To keep in line with my yearly theme of children’s stories, I chose Lewis Carroll’s classic “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” for my March theme. Since it was written in the Victorian era, I did the theme in a scrapbook style with Victorian influences. Some of the images are colourised replicas of the original illustrations by John Tenniel from the book.

This post was published much later than normal. My dog recently had to get cancer surgery (he’s fine now!), I hosted a guest for two weeks and recently started a new job. I got so overly fatigued from it all that I’ve had to prioritise daily life over creativity. But better late than never, so here we are!

So many out-of-the-way things had happened lately,
that Alice had begun to think that
very few things indeed were really impossible.

One of the nice things about creating children’s stories inspired themes is that it offers an opportunity to engage with them again. It’s been such a joy reading or listening to the stories, while gaining an adult perspective on them. I admire the authors’ ability to put themselves in the minds of children, capture their sense of wonder about the world and translate it into frivolous nonsense for all to enjoy.

Since it took me several weeks to complete this theme, its compositions are about as unhinged as the story that inspired them. Thankfully this style allows for a lot of trial and error, so my various experiments and layouts came out looking pretty cohesive and intentional anyway.

I’ve been practising my handwriting and am starting to see some of my progress in the titles I wrote. Ironically I chose not to include header titles in this theme ha!

As I’m writing this I noticed that I didn’t include a key for my symptoms and mood tracker. I’ll have to add it once I start using them. While I was making the theme, I used a printed template to capture my days. Now that I’ve scanned the pages I get to actually copy the data into my journal, to complete the ‘messy scrapbook’ vibe with my scribbled notes.