An Altered Journal

Hello all!  My name is Amanda Perkins and I am honored to be able to post here today as a designer for The Bug Bytes!  I was a little nervous to be the first one to post so here we go!

I have been making a lot of cards lately and wanted to do something different.  I had several composition journals sitting around and my daughter wanted to know if she could have one, so I decided to make her a journal.  The cartridges I used for this project were Home Accents and Home Decor.  Here's what I started with: 

Paper/Cardstock (I used a combination of cardstock from My Mind's Eye, DCWV, and The Paper Studio.

a Composition Book

Scor Tape

Trimmer

Mono Adhesive

ATG Gun

(and of course my Gypsy and Cricut!)

I started by cutting down the paper I was going to use for the cover and binding.  The front and back cover pieces were trimmed to 9.75" x 7" and the piece for the binding was 9.75" x 3".  I put Scor Tape on the pieces.  I then stuck them to the book and trimmed the corners.  And this is the result:

After that it was time for the fun part!  I started in my Gypsy with 12x12 mat and got a rectangle from the Plantin Schoolbook cart.  This was simply so that I could see how everything out fit on my notebook.  My daughter is a huge fan of butterflies so when I saw the butterfly on the Home Accents cart I knew I wanted to use that.  I also liked the corner flourishes.  Since she is a daydreamer, I also picked out the words "dream" and "imagine".  On the Home Decor cart she wanted to use the star and also the words explore.  I then separated the images so I could cut them.  The main images were on one page and the shadows on another. (I was having lighting problems so one of the pictures is a screenshot from DS)

And here is what my mats looked like.

After I had cut them out, i noticed a few cutting problems.  I had to go back and recut the "dream" and "imagine" shadow and image.  I ended up putting in the cartridge in my cricut and cutting them so that I could adjust the speed because the paper kept tearing.  But I finally got it.  Then, when I finally was ready to assemble the book, I decided the butterfly was too big and that the journal was looking to cluttered.  So....I ended up only using the corner flourishes, butterfly, and "dream".  And here is the end result:

I was pretty happy with it and my daughter was ecstatic (which is all that really matters). 

I hope you enjoyed my project!  I will have it up on my blog later today along with the gypsy file.  Have a good day everyone and happy crafting!

~Amanda