My mom got me started playing around with journals and boy, am I having fun. I've got two more ready to go that are animal focused for kids. I am constantly on the lookout for ephemera and books that could work. For these journals I had an Animal Encyclopedia and some Children's Digests that I found at a thrift shop. Perfect!
I started with a cereal box cut to size so that I could just fold my papers in half and use them as is. Worked pretty good and made life a little easier. For the cover I used double sided sticky tape to put two pieces of paper together and then centered my box, gluing it down a little with quick dry glue and leaving roughly an inch around the edges.
Cut your corners as shown and you'll have nice little mitered corners when you're done.
Using double sided tape turn over the edges and stick them down.
Here's the interior once I got the other papers on.
I didn't take pictures of my signatures, oops, but there are three, each has roughly 8 pieces of paper folded in half. I used solid papers as well as decorative. My middle signature is all plain papers with book pages from the Animal Encyclopedia mixed in. If you're really feeling creative try tea dying your papers. Honestly I haven't got the patience to do that quite yet, maybe someday.
I ended up with 4 holes to bind my signatures into the book. I used ribbon and decided to braid an accent color for decoration. I really love the look of grommets to tidy up the holes but I couldn't get the ones I had on hand to work, papers were just too messy and thick.
Here's both of the front covers. I tend to leave them simple so that whoever ends up with them can add whatever they'd like. I do want to add some type of closure but I tend to draw a blank when its comes to that. I've got a couple buttons picked out for the butterfly book but not sure about Mr. Elephant yet.
The following are the decorated pages of the elephant book. Very simple with tons of journaling and drawing space.
The elephant card is from a really cute vintage rummy card set. I keep hoping I'll run across more of them, probably one of my favorite pieces of ephemera yet.
The book page on the left is a cat poem from the children's digest I found at the thrift shop and the right is a pocket with a koala greeting card that's blank inside.
The "flightless birds" page is bound into the book along with lots of other pages in the middle signature from an Animal Encyclopedia. I included some stickers also.
I had so much fun making these and am having a blast finding epehemera for a variety of topics. My stash is growing and spilling out of my craft area.
Here's a couple links to a few more of my journaling projects:
A Flip Through Of My First Paper Bag Journal
Magazine Memory Journal
First Cereal Box Cover
I am hoping to get some classes together for simple junk journals once I get "The Chirping Frog" up an running, I am using my first completed journal (the cereal box covered one) to keep track of our progress while building. I'm not a good journal keeper but I do love making and collecting little decorative books.
Have you made any decorative journals or paper crafts?
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