Journal Experiments

I've been flat out buried in various projects, family staying on holidays with us, then a virus and have only now realised how long it has been since I have posted on the blog. Doesn't time just wizz away when life gets busy! After being ill for a few weeks the creative mojo was barely able to be scraped up to lie around the house with me. Lots of ideas spinning around in there and zero energy to do anything about it! However I did manage to drag my journalling bits out to the couch and the mojo and I spent some time in the prone position playing with our journal and watching a few movies (in between bouts of virus wrestling)! I'm always spinning ideas around in my head and after accumulating a pile of loose but completed pages realised they needed some sort of home, so decided to create a book binding to put them all into. I know I should have made the book first, but I was flat out holding a piece of paper let alone a book when the virus frst attacked and so everything sorta ended up being done backwards.
I've long been a fan of Teesha Moore's fabulous journal work, so decided to take a leaf or ten from her style to create the covers. I had loads of fabric lying around (I'm in the middle of a fab project with that but we'll talk about that another time) so decided to create fabric covers for the book. I've painted and collaged directly onto raw calico to construct the covers then doodled to my hearts content in between movies, virus wrestling and sleep and am quite happy with the end result.

The outer front cover.




and the inner front cover.

Yes, leave your reality elsewhere and welcome to my world!

I have placed heavy cardboard between the fabric layers before sewing them together to form the front cover and the whole works well. The calico becomes quite stiff after numerous layers of paints, collage and inks, but flexible enough to sew with ease.

Anyway that's the front covers done, I'll show you how it all works out when I finish sewing the rest together.