Love what you do, do what you love!

Hello lovely visitors and thank you so much for dropping in here.
It's been a bit quieter here than usual, that's because life has been rather busy as far as my day job is concerned and that made me reflect on the title of this post. I do love my day job, but if I don't get the time to create, life goes out of balance for me, so I knew I had to make time to do something just for me. What I love more than anything is to create little books and that is what I want to share today.

It's like a little mini journal, for me to reflect on all the things I am grateful for....
The whole little book is made out of 1 sheet of 12 by 12 thin card and I'll start with a very brief explanation of how I made it:

1. Score your piece at 6", turn 90 degrees and score again at 4 and 8"
2. Cut between panel 1 and 4 and 3 and 6 as shown
3. Start folding your piece into a booklet: Fold panel 1 down to 2, then fold those two behind 3, fold 3 up       to 4, 4 behind 5 and finally 5 down to 6.
4.  You will now have a fat little packet of 4 by 6" pieces all attached because of the folds.
    Piece 1 and 6 are single end pieces, and 2 and 3 as well as 4 and 5 are double. They can either be glued       together, or attached just at the top or bottom to form pockets, which I did for this booklet.

I cut two separate pieces of Kraft card to 4 1/4 by 6 1/4" for the cover, plus a 2 by 6" piece for the spine.
Here is how I finished the cover:

The main stamps are by The Crafts Meow, I also did a lot of background stamping, but they kind of disappeared in the process. The dies are all Tim Holtz. The flower is from Prima I think.

Here is the first page, I recently bought this stamp second hand, and I just had to use it, can't tell you who made it, but the sentiment is from Donna Downey Empowered Words set by Unity Stamps. As you can see the background is more inky play with book pages, background stamping and stencilling thrown into the mix.

On the left, the inside cover was just covered with some Tim Holtz paper, a bit more stencilling and the sentiment that really informed my whole thinking about this booklet, "Let what you love be what you do"....

Another second hand stamp with a further quotation from the Donna Downey set.

The facing page, this one includes some scraps from paper serviettes and some Prima stamps designed by Finnabair.

Below you can see both facing pages together

And finally the last page, again using similar techniques:

The back cover end piece was kept simple again, Tim Holtz paper with just some stencilling with one of his masks.

And finally the outside  back cover

I used a Sizzix Tim Holtz texture fade for this.

Now because I had made the inside pages into pockets, I really wanted to make some tags to go inside. The backs of the tags were covered with more paper and then left blank for journaling.

This one was created with the help Distress Inks, paper serviette scraps, stencilling and La Blanche and Tim Holtz stamps.

For this one I stamped the beautiful Leonardo drawing (had this stamp for so long, I can't remember where it is from), in Sepia Archival, I then masked it, inked around it with Distress Inks and did further back ground stamping. For the ticket I combined a Tim Holtz Ticket stamp  and a Whimsy Stamps sentiment stamp.

Well there you have it, a rather long post, I'm sorry. Hope you like my little booklet, and like always thank you so much for visiting. Hope you will make some creative time for your self, you will feel all the better for it, trust me!!