I am Back...

Hello there lovely people;

It has been a CRAZY month.  I am back and have lots to show you.  Check out the "Sketchbook Challenge" it is still going strong.  This months theme is 'Spilling Over'.  And oh my goodness I can definitely relate to that. Here is my rendition...

 What kind of sicky gets all worked up...just by simply LOOKING at "art supplies"....well...I am afraid to admit, that would be ME!  So this page is about that.  I love art supplies and I do have allot of it and not enough time in this life to use it.  So I now refrain from buying (which is extremely hard) and I just stalk other blogs and look at their supplies and how they are using them and that seems to fill the void.

I have been working on this next project for a couple of weeks now.  As you know my youngest daughter is going to London (this Saturday!!! OMG) and I thought it would be nice for her to document this journey in a hand-designed journal specifically for this trip. Here is the journal before.....

This is a simple lined Moleskin Cashier journal.  Looks pretty plain and not very inviting for a journey such as hers will be.  This is after I personalized it.

 I added an elastic enclosure that I attached to the back of the book.  I also handmade the button on the front.  I used my dremel tool to drill a couple of small holes that would incorporate the elastic and drew her name all fancy with ink and sealed it.  I picked her favorite color for the book which at the present time is "yellow".  I did some stamping and rubbing ink all around the sides to give it an old look, and cut out some of my hand-drawn flowers out of an old book page and glued it on.  I re-inforced the book by putting a seam of black tape on it.  I think it looks better like that.

 This is the back of the journal, I added a few more places that she wants to go to in her life.  I rubbed ink around those pictures as well to tie it all in together.

 I personalized the inside as well.  A blank book can sometimes be intimidating.  So I stamped some images in and I found some good "Travel Quotes" that I wrote in the bottom of some of the pages.

She is going with her classmates and at the last parent meeting they gave us their itinerary's so I added that to the journal hoping it will prompt her to write a little something everyday.  I also made a magnetic bookmark using the same paper as the journal so it matches. 

Re purposing an existing journal doesn't really cost allot of money.  I only used 1 piece of scrap booking paper; under 99 cents, an ink pad and a couple of stamps, glue and cut-outs from a travel book, and a little imagination which is FREE.  And of course TIME...which I know we don't have much of...that's why this took me 2 weeks because I could only work on it in 15 minute intervals.  I haven't showed her yet I just have a few last minute things to do, but I can't wait to show her :)

I will leave you with one of the quotes that I used in her travel journal...

"A traveller without observation is a bird without wings."                    Moslih Eddin Saadi