The Joy Journal For Grown-ups: 50 homemade craft ideas to inspire creativity and connection

By Laura Brand

'This book is a chance to slow down and find stillness. Self-care in the most beautiful, creative ways.' – Fearne Cotton

Fifty imaginative ideas for crafts that encourage a sense of joy and mindfulness. Includes a foreword by Melissa Hemsley.

The Joy Journal For Grown-ups invites you to experiment, play and unlock your creative potential with a range of simple crafts that can bring a little more calm into your everyday life. Using store-cupboard ingredients and easily foraged supplies, this beautifully illustrated handbook includes new and inspiring ideas for adding a personal touch to celebrations, creating unique gifts, and making stunning keepsakes.

Whether you are a beginner or confident crafter, bestselling author Laura Brand gently guides you through a host of delightful projects including beautiful flower-pressed candles, scented body butter, and origami hearts. She invites you to carve out 'me time' and enjoy shared creative experiences with friends that can help us to feel more connected and harness the freedom of play from childhood.

Imaginative, engaging and easy to follow, this gorgeous, step-by-step guide features all the encouragement you need to find inspiration, awaken your creativity and brighten your mood.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pan Macmillan
• Release date: Mar 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781529074734

Laura Brand

Laura Brand is an illustrator and mum of two. She shares her crafty experiments and creative ideas for everyday play in her book The Joy Journal for Magical Everyday Play and on her online platform The Joy Journal. She has led workshops for children and adults at Fearne Cotton's Happy Place Festival, Port Elliot and others. Laura lives in the countryside with her husband, their two daughters, two dogs, two cats and chickens. Home is a place of muddy boots, abundant jars of play dough and hand-painted 'welcome' banners above the doors. With chaos and calm in equal measure, Laura aspires to guide her children in the joy of play as well as mindfulness. Laura has found that having her own creative outlet, as well as facilitating a space for the creativity of her girls, has been a welcome tonic.

Book preview

Exercise: Moving Into Calm

This is an exercise to use in gatherings or as part of your own creative self-care, when embarking on any of the projects in the book, or in your day-to-day life when you need help to connect to the world around you.

I trained as a hypnobirthing instructor after the birth of my two daughters because more than anything I wanted to share with others the amazing benefits of birth education, fear release exercises as well as breath and body work – all tools that had calmed my mind and eased my own fears during pregnancy and labour. It may seem tangential that I would be writing about this here, however, when I was recently experiencing some stress, someone said to me, ‘You are living in fight or flight,’ – an automatic physiological state that our bodies go into to protect us when we feel under threat. I realized then that I could use my hypnobirthing breathing techniques to rid me of unnecessary adrenalin and help me to just stop and quiet my mind for a moment.

The exercise that follows incorporates a breathing technique that I learned from my hypnobirthing teacher Hollie de Cruz; it is the first breathing technique you teach expectant mothers (and fathers) but I use it in my own life now when I experience stress or anxiety or if I need to slow down. I have combined this, for the purposes of creativity, with tuning into your senses, and I really hope you will find this as beneficial and nurturing as I do.

Sit in a comfortable chair. Put both of your feet on the ground and close your eyes. Be still for a moment.

Now, with your jaw relaxed and your mouth closed, breathe in through your nose for 4 slow counts and out through your nose for 6 slow counts. Repeat this several