A little background: I’m not an especially creative person, in the artsy sense. My creative talents fall almost entirely in the thinking-outside-the-box-for-problem-solving arena. I’m especially bad at creating pretty art from scratch, although I can do a little with arranging things that already exist into an aesthetically pleasing arrangement, like with photography or graphic design.

But I’ve been making a concerted effort over the past handful of years to grow in this area of playing with art and creativity, and using prompts and challenges and other forms of external structure to give me some guidance.

Bible Quilt Journaling

So I was pretty excited when I stumbled across Bible Quilt Journaling. With a variety of premade templates, the idea is that you write one verse into each quilt “square,” then add stitching and decoration to the page. (If you’re doing this without a template, you can just write the verses out in sections, then add “stitched” dividers and decorate the page.)

There are a number of benefits to this, besides the obvious benefits of things like writing out the verses. Having each block in a relatively small space breaks the whole thing down into bite-size chunks, which is a lot less intimidating for “uncreative” people like me!

And I like that it naturally breaks down into stages. Just as it’s generally better in composition to treat writing and editing as distinct activities because they use different parts of the brain (rather than trying to do them both all at once), on these pages it’s possible to do just the writing — and then come back and do the decorating later, so you’re not holding up the writing stage trying to figure out how to decorate.

I like this approach and plan to do pages that use this method as-is. However, I tend to do a lot of studying where I’m looking at a lengthy passage or whole book of Scripture, or a very long list of topical verses, and I wanted a way to do this with these larger verse collections without it being difficult to differentiate my notes from the main text. So far I’m really loving what I came up with, which is sort of a hybrid “Bible Quilt study.”

Bible Quilt-Inspired Bible Study

Remember, this is for lengthier passage. You can definitely use the original BQJ approach for Bible study! But in my opinion it works better for smallish verse collections or else those of us who are more linear thinkers might tend to get confused about what we’re looking at. This method requires a little bit of preparation (which I’ll explain later in the post), but ultimately saves time over trying to write out a whole book of the Bible by hand.

It uses “blocks” like Bible Quilt Journaling does, but they’re divided into columns so it’s easy to discern what’s what. The column divisions are divided roughly using the Fibonacci sequence/Golden Ratio, and the left column is the main text, the center column is related Scriptures and definitions, and the right column is for my own insights. (As you can see, I haven’t gotten far enough with this one to have written anything in of my own observations.)

(In this particular instance, because Hebrews quotes heavily from the Old Testament, I also put the references for all the quoted texts at the top of this column for each chapter, because I didn’t plan to write them all in separately.)

After writing in what needs to be written in, decorative outlines/borders can be placed between the verses or notes, and decorations added. Because I’m not much of an artist, most of my decorations are stickers. There’s also a lot of color added in the text for emphasis, and I try to reserve this mostly for “color-coding”-ish purposes so that, even as it adds visual interest, it’s aiding in visual scanning of the page.

The washi tape along the left edge adds some color, too; more importantly, it adds reinforcement so this can be punched and added to a three-ring binder or bound with a comb-binding or similar machine and (hopefully) not tear.

Preparing the Text

One of the benefits of a Bible Quilt Journal is that you’re spending a lot of the time hand-writing Scripture. And I love that! But, realistically, if I want to study a whole book, I’m not going to hand-write the whole thing first. It would take me so long that by the time I was done, I’d be too burned out to go back and do the actual study (or I’d lose track of my insights in the meantime). So for this approach, I settled on a blend: the main text is printed from a computer, and the cross-referenced verses are hand-written.

I export the text from e-Sword (my Bible study software). From the “Bible” menu, there’s a “Copy” option.

Inside this dialogue, make sure you’ve selected the full span of text you want — whether that’s the whole book or just a chapter or whatever. And I prefer formatting option “2,” which puts the reference after each verse. Then click the “Copy” button.

Now navigate to your word processor. (I use LibreOffice or OpenOffice, but you can use Word or Google docs or whatever.)  In a document with a left margin of 0.75 inches and a right margin of 4.25 inches, “paste special” (the hotkey for this, on Windows, is Ctrl-Shft-V, if you don’t want to use the edit menu) and paste the text in as “unformatted text.”

(By the way, all of this is a lot less complicated than it sounds; I’m just giving you lots of detail.)

Now you should have one wide left column of text, with a wide enough left margin for punching.

I format the bulk of my text as 12-point, which is the default in my software; depending on your preferred font, you might want something a little bigger or a little smaller. I like to keep the line spacing at something that’s about 1.15 line spacing at this size, but this may need tweaking later (more on that in a minute). I make the references 10-point type, and then I group these like I think I would have grouped them if I were hand-writing them in Bible Quilt blocks. That means occasionally I merge two or three verses together into a single block if they seem like a single thought, and I put an extra space between each verse or verse-group so there’s room to draw in dividers.

Optional Additional Formatting

If you want, you could totally leave it at this. I like to do a little more to pay off for me in the long run (and most of it is part of the study itself).

I highlight key words. This is my attempt at getting the best of both worlds, where if I’d been hand-writing these I might have emphasized certain words with special lettering or colors or something. I choose what words I want to emphasize, and I change their font and font size.

If you don’t mind printing out a bunch of pages in color, you can just make these the color you want and print them that way. I make mine a light grey, and then after I print everything out (in black-and-white), I can trace over these with colored pens. If you’re going to trace over them, you definitely want to be sure they’re big enough that you get at them with a pen or fine-tipped marker.

And here’s where you might have to tweak your line spacing. 1.15 lines at 12-point type is good spacing — but the spacing isn’t maintained if you have occasional words that are in much larger font sizes, and things start to get a little wonky. So what I do is highlight all the text, go into the paragraph setting and change the spacing to “exact” and then play around with the distance until it seems to just accommodate my larger words without having an excess of white space everywhere else. Usually about 0.20 to 0.24 does it.

If you want, you can also make certain verses larger type overall if you want to emphasize them. (Remember to check that your reference is still in small type so it doesn’t take over!) Check that individual verses or verse-groupings aren’t split across pages, and print everything out. It will look something like this:

(This is a screenshot, not a photo.)

When I did Revelation, I also opted to do a little extra formatting up-front because it’s such a heavily image-dependent book I wanted to be able to emphasize the various types of imagery.

Add Columns

These next few steps (marking off the columns, writing in the colored text, and washi-taping the borders) can really be done in any order. We’ll start with marking off the columns. You’ll want to do this lightly in pencil, because these are guidelines. Ultimately, you’ll be doodling in stitching or similar dividers over top of these marks, and you might find yourself wanting to erase parts of them.

The easiest way I’ve found to do this, so you don’t have to keep measuring on every page, is to cut two pieces of cardstock to use as templates. I used a pretty thick cardstock (I think this is 120-lb), and I’ve intentionally designed these to measure from the right edge of the page so that if you’re binding these together, you could still mark them after the pages are bound.

The full height of a sheet of paper, one of these is 1-3/4″ wide and the other is 4-1/8″ wide. One at a time, you’ll want to line these up against the right edge of the page and then use a pencil to lightly draw a line along the other edge. I find this easier to do if I stack up all the pages for a passage, so there’s a thicker “edge” to line up against. You should end up with something that looks like this:

Mark the Text

If you didn’t leave all of your text uniform, and you didn’t print it all out in color, you’ll also want to go through and go over the key words you left, in color. I prefer Papermate Flair pens, but of course use whatever you like. You can also go over your lettering as-is, or you can use the printed text as a guide for base letters and build on that to make letters with dots, serifs, etc. for emphasis.

In some cases, I also use actual highlighting and/or colored underlining to emphasize certain key or recurrent phrases or ideas. At this stage, though, I’m really only marking patterns of what is already there in the text.

Washi the Edges

I also like to then washi-tape the left edge — where I would punch it for binding. The width of the left margin is perfectly-sized for a standard-width washi tape to be applied without having to butt it exactly against the paper’s edge, and still allow a little “breathing room” for the left edge of the text. The washi that’s a little on the wider side is too wide unless you trim it.

I turn my paper sideways, stretch out a strip of washi tape that extends a little beyond each end, cut it, then stick the whole thing down. You could trim it even with the top and bottom edges of the page, but I prefer to fold it over to the back. I just feel like it’s less likely to get pulled loose from the ends.

Detour: Revelation

With Revelation, I did a little extra decorating at this stage, although I would normally save decorating for later. I specifically sought out and/or made stickers for certain themes in the book that I used to mark sections of the text almost like headings. For instances, each of the 7 churches, the 7 seals, 7 trumpets, 7 bowls… This is a little unique to Revelation, though, which is organized around these images in a way other books of the Bible are not.

(A lot of my images for stickers came from Digital Scrapbook.com [previously PixelScrapper]. A few I searched for via the internet at large because I wanted something specific. They’re printed onto standard or clear label paper from OnlineLabels.com)

Diving Into Study

‘Most everything else to this point has been preparatory, and at this point, we really get to dive into my favorite part — the actual study.

Here is where I start to read through the text and look for connections and insights. I just start reading through in order, and when something in the text reminds me of another verse that seems related, I write that verse into the center column. I also look up the meaning of certain key words, and write those into the center column.

If I have any personal observations to write down, I write those in the farthest-right column, but most of my insight at this point is in the form of the cross-references and definitions.

Dress it Up!

As you begin to accumulate segments of writing you can create divisions between the columns and horizontally between the written segments, and start adding decorations.

Stickers are a fun way to do this (especially for those of us who aren’t super-artistic). Small doodles. Thematic elements. (e.g. one verse in Hebrews talked about oil, so I made the dividing line below it a wavy line like liquid and drew in a few droplets, which are within my limited capacity for drawing.) Additional washi tape. Coloring sections in with colored pencil — either entirely or just shaded around the edges.

If you’re like me, and have a hard time coming up with divider ideas, try doing an image search or a Pinterest search for “doodle dividers” or “doodle borders” or something along those lines to find suggestions.

You don’t have to have an entire page complete in order to decorate things. You can just add borders and decorations to the places that are printed/written on so far and leave the rest blank for future observations.

Not only can this stage of decorating be fun; it integrates additional senses into the process of immersion in the passage, and the visual variation of the page makes it more skimmable and memorable for future readings, so it’s a valuable element of study & meditation.

Need a Video?

If you prefer to watch this in action, I now have video walk-throughs of the whole process: