My blog is about my creative process and what makes me happy in life. I write about my creative friends and moments of bliss. I document the progress of my art journal, crafts, knitting, sewing, making collages and recycling materials. I also include tutorials, inspiration I find in nature, in books, blogs and magazines. It’s filled with my thoughts on a good life and what it should contain.
One of my dreams has always been to write a book and publish it, but I’ve found that I hardly ever write the kind of fiction I think my book should contain. Then in the beginning of this year I was copying all my blog entries into a Word document as a backup and a way to read through what I’d written in a year.
All the entries from 2006 put together became a huge document and I noticed that it was already an entity, a whole. I had written a whole book without noticing what I was doing!
What I had was a text in diary form with a beginning, middle and an end. The text had a clear theme, the narrative of the days gone by and all the words were already written… It’s a document of a year in my life. A good year with lots of great days, days I wanted to tell about and remember.
I wanted to hold it physically in my hand and share it with the world, so I decided to make a book out of the texts.
I started to edit it, and it took my nine months (!) to spell check, rewrite and correct it until it felt finished. I worked on the layout (as best as I could in Word) because I wanted it to look and feel good too. I wanted to illustrate my words with colour photos I’d taken and keep the feel of a diary. I added a note of introduction and a register, some quotes that I like and made a new chapter from the 12 months. Voila! It actually started to look like a publishable book. I named my project A Creative Year and designed the book cover using Photoshop.
The book has more than 240 pages, it is full colour and it is filled with crafty tutorials, creativity, inspiration, photos and encouragement. Do the best of each day! Create beauty in your life! In the book I talk about projects and what they mean to me, about setting goals, finding inspiration and there is also a couple of mixed media tutorials (and more).
I have experience in layout for both web and magazines, but this is the first book project I’ve ever done. I think anyone could do it though, but remember it takes a lot more time than you could ever imagine!
My book A Creative Year is now available as a print on demand book at Lulu and I feel so great that I took on a big project like this and finished it on my own!
Hanna Andersson (aka iHanna), Sweden
iHanna’s blog
More about A Creative Year
Buy it at Lulu.com
