101 Journals Project: 91-97

This batch was quite fun to make. I used food boxes that I trimmed down a bit, painted over with a buff colored acrylic then decoupaged with napkins. I love these fatties because they do use up a significant chunk of paper.

This was a spontaneous creation using a tea bag box. I wanted to take a big bite out of the 6x6 papers I seem to love to buy but never use. I just grabbed a piece of packing paper I was using as a backing to spray color on some doilies a while back.

First entry: the cat

This is for my December Daily journal...

...inside cover decorated with scraps of origami paper.

101 Journals: 3 Day Weekend

3 finished during my 3 day Thanksgiving weekend: Salli, Salzburg and Canyon Road

Salli is filled with mostly assorted art paper interspersed with inspiring images...

I call this Salli, for Salli Swindell who curates the website "They Draw and Cook". I follow her on Instagram and she does her  "kitchen counter" drawings over her morning coffee.  This will be my Cafe Play journal.

... copies of my Arty paper collages...

...pages from Somerset Studios magazine...

...pages from art books...

...images from magazines and Sunday Travel.

101 Journals Project: Petunia

Petunia is made from a green tea box from Trader Joes so it's about 4 x 6 with a 2 inch spine. I believe the Petunia printable came from Artymaze. I mounted it on an acrylic/stamped/stenciled background I had kicking around from another project.

This is another naked journal. All of the journals in this project are just "finished" to this point, decoration may or may not happen depending on where they go from here.
My immediate goal is to burn through my paper stash by the end of the year in a "use it or lose it" purge figuring after 101 journals I will have a clearer vision of what I actually use vs. what I think I'll use then moving forward I'll be more discriminating when it comes to future acquisition.

I just used dental floss to sew these signatures in

This is such a cute little journal.

101 Journals Project: Three Amigos

These 3 journals were made from Trader Joe's Shu Mai boxes trimmed down to 6"x 6" x 2" and covered with a couple of pieces of scrapbook paper I was sent in a travel themed Flow-ish Journal swap in the Trashy and Flowish Junk Journal FB group. The spines are covered with fabric.

They're naked inside (undecorated) using a variety of travel book pages, brochures, maps and lined/grid paper for writing.

The cover of each of the 4 signatures is heavy textured cardstock

Each signature has a kraft paper pocket

The images are from a travel book of Tuscany.

Project Share: 101 Journals

12 Journals in 10 days

The paper is getting out of control so, I've issued myself a challenge, prompted by a post in one of my junk journal Facebook groups. Someone had posed the question "Could you go a year without purchasing any craft supplies (not including adhesives)?

Interesting thought as this made me reflect on why I went down the junk journal rabbit hole to begin with...re-purposing. I was a theatrical costume designer for 20 years and prior to that a student, then teacher of costume design as well. I collected a lot of paper: images, postcards and books about fashion, costume history, art, design, clothing construction, millinery, etc. in addition, things I collected throughout 20 years of travel. 

I started off well enough until I discovered a store called Tuesday Morning. It's kind of a discount Home Goods with a nifty craft section.  In the last 18 months I've accumulated more paper than I started out with.

My riff on this challenge is to make 101 naked journals without buying anything but glue and blades for my paper cutter. I live in a studio apartment so my stash, though out of control for my space, is not as massive as those who have dedicated craft rooms and storage.

Cadillac Ranch

I unearthed a large box of photographs I'd taken on my travels and made a bunch of cover plates. Cadillac Ranch is made from a box of Trader Joe's crackers collaged with painty paper scraps. my fattest journal thus far.

Birthday Girl

Gift for my nieces 25th birthday

Birthday girl was made using a gutted hard cover book decoupaged with a decorative napkin, fabric from a sun-worn tablecloth and a band made from strips of scrap decorative paper.

I had several pieces of "Frankenpaper" sort of a paper crazy quilt of scraps, which became journal covers

I covered the inside with fabric...

There's no decoration within the journals at this point...

The papers are a mash-up of anything I could fold in half: book/magazine pages, lined paper, graph paper, greeting cards etc.

I've given myself a soft deadline of January 1 because I really want to "use it or lose it" and re-organize my space. I'm also curious to see what kind of chunk this will take out of stash.

Project Share: A Mega-zine

I watched a video from Mrs. Cogs last week where she flipped through a Mega-zine she made during an online class she'd published in her Etsy shop. She was trying to find a way to use large images that were too big for standard sized junk journals. Once again I was hooked because I too have a lot of magazine, art book, calendar images that I love but they really don't lend themselves to much cropping and I don't want to turn them sideways so I was inspired to create this journal which measures 8 1/2" x 11" with about a 1 inch spine.

I used a heavy duty, legal sized, medical file folder I'd picked up at SCRAP (creative re-use center) last week. I cut down the top where the prongs were embedded and used 2 pieces of the Frankenpaper I made a couple of weeks ago, then wrapped a strip of fabric all the way around the spine.

Mrs. Cogs calls this "the dashboard". I don't know why but anyhoo the pocket on the inner cover is a piece of embroidery I was sent in a swap. I dyed it with food coloring a long time ago for another project that I never ended up using it in. There's a piece of eco-printed watercolor paper on the right.

I just did some minimal decorating with some new stamps and washi tape.

I did an off-set fold on the double sided scrapbook paper signature covers and this is where I used partial calendar images glued down to an 8 1/2" x 11" piece of scrapbook paper to complete the width of the cover also creating a pocket.

I created paper hinges to attach two 8 1/2" x 11" pages together to make one large piece that I could sew into the spine

More eco-printed paper...

The polka dot scrapbook paper was trimmed down to 11" x 12" and folded at 8 1/2. The other piece of scrapbook paper measures 8 1/2" x 11" and is machine stitched to the larger piece to form the pocket on the backside.

Franken Paper cover detail.

Project Share: Travelers Notebook to Travel

I whipped up this Travelers Notebook style cover the other day...sort of. Several years ago I got my mitts on a large quantity of decorator samples, most of which were about 10" x 10" squares as well as some a bit larger. I made a bunch of utility aprons (3 large pockets) as gifts...the kind that one can wear whilst crafting or a flea market/farmers market vendor might wear, or in my case as a cashier at the market I work in. The pocket strip was a crazy-quilt like mash up of all of these small pieces of really pretty fabrics.

I had made several apron kits set up and ready to assemble, the quilted strip already sewn together...then I hit a wall and put the whole project away...until now. I recently watched a video by PinkOddBird where she'd made a journal cover out of a clutch purse as well as a clutch style journal cover and I was like "Aha!" I dug out my abandoned project and got to it.

I'm going on a trip to Wisconsin next week, a trip I won at a Cheesemonger competition earlier this year. I'll be visiting several cheesemakers and I'm super excited about it. I've never been to Wisconsin and haven't done any traveling at all for years. I had made a bunch of journal inserts during a stash-busting session a while back so putting this all together didn't really take much time at all. 

I started decorating with a bunch of cheese stickers as well as other product related stickers I get from vendors who come and do demos at my market.

I added some postage stamps and made a writing board.

The signatures include scrapbook paper that I stenciled on the white back side, pages from Somerset Studios (a paper crafting magazine I love), some coffee dyed papers and map pages from a AAA TripTik I'd saved from my cross-country move from NYC back to California 19 years ago.

Somerset studios inspiration going on here...

Spray inks through several stencils...

I just threw down a few stencils onto the back of a bunch of scrapbook paper and sprayed coffee through them.