Happy New Year & We are all Getting Older for A Vintage Journey

Hello everyone and let me start by wishing you all the most wonderful, happy and creative New Year.
It's the first Friday of the month and that means a new challenge is starting at A Vintage Journey, hosted this month by the wonderful Alison from Words and Pictures, who I am sure is well known to most of you.

She chose the theme "We Are All Getting Older" and this is what she had to say about her challenge:


Time for weathering and distressing, or some ageing and antiqueing. Make a project using techniques for making the new look old, whether that's paper projects, altered art or mixed media. Just remember to ensure that you create in one of our preferred styles of vintage, shabby,mixed media, art journaling, industrial, timeworn or steampunk.

Well I decided to make a Midory sized notebook/journal in vintage junk journal style, but with plenty of space for actual journaling. So let me take you on a little tour of how I created the cover first of all and then what is inside:
The cover was made from a piece of very old 8 x 8 scrapbook paper. I collaged several elements, labels, diecuts, dried flowers and a wax seal, inked the edges and then sewed around them for extra strength when opening and closing the journal.

The closure is made with a large brad and some hat elastic and the handy thing is, that as the journal gets fatter it can also be closed lenthwise as you can see from the photo below.

The inside pages are a mix of tea and coffee died papers, textured papers etc, sewn together with a simple pamphlet stitch. In total there are 24 double pages, with numerous pockets, belly bands, tuck spots etc. I will take you on a little photo tour without too much explanation as I think the images will speak for themselves.

Pages are only minimally decorated with some stenciling and stamping to leave plenty of room for writing.

I designed most of the graphics used in the pockets and journaling cards myself in Photoshop Elements, making use of some of the wonderful images from the Graphics Fairy etc.

I have tried to give the whole journal a kind of wintery feel, with some nature inspired elements included also.

There are many more pages still, but this will have given you some idea of what is inside, so I will finish with a close up of some of the journaling cards and tags etc. I made still.

Well, there you have it. Do hop over to A Vintage Journey, if you have not already done so, to see what my talented teamies have created and if you feel inspired by our theme this month, we would love to see what you create!

Thank you for your visit today and happy creating!

xxxxx