A Frugal Journey Through January Day 4

Hello again and welcome to Day 4 of my Frugal Journey where I have something a little different for you.

I am a huge fan of the work of France Papillon, the author of 'Journal on Mondays' where she creates the most amazing journal pages which are published each Monday on her YouTube channel. Over the past year she has been journaling in an altered book which inspired me to try something similar myself. All you need is an old hard backed book that you can bear to part with. Today, I will show you how I altered the cover, and later in the month I will share how I prepared the pages by thinning them out and creating some flaps and pockets, followed by a couple of finished pages.

I gathered some scraps of black card, stencils,black texture paste, homemade, but more of that another day, some embossing folders and Treasure Gold in a sliver finish.

 

I stencilled onto the cover and spine of the book with texture paste then painted over them with black acrylic paint by Eco Green Crafts - great coverage and a lovely creamy texture which dries beautifully matte. I then embossed all my scraps of black card with various embossing folders, mostly from Tim Holtz, but a couple of others that had no manufacturer's name on too.

I then tore up the embossed images, glued them to the front cover and then highlighted the texture with Treasure Gold. I worked in two layers which I think helps with the illusion of depth. As you can see I created a sort of steampunk look, without any dimensional embellishments as I wouldn't want them to be damaged when I pop this in and out of my bag, but you could use any paper or card stock, in any colour, on any theme you like.

I'm really pleased with how this turned out but normally I wouldn't risk altering the cover of journal before I had finished all the pages as I can be a bit of a messy journaler with lots of inks, stains and sprays - perhaps this will encourage me to work a little (or a lot) more carefully in future. I may also add some more dimensional embellishment when I have completed the journal, who knows!

Thank you so much for joining me today. I will be back, same time, same place tomorrow with an interesting idea for a scrapbook layout.

I hope you will join me x

 

Posted with Blogsy