Penpal Journal swap

Hello everyone, I have a slightly different project to share with you today. I have recently been taking part in a penpal journal swap, organised by the lovely Di Oliver from Tando. The aim of the swap is to create a journal, and send five letters to a partner, making journal pages along the way. At the end of the time, each of you will have a completed journal, and know a bit about each other as well.

I have had a very busy time lately, and some personal things going on as well in the family. These have taken up a lot of my time, and it has not been easy to find the time to make the journal on top of everything else that I needed to do. However, I really enjoyed the experience, and took the opportunity to use some of my neglected craft supplies to create the project.

To start my journal, I used some greyboard journal covers, available from Tando, and covered these with book pages. I coloured the pages with Cadence paints in shades of blue, green and lilac, I diluted them with water, using them as a wash. These pretty metallic shades blended beautifully together, and created a soft background for everything else, and still allowed the book pages to show through.

I added some gesso through a stencil, and then started my stamping. I used stamps from Rock and Rust to add texture to the background, using Archival Ink, and added highlights with a white gel pen. I also added an image from the Perfect Words stamp set in amongst the other texture on the background.

On a spare piece of card, I stamped some of the dragonflies and bees from the Creepers and Crawlers stamp set, colouring them with Koh-I-Noor paints, and cutting them out. I attached them to the journal covers. I added a couple of the words to the front cover.

Next up, were my pages, I wanted to represent myself as much as possible, showing my love of colour, and what makes me tick, so to speak. The first page was very similar to something that I had made in a recent course that I had completed, and had really enjoyed. I covered the page with vibrant acrylic paint, adding a leafy stencil using white paint over the top. I wrote some words that had meaning to me, using a white gel pen. Using black paint, I painted my buddha, and added shading using the same colours of paint that I had used for the background.

These faces feel very peaceful to me, I am not a Buddhist, but I do go to yoga regularly, and these images conjure up the same feeling of tranquility that I get when I get when I am attending my yoga classes.

For my second page, I used similar colours, starting with a book page, as I has done for the journal covers. I added some shading with Distress Inks, creating an ombre effect, then places a stencil over the top, and applied more of the same colours. I used some stamps by Kay Carley to complete the page. The large flowers and leaves were stamped onto patterned paper and decoupaged. I added a bit of extra colouring with Koh-I-Noor paints.

These two pages formed the outer covering for the first letter to my penpal.

To create my letter, I added a napkin to the bottom portion of the reverse of the page, and painted the top half with a wash of colour. I added some additional stamping, in particular, two black cats from Lavinia, to represent my cats, Poppy and Bella. This next photo is a bit fuzzy on purpose, it is not my bad photography!

I hope to share the rest of my journal with you as I go along. It has been enormous fun so far, and hopefully you have enjoyed seeing something a bit different from me for a change.

Thanks for stopping by, xx