Sunflower Ephemera Holder

 

The cover sports a sunflower but that’s about it for sunflowers. 

I started making ephemera holders to send off to Nevermore Creations 17 Marketplace. I thought this would be a simple project but this has taken me forever to finish just the one. I have several journals in the works and kept pulling the handmade ephemera to use in the journals.

It includes altered guest checks that have been bubble printed and embellished with woven paper strips and some kind of focal image. I was watching a video at 49 Dragonflies awhile back and she had mixed a bowl of ink with water and dishwashing soap then blew bubbles through a straw to then dip paper onto thus leaving a bubbly imprint onto the paper. I tried this by taking several spent ink cartridges from my HP  printer and leaving them to soak in a large jar of water. I’m on the instant ink program but they never send me enough return envelopes for recycling so I had built up quite a backstock of cartridges. Turns out they release a nice purple inky water after several days.

There are a lot of hand made tags, collaged journaling cards, and belly bands within. I haven’t actually counted the pieces but there’s got to be about 60 pieces if I count each sticker.

I included a lot of embellishments I have collected over the years…many assorted stickers and images that I love to use in my own journal pages as well as what I use to decorate the journals I send to Nevermore Creations 17.

My covers usually involve a lot of mixed media layering that starts as a collaged sheet of scrap card stock or food packaging ie. frozen pizza boxes, cracker boxes, and cereal boxes. Then layered with tinted gel medium or gesso, then stenciled texture paste, then a mix of acrylic paint and distress sprays, then finally another layer of gel medium and acrylic spray. The spines are reinforced with painted Tyvek on the outside and fabric on the inside and then machine stitched around. From start to finish these covers take about 3 hours to create.

My idea was that whoever buys this could, theoretically, deconstruct, and turn this into a journal by snipping the 3 hole binding stitching, adding their own papers, then re-assembling to include the pocket pages and use the ephemera and embellishments to decorate their journal or use the stuff somewhere else.

This and That: Dream

I took a break from the series of challenge journals I’m finishing up for Nevermore Creations Marketplace (see the last pic below) feeling a need to do something with the pile of stuff that didn’t make its way into those books. I switched gears and decided to make this Catch-All.

There was another method to my madness. I wanted to see how long it would take to complete one journal from start to finish. I usually work on several books at a time, completing each phase on all journals before moving on to the next. 

So. No overthinking. No theme. No distraction. No stash shopping. Use what’s already been pulled out.

I figured it would go pretty quickly since I already had both cover and the image plate made, they just hadn’t met yet😉 

I made two fat signatures determined to not re-file anything and find good spots for my extra pockets. I anchored each signature with some gelli printed card stock.

I made some floating pockets and envelopes

The detailing of the “Frankenpaper...

This is a fattie. 172 pages front and back (that’s 43 sheets of paper so 21-22 sheets per signature). The time drain was trimming down the pages.

The up-side to the fattie was that I was able to use a lot of the printed ephemera I’ve been hoarding that I usually find too one dimensional. I love it but find it hard to use on its own. Anyhoo...I was so happy to get it in this book. Staying true to my challenge, my ephemera books were already out😉

These cut apart postcards were from the first paper stack I ever bought from my first trip to Tuesday Morning. So happy they finally found a home. 

A belly band made from a beer box. I bought it because I loved the graphics.

Gelli plate play.

So how long did this take me? Somewhere between 13-15 hours. All day yesterday and about 3 hours this morning.

These are the journals I’m finishing up.