Doing the embossable on Date Night
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his month Date Night found Kat and I embossing leather journals that we will be keeping as a new way to communicate and share ideas. After several months of success with a date night subscription service, we decided to change things up and try a new model, the Adventure Challenge Book: Couple’s edition. The book comes with dozens of mystery dates that we can select at random. Here’s how it works: We open a page that has four date ideas hidden behind a scratch-off window — something similar to lotto scratchers. Before deciding on which date to pursue, we are given a little snippet of information: A title for the date, a cost estimate, a time commitment and a timeframe for the date. For example, a date may take between two and three hours, but if it will have us making stops at local retailers, the book will tell us we must do the date before 9 p.m. The book also comes with an option for a date box that will send the supplies you need for random dates once a month, cutting down on the prep time and eliminating
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the necessary shopping trip that is indicated on many of the dates. Our first box arrived for a date that can be found on page 17 of the book. “Penny for your Thoughts.” The cost estimate was between $5 and $40 (in line with the cost of the subscription box), it could be done at home at any time and would take between one and two hours. We scratched the window to see what we would be doing with our evening.
Part of our task was to create a collage inside our journals that will personalize them and serve as inspiration when we open them up to write to one another. We were fortunate to have copies of our past Date Night articles, which added a personal touch to our collages.
“Go to a store and each of you pick up a journal or notebook of your liking. Use cutouts from magazine, patches, decals, stickers, stamps, pins etc. on the exterior of your notebook to make it your own. Everything you write in this journal is intended for your partner to read any time they want. So fill it weekly with love notes, encouraging messages, date ideas, things you’re learning about them, etc.” Sounds fun. But we don’t have to make the trip to the store, because all our materials were shipped to us in a date box. We open it up to find two leather journals and an embossing set, glue sticks, a couple stock magazines, scissors and a
scrap piece of leather to practice our nonexistent embossing skills. An additional set of instructions explains how to emboss our new journals and suggests we use the provided magazines (and anything else we want) to collage the inside cover. Kat is over the moon. She mentioned a couple weeks earlier that she wanted to get a leather embossing set to see what she could make. I’m smug and excited — I know a guy who’s been chronicling his date night adventures in a local magazine for the past few months, so I know I can get my hands on some sappy, sincere and personalized collage material for my journal.
