The Memory Zone (A Weekly Collection of Life's Trash)

Thank you, Miss Vera May for the awesome journal name! After weeks of trying to figure a name out, I decided to go with her idea - The Memory Zone!

Here is the cover with one of my fancy doilies (I really need to make some more of those. Aren't they gorgeous!?)

You can find the video of my cover construction HERE

I sized up all of my covers so that I had one that would fit in my fancy Dollar-General-Clearance box. There is enough room in the box to throw my trash and store the journal. Yay for organization! Now I just need some sort of organization in the house so my trash stashes don't get lost or thrown out...I've already lost some and its only been 2 weeks so far!

Here is Spread 1

Let's go over some of the stuff on it. The video can be found HERE

• Birthday cards from my girls
• Coupon from pizza place
• Foil from bubble bath packaging
• Loser scratch tickets
• Burlington coupon I found in a parkinglot
• WB Mason packaging from my last ream of WB Mason paper (that dude's face was a part of my daily life up north because all of the jobs I had used their office supplies and that handsome fella is on EVERYTHING from them)
• Random sticker

The only problem with that week is that I'm STILL pretty sure I'm missing stuff that I had collected. It was a busy week for us and I remember squirreling a bunch of bits and bobs for this project in my purse and who knows where the hell it went after that! Hence the need for a basket of some sort only for my trash.

Here is spread 2

I didn't have as much this week because we simply didn't do anything. We had bad weather that kept us home so I had to get creative with my junk. So, on this spread you will find:

• National Geographic cover piece (made up a lot of page packs this week)
• Notes I wrote after watching a video 
• Ziploc package. Is it from this week? Who knows but this is when it made it down to my shop!
• Onion tag
• Phone and phone case packaging (new phone....yay!)
• Kleenex package
• Random sticker included in an Amazon order

I've already accumulated quite the stash for next week already. This week's lack of goodies made me super vigilant on my hunt this week!

So far, I have some junk mail, school papers, clothes packaging, and random work pages from the kids.

One thing I'm having a hard time with, though, is saving packaging that had food touching it. I know Shannon Green washes her packaging really well and I'm sure it'll be just fine but I just haven't done it. I think most of the reason is TIME. I don't have the energy to wash the dishes I already have! You think I'm going to wash things I DON'T HAVE TO?

Some things to use:

• Packaging
• Receipts
• Cards
• Lists (grocery, to do,etc)
• Vacation/trip ephemera (even little handouts at gas stations)
• Project pieces (like my Nat Geo cover)
• Magazine/Catalog bits
• "Found" objects
• Kids art/schoolwork
• Doodles
• Instructions from purchased items
• Printed items (no shame in printing your own junk!)

Just think of the trash of your life! So, what do you say? Want to join the weekly trash collecting movement with me?! Send some pics over if you do! I'd love to see what you're working on!

~M