this is the journal i made for my mother-in-law's trip to china. it's rather small (14cm x 20cm - 5 1/2" x 8") and light, with a lot of space to keep ephemera she may collect and to write about it.
the cover is made from a padded envelope that i covered in old sheetmusic and napkins. i love the effect that gives.
the inside cover has an orchid-tuckspot which i think matches the colours really nicely...
i stitched in two window-envelopes and a paperbag along with some of T's and R's drawings and pieces of a huge old map of china (although i mainly used the ocean so these pages can still be written on without being too busy).
i machine-stitched over all the edges where i glued the tuck-spots using a colour-changing thread in pinks and purples matching the colours on the cover.
i had a little trouble with the "theme" because i couldn't find many things in my stash that served any kind of chinese cliché except for a stampset with lanterns (and tassels to make them look like chinese lanterns) and a punch that punches the little dragon (above picture - bottom right corner).
i think the paper with the goldfish matches very well too...
the center page features a colouring image T coloured in for his grandma so i could put it in the book too. he is very interested in space and planets and spacetravel. my hubby extended the original colouring image to include the sun, all the planets, a satellite, the international space station and the asteroid belt. each time we draw a new one it gets more and more intricate... i didn't want to cut the overhanging edges off - so i just folded them over.
R was allowed to draw on the back of the spaceship so that grandma could take something of hers too.
the very center is an envelope made from the map of china. it hides the binding and will hold a small colletion of washi tapes to keep the collected ephemera safe.
another piece of china-cliché i could find: a scrap of wall from another project turned into a tuck-spot.
the original opening of the envelope - where the mail would usually go in - is still open and can hold even more things.
i hope she likes it and uses it. as per request i kept it light, simple and practical. i didn't add any paperclips or tags to keep it from becoming bulky before she even started using it. the only piece of metal on it is a small eyelet that holds the elastic closure - i don't want the journal to cause any trouble at various airports. i suppose paperclips are okay in general but you never know...
i have written about this journal before in this post. it is my personal journal that goes with me almost everywhere. i've had a phase before where i had a book to write and sketch in with me wherever i went
along with my most favourite pencil case...
it was my dad's until he gifted it to me - inkstains and all. i love it but sadly the leather didn't take the ink very well and it broke in those places and the pens kept slipping out. maybe i can find a cobbler who could patch it for me...
anyway - that was back when i used to write and always needed to draft out ideas for plotpoints of stories i was working on... i'm still working on most of them...
my recent journal got a dangly lace-charm along the spine. i just love touching it and it makes me happy very time i see it. (R loves it too.)
i use it for personal journaling which is sometimes very elaborate and wordheavy and sometimes just a very quick list of words that happen to pop into my head as i write.
i don't journal every day but my goal is to get into the habit of doing it every day eventually...
i like using all those different spaces and shapes to write on and to work with...
the flowers were leftovers from another project that i just stuck in there because i couldn't throw them away (and they had the glue already on them). i coloured in the lights that were already on the page, which was a "mop-up-page" from making christmas cards about two years ago...
in may my hubby organised an event at the school he's teaching at that was for the students to have the opportunity to exhibit something or other (photos, writing, acrobatics, ideas, singing/dancing/music, movies they made, etc) if they wanted to. the Mango sign is one of the five or six flavour-signs that some girls had made for their cup-cake sale. when they were cleaning up i just asked if i could have them if nobody else wanted them - i think they are very cute...
they fit perfectly inside half a business envelope waiting to be used as journaling cards or something. by the way: the envelope is at the top edge of the book because i accidentally stitched in the first signature upside down. it didn't matter though because none of the papers i used had any sort of direction or image that needed to be placed the right way. i just taped the "bottom" of the envelope closed and cut open the new top. no harm done.
i love the way this works with books like that...
the Mango card happens to have a monologue about T's newly found fondness for tropical fruit flavoured ice cream on it...
in this tuck-spot it saved the tickets to a wonderful garden we have been coming back to for years now but this was the first time we went there with both the kids being old enough to really enjoy it... (i'm talking sand-water-mud-pit, gigantic slides, waterplayground here...)
they have a very nice shop that is part gardencenter part gift-/souvenir-shop. i bought three ceramic tumbler cups i instantly fell in love with (not that we have any more room in our cupboard really... but who cares) and had to sketch out the patterns on them...
i watched this video lately and totally loved the basic principle of it: pick a surface (page in a book), gather things you like the look of, glue them down, done. there's nothing hard about it and i've seen it done before but something about the way Debbie-Anne Parent does it really appealed to me. and i love her voice... so i tried my hands at it too and i'm even quite happy with the outcome. i might do that again...
you may wonder why i'm sharing so much of my personal journal. the thing is: i used to have (and still have) problems with using my books and journals. i bought and have been given lots of pretty notebooks to write in and either i couldn't bring myself to "spoil" those pretty books with my rambling thoughts or i started and tore the pages out again - which is not good for most books... when i started making books and journals myself it was still the same: i had put so much effort into making it - now i can't ruin it by using it. very slowly i have come to realise - mostly by seeing other people's journals-in-progress - that using them only adds to their beauty. even if you mess up a page or write something you don't find eloquent or thoughtful or you end up covering it or you draw a sketch that you don't like - it all tells a story and by adding layers and layers of yourself to the book or journal you give it it's own character, it's own story. i never knew what to do with a "junk journal" (though i've come to not like this term very much) until i made this one. i feel like i couldn't even "spoil" it if i tried to because it is made from things that others would have considered waste paper. i love the texture each page has and every page inspires me because there is something already on it. a white page screams "perfection" at me and that is what it expects too: perfection. no wonder i never wanted to use those pretty books because my writing and sketching skills are far far far from perfect...
if anyone reads this who has been wanting to actually journal rather than fantasize about it and - like me - has often been intimidated by the gorgeous pictures of other, more professinal (art-)journalers: i hope you find it inspiring to see another beginner's imperfect work, a way to use a journal - there are so many more...
by the way: i kind of knew how to do it already, but i found this video series very helpful when using an old book to make a new journal. it helped me with the measuring of the signatures so they actually fit the cover along with tips on what kind of book works best, etc.
another video i watched was this one and i absolutely fell in love with the very first book/set she shows. i showed it to my hubby and he said: "you know we have books like this, right? did i never show them to you?" and he presented me with this stack of beauties. it was like christmas in july... i know i have never seen these before - i would have remembered...i love him for that! (okay - not just for that...)
they are little guides to various things. this green one happens to be about common poisonous plants and flowers.
these are about common birds and their nests, and butterflies. they have a very nice size and if i wanted them to be thicker i could easily take them apart and replace the spine with a wider one.
this one is about moths - obviously. they are beautifully illustrated and must be from the 1920s to the 1940s. it doesn't give the year of publication anywhere but some still have a little catalogue inside announcing upcoming volumes of the year.
i love them all and i would love to make some nice journals with them but then i also don't know if i dare take them apart. my hubby looked them up to check if they're of any great value - which they are not - but still... most of the illustrations are double sided so collaging them is out of the question without sacrificing one side of prettiness. the other idea would be to scan them and learn how to do digital collaging... i want to check with the publishing house that originally published them but i'm pretty sure they are all in the public domain by now so i could make some printables once i've learned how to do it...
until then i might just have to get that nice glue book set from ephemera's vintage garden...
happy journaling and happy crafting everyone!