Hello friends! It's nice to have semblance of normalcy in my life again! We just moved from North Carolina to Tennessee and what a job that was. Since mid-January, all I have done is pack and then unpack boxes. I've moved more times in my life than I can possibly count (I am an Army brat so moving has always been part of my lifestyle) but this move was the hardest ever! I think it has something to do with my rapidly advancing years. 😅
Finally, I found a few crafting supplies and was able to create this fun spring journal with Eileen Hull Designs Wrap Journal. Ha ha! Ok crafting in my new studio was a challenge. So....here's how that goes, first I thought what I wanted to do, yes, 💡 make a wrap journal. So then I spent 2 hours looking for my wrap journal die! I was about to really panic when I couldn't find any of my XL Scoreboard dies when I spotted 2 Vagabond boxes. At that point I realized that I only have one Vagabond because the first one broke and I threw it away. Hmmm,now wouldn't that Vagabond box be a great box for packing XL dies? Yes, aaaahhhh, there they were, all my wonderful, much loved, Eileen dies. Whew, crisis averted! Well repeat this process for nearly every supply I wanted to use...you get the picture? Creating time - 3 hours, looking for stuff time - 6 hours. Sigh, I hope to get my studio organized soon!
The Journal
So how did I make this fun, colorful quirky journal?
I started out by creating the background. That was a simple process, I just grabbed some inks and paint and began blending in patches of color. There was no rhyme or reason to how I did this, I just made splashes of color.
Next I rummaged around and found a few stencils and I used those to create patterns on the background. I let all that dry and then stamped the floral/mushroom image with a fun new Dylusions stamp that I just got. I liked how that looked, so I kept right on stamping and added that heart border.
I also just got Seth Apter's new Baked Texture embossing powders and wanted to try those out so I stamped on some embossing ink and used Blizzard Baked Texture. Oh I loved the addition of white to offset the bright colors.
And then to give it some real wow, I die cut some flowers with Eileen's Thinlit flowers die, added some doodling to the petals and popped them on the cover. Don't they look great and they add dimension AND character!
The Closure
I'm always trying to think of ways to hold my journals closed as the wrapped bands don't always work for me because I usually have flowers and other 3D doo-dads on my covers that get in the way of a ribbon or elastic wrap. So I thought these two buttons made a great closure. The orange button is simply sewn on the cover with eavy duty thread. The button on the spine is sewn on with elastic. Now here's the trick, after having made a couple of stitches to hold the button securely I made one last stitch BUT I did not pull the thread all the way through, thus creating a loop that could be secured around the orange button. Pretty cool, right? And SEW (LOL!) easy!
The Signatures
I made three signatures to go inside, using tiny composition books that fit perfectly in the Wrapped Journal. I used scrap design papers to cover the outside of the books and then added inks and stamping in keeping with the style of the cover.
Thanks for visiting with me today, now that things have settled down just a bit, I hope I can get back to crafting on a regular basis!
Eileen Hull Designs Products Used:
Colorblends Inks: Beach, Hydrangea, Bay, Leaf, Sunflower and Melon
Other Supplies
Stencils
