Dear Everyone ~
At BZS, the new year began with a buzz of kit assembly for Bookful of Travel (Nº 15). The four-week session starts on Saturday, January 18—barely a fortnight from today.
The kits themselves are traveling far and wide. We’ve already dispatched an international parcel to our first-ever student in Hong Kong, where it is 14 hours ahead of Chicago. We would love for this student to join the workshop live, and we’ll see (we hope!). If so, we’ll have students from seven time zones virtually together simultaneously!
Another parcel is en route to Austria, and two will be on their way to Canada mid-week. Even though the Canadian postal strike ended a couple of weeks ago, the USPS will only begin accepting parcels for Canada this coming Wednesday (the 8th). The two Canadian students are both Bookful all-timers, and they’ve been less anxious than I about the situation. In the U.S., parcels are winging their way to destinations from the middle of the Pacific to the Atlantic seaboard.
When I travel, as you might imagine, I consider for hours on end, not what clothes I’ll pack… but which sketchbook I will travel with. On many trips, I’ve taken more sketchbooks than I could possibly fill. On our most recent trip to the UK, I settled on taking a hinged bookcover + butterfly-clip I had taught in my Introduction to Glueing Happiness (Season 3) workshop. It was perfect for travelling with loose papers that I love to draw and write on. I then added an accordion to the inside of the back cover and attached hand-folded envelopes from Cambridge Imprint papers for each of my destinations to enclose bits and bobs of whatever papery delights I’d collected, from business cards to bookmarks, from receipts to coffee rewards cards from the different cafes we’d visited. This “system” turned out to be incredibly and perfectly useful on my trip. See below!
Cat recently shared with me an entertaining story about a trip she had taken many years ago: “When I think about my own travels, it’s rarely the perfect hotel I remember or the sights. I remember the adventure. Once we went to a Greek island. We were excited to experience what we’d often read about. Think Leonard Cohen on the island of Hydra—love, writing books, long days sipping wine in the sun! But in our place, we ended up sleeping in a bamboo hut with a leaking roof and a starving donkey braying outside all night. And it was so hot we could barely walk! My mother nailed it when I related our adventure. ‘That’s a trip you’ll never forget!’ she said. ‘You’d soon forget a nice hotel!’ So true. On that trip, we learned to just flow with it. We survived! And we still laugh about it!”
Maybe you traveled in 2024 and would like to look back on, or commemorate, your trip(s) using ephemera you’ve collected—rather than tucking them away somewhere. Or maybe you’d like the inspiration of anticipation as you prepare for an upcoming trip, so you plan how to document it in a meaningful way. And even if it’s armchair travel you’re musing about, we would love for you to join us for another Bookful adventure! Cat & I look forward to sharing stories and making books with you in this four-session workshop via Zoom, soon! And if you haven’t yet registered but would like to, book your Bookful and I’ll book-y to the Post Office to expedite your kit!
Bookful of Travel
Bound for a Bookful of adventure, Bari
PS:
We will be debuting a new blog post format for the new year. We’re calling it BuZzeS, and our goal will be More musing, more merch, more often. Stay tuned for BuZzeS No. 1 next week.