Monday, July 18, 2016

Journal Monday - Handmade Journal

I am an active watcher of art journal videos on YouTube.  Some of my favorite Art tubers have a certain day that they share art journal videos.  One does Monday's.  One does (or used to do) Wednesdays.

I've been toying with the idea of sharing my own art journals here on Monday's.  Sharing one (or all) of the spreads I do in a day.

I already have a collection of art journals, but thought I'd make Journal Monday here at A DIY Day even more special by making my own journal for it.

So today, between playing with my boys and going to see Ghostbusters, I managed to make this:


I think it is quite lovely if I do say so myself!  But can you guess what it started out life as?  Keep reading and you'll find out!

After watching a YouTube video where a woman was challening people to make 5 Junk Journals a week for 5 weeks, I thought I'd like to make one.  5 a week seemed a bit too much for me, but started with 1 seemed okay.

So I ran to my recycling box and I rescued this:


That's right, the base of this beautiful journal was a Kraft Mac and Cheese box!


First I opened up the box and cut off all the tabs like so:


After that I used some prints I had pulled off of my Gelli Plate using a live fern as a mask.

One print was used on the outer cover, the second was used on the inner cover.  I used Aleene's Fast Grab Tacky Glue to glue the pages down.  I love the fast grab because it sticks quick and I don't have to clamp thing down, but it is SO thick.  I think I'm going to try to find a thinner glue next time.

The inner pages are recycled too.  They are a cardstock of unknown poundage.  They were scraps my husband brought home from his old job over 6 years ago and have been sitting around the house waiting to be used since.

 I cut the scraps to fit my book (which is tall and narrow).

I made 4 signatures of 4 pages and each, and bound them in the book using a 3 hole pamphlet stitch.  I didn't use waxed thread, I just grabbed some DMC floss in yellow.


The words on the front read "Where I take a break from my day" and they were taking off of a magazine page.  I used paint the same colors as the journal cover to take the white off of the wording.

Once it was all said and done I thought I did a pretty good job.


What do you think?

2 comments:

  1. That is really neat. I am going to have my daughter look up art journals on Youtube. I think she will really get in to them.

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  2. I need to do this! thanks for the ideas.

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