, run of the mill, every day composition book, btw):
- Don’t think. All I did was rummage through my box of images and pull out anything that was blue and turned me on. I did not spend a lot of time aching over the composition of the page either.
- Don’t spent more than 30 minutes on a spread. A spread is two facing pages. Therefore, if I did one page, I would only spend 15 minutes. This goes with the don’t think thing very nicely. You can express yourself in whatever way you need without spending a lot of time over how perfect (or imperfect) the page looks.
If this sounds like fun, grab a magazine you want to cut up (I like ripping out pages and images for later use while I watch tv in the evening), a glue stick, and a book to glue stuff into and GO! Go Glue Something. I’d love to see what you do!