Paris is Always a Good Idea

A creative journey through the City of Light

“You are an adventurer.  You go your own way.  You’re an observer of the little things that make life so magical.  You seek camaraderie with other curious souls to share experiences.  You explore with new eyes everywhere you go, and you collect things along the way.  You log your impressions in a journal, and then you tell the stories.”

This is my travel manifesto.

Before each trip, when I gather art supplies and prepare my travel journal, I choose a vintage postcard from my collection and write these words on the back. Then I tuck it into my journal as a reminder to savor everything I encounter along the way.

Preparing a journal before a trip heightens the anticipation of travel for me. Sorting through boxes of papers and ephemera, imagining what might be discovered in a new place, always fills me with excitement.

When I’m teaching a workshop — as I was recently in Paris — there’s an added layer of anticipation.

I look forward not only to exploring the city myself, but to sharing it with a group of curious, creative women who are seeing it with fresh eyes.

Our project that week was to create vintage travel journals to chronicle our time in Paris.

During the day we wandered through the city — flea markets, museums, hidden neighborhoods, gardens and cafés — gathering small treasures along the way. In the afternoons we gathered at a cozy bistro near our hotel to build our journals together, layering our collected memories into handmade artist books.

Throughout the week I encouraged everyone to collect whatever caught their attention:

• Metro tickets

• Museum maps

• Café receipts

• Croissant bags

• Menus

• Scraps of paper

• Anything at all.

“If it can be glued into a book,” I told them, “throw it in your bag!”

One of our favorite outings was the Puces de Vanves, my favorite flea market in Paris. Nearly four hundred vendors fill the market with antique photographs, vintage books, handwritten letters, ledgers, postcards, and countless other paper treasures.

For those of us who love ephemera, it’s a dream.

We gathered beautiful old papers and fragments of French history to incorporate into our journals — pieces that would become part of the story of our week in Paris.

Another day took us to Montmartre, once a small village outside the city and still filled with artistic spirit. After visiting the Musée de Montmartre and the lovely Renoir Gardens, we wandered the winding streets, sketching, photographing, and noticing small details that would later appear on our journal pages.

Each afternoon we returned to our workshop table.

I demonstrated how to gently deconstruct old vintage books and transform them into the foundations of our travel journals. Page by page we rebuilt them, filling them with the ephemera we’d gathered and the impressions we’d captured throughout the city.

Watercolors.
Ink.
Pencils.
Layers of torn paper.
Stitches of fabric.

Each page became richer, fuller, more alive.

The journals began to take on a life of their own.

At the Musée d’Orsay, as we stood before paintings by Monet, Renoir, Van Gogh, and Chagall, I encouraged the group to notice color palettes, patterns, and brushstrokes that might inspire their own journal pages.

Later we sat beneath the Eiffel Tower, sketching the intricate latticework of its iron structure — some capturing the entire tower, others focusing on small sections through viewfinders to isolate shapes and patterns.

And of course we explored the beloved neighborhoods of the Left Bank — from Notre Dame to Shakespeare & Company to the Luxembourg Gardens — soaking in the atmosphere that has inspired writers and artists for generations.

By the final afternoon, we gathered one last time to complete our journals.

Page by page, the week came together.

The markets.
The museums.
The conversations.
The tastes and scents of Paris.

These journals became far more than simple art projects.

They became archives of the journey.

Each book held the story of the week — the places we wandered, the treasures we discovered, the moments of laughter shared around café tables.

The beauty of this kind of travel journaling is that it requires no special skill or artistic experience.

All it asks is curiosity.

A willingness to notice.

And the simple act of collecting the small details that might otherwise be forgotten.

If the idea of exploring Paris in this way — wandering, noticing, gathering memories and transforming them into a journal that tells the story of your journey — speaks to you, I would love to have you join me for a future workshop.

You can learn more about upcoming retreats here.