Welcome to Smashbook Sanctuary
Smashbooking is where I give myself permission to gather, tear, layer, paste, scribble, paint—and follow what catches my attention without needing to know why.
A word. An image. A color. A scrap of something I've saved. Sometimes the choices are playful and spontaneous. Sometimes, when I step back and look at what has found its way onto the page, I discover something I hadn't quite known how to say.
As an Art Therapy Coach, I have long been fascinated by the ways creative expression can help us notice what is stirring beneath the surface. Smashbooking has become one of the ways I explore that territory in my own studio practice—with curiosity rather than expectation.
This Sanctuary is where I share that continuing practice: the pages I'm making, the things I'm discovering, and simple invitations for you to explore alongside me.
There are no perfect pages here. Just scraps, color, curiosity—and whatever wants to find its way onto the page.
Pull up a chair. There's room at the table.
More Than a Messy Book
I became a certified Art Therapy Coach in 2019, and a year later trained as a Cosmic Smash Book Teacher/Guide with Cat Geller. I was already an artist, but these experiences gave me another way of understanding something I had felt for a long time: what our hands choose to make can sometimes show us what our minds haven't quite put into words.
That's one of the reasons Smashbooking remains part of my own creative practice.
There is something wonderfully liberating about taking an ordinary notebook and deliberately changing it—scrunching pages, adding paint, tearing and pasting images, writing across things, covering things up, making marks without worrying whether any of it is going to become “good art.”
I've watched people hold their newly altered book for the first time and look at me as though we've just broken several important rules.
Maybe we have.
Because underneath all that glorious mess is permission: to play, to respond, to follow an image simply because it calls to you, and to become curious about what appears.
Sometimes it's just a page.
And sometimes the page knows something.
What Smashbooking Is to Me
Smashbooking is therapeutic for me, but it is also experientially creative.
I can create something ugly. I can create something beautiful. And when either one is the end result, it still feels good. I embrace both sides of the mirror.
When I finish, I often feel uplifted, refreshed, lighter—as though I have let go of unspoken things, buried things I don't necessarily need to consciously remember, name, examine or understand.
I've always believed that's one of the reasons we cry.
Sometimes an emotion becomes so strong that the body simply cannot hold it anymore.
It needs somewhere to go.
And so the tears come—sometimes bursting, sometimes trickling, sometimes only a single teardrop.
But something has been released.
That's what Smashbooking can feel like to me.
The page becomes somewhere for what I've been carrying to go.
I don't have to explain it.
I don't even have to understand it.
I just have to let my hands make the page.
A Personal Invitation
Come Smashbook With Me
For a while, my Smashbook group went quiet while my attention was elsewhere. But I never stopped Smashbooking. And now I’m ready to bring the table back to life.
Smashbook Sanctuary is gearing up to be an active creative gathering place on Facebook—a simple space for monthly activities, shared pages, inspiration, encouragement, and the kind of creative play that doesn’t ask you to be impressive.
You do not need to be an artist.
You do not need to make beautiful pages.
You only need a book, a few supplies, some curiosity—and a willingness to see what happens when you let your hands lead for a while.
If that sounds like your kind of table, come join us.
Pull up a chair. We’re smashing again.
