Perpetual Playtime

I made another journal . . .  This one started (as so many projects do) with a YouTube sitting session. I sometimes spend so much time travelling from one video to the next that in the end I have no idea where I started. That's the case here - I watched a video, linked from that one to another "suggested" video, on to another (rinse & repeat) and then saw one where someone (and I hate that I cannot find the video that provided my first inspiration) made a journal with envelopes. A couple of days later I went on a failed search to watch that video again and ended up watching several envelope journal videos, but never happened upon that specific video again. But I wasn't deterred since I had the general concept. However, on this subsequent video journey I did come across a video by Kathy Orta that showed her Hidden Hinge process . So I went with that and jumped right in. There are actually two different Kathy Orta videos that show the Hidden Hinge, but since...

. . . From Recycle (for the most part.) Yes, two fauxs - since this faux leather is paper and not cloth. I figure, if faux leather is made from cloth, that this is a paper faux of the cloth faux. Have I lost you yet? eep! Yep, I made most of it from recycled items. I bought the leather cord that closes it at Target and I bought the skeleton key on etsy, and all other components are recycled (of course the thread to sew the signatures and the glue to bind the cover to the liner is not recycled, but that probably should go without saying.) This journal took a couple of months of migration and morphation (new word! Yay me!) to find what it wanted to be. It started with a piece of junk mail. Yep, junk mail - back in October I had a tri-fold cardboard mailer delivered to my mailbox with a free sample attached inside. I started to throw it all away when inspiration jumped right off the card. I removed the sample and the sticky that held it in place as well as the sticky that hel...

My granddaughter came to visit last weekend and brought her journal we worked on in July back so that she could add more pictures (Click HERE to see the July journal). She also pointed out that her journal was almost full and that we needed to make her another one.  Well, I'm always interested in trying something different so I went in search of ideas for her next journal and found a technique I thought would be interesting - sewing it together using a coptic stitch. I watched several videos of different people using the technique and decided I could do that.  Here is a WIP image:  I cut the front & back covers from chipboard and let her look through my scrapbook paper for something she would like for her cover. I did the cutting and she did the gluing.  We used basic copy paper folded in half for the pages. I would start the paper folds and then had her press the crease with the bone-folder. Once we had folded 50 sheets (we could now ca...

I'm not very consistent with blog posts, and sometimes I'm just in a short hiatus from crafty stuff, but that doesn't mean I'm not slowly working on something. Right now I'm in the process of altering a piece of junk mail to turn it into something I'm happy with for a homemade journal. But that is a slow process since I'm not really sure how I want the journal cover to look. So, while that has been on my table for a couple of weeks it my still be there in another couple of weeks. For me that is just how my creative process works.  But, when I realized I had not posted any blog posts in over two months I thought I might ought to. So today I will share my granddaughters creative project. She is altering a pair of plain white Keds with Copic markers: Pretty good if you ask me!