A few quick junk journals

I created a couple of quick journals for the teenage daughters of a friend of mine. I had 2 days to put them together, which for me is extremely short notice. Luckily I had the covers done -- minus the hardware -- and just sitting on my bookshelf.

I bought two covers at Tuesday Morning on the cheap and played around with how to cover up the Tim Holtz Christmas theme printed on the front. I sprayed ink, painted, dabbed more ink, sprayed with more colors, and then glossed until I was content. I wasn't really pleased over all, but I don't think I could have done any better. After everything dried I stamped an image on the front with my favorite copper stamp pad.

This was the first time I added hardware to covers. Since these were going to be for young teenage girls I wanted to put some chain and hooks for closures, and use some key lock plates for decoration. Silver on the red cover and copper on the green.

I also added paper clips to some of the pages with fibers tied to them.

For the spine I used black embroidery thread with a few beads. This was the first time I tried this 2-holes-in-the-spine system of binding and I didn't like it at all. When I tied in the signatures I couldn't get them tight enough so they were wobbling up and down in the book. I simply couldn't fix it. I had to leave them wobbly.

For the inside pages, I used 5 sheets per signature, folded that makes 10 pages. I made 3 signatures for each book. I tried to make the pages all different in function as well as different sources of paper. I wanted folds and pockets and different sizes, some plain and some colorful. I also wanted to find places for lots of tags, envelopes, some stamping, and washi tape.

I used a hook and eye system for the fastening. This worked well as it didn't scratch the paper on the back page.