Paper, Scissors, Rock! - A Selfmade Art Journal

I told you in my last post that I only took some watercolours, pencils and some paper with me....well, today I really took my "holiday stash" to its limits (and a bit further ;)

Sadly the weather causes me a lot of headaches again, so I was not too keen on walking out into the hot summer sun or lying on the beach today... which led to my very first selfmade art journal.

As my son loves to draw and craft too, we always take some glue, scissors and paper with us when we leave for our summer vacation. We also have a travellers sewing kit with us, just in case a button comes off... well, all of this came in quite handy today. ;)

I started my journal by tearing two sheets from my drawing block into six pieces of same size. Then I folded them in half.

I tore all the edges too as I did not want any cut off looking edges with my journal.

That reduced some of the pages' width of course, but I think it was worth it as I wanted my journal to look torn and worn all over.

Then I "stained" my pages using the watercolours brushing, dripping and sqishing them through puddles of paint which I simply made on the kitchen desk ;)

To avoid having my pages blown away during drying time on the balcony I put some weights on them - using some of the fossil stones we found some days ago.

The worm traces look beautiful, don't they? I am always fascinated by the idea that they have been lying there for thousands of years - waiting to be found by my son, DH and me....

I remember, when I first found one of these (being a little girl then) I thought I had found imprints of fossile grass... later I learned that these are traces made by tiny organisms... a kind of "wormholes" they dug into the mud before time transformed it into stone.

While my pages dried, I created the book cover from some cardboard (from a cookie box), some newspaper and a page from an old nature science book I found at a church fleamarket some days ago.

As you can see I added some washes of colour to the book page for more depth.

The bookplate was made from a scrap of the same page, which I tore to size and stamped the title onto. Then I painted a border using shades of brown, lilac and orange.

I glued the bookplate to the cover and let all dry.

Using a crack in the balcony's wooden rail, I punched five holes for my sewn binding using nail scissors ;)

Then I used the "first aid" sewing kit (from a hotel from our studies trip to Turkey) for the binding.

I glued the first and last pages to the book's cover. Done!

The first page shows a sketch of one of the fossils I used ;)

I used an Indian Ink pen.

Sadly the light was gone, when I wanted to make some more shots of the finished journal...I hope you will forgive me for the dark pictures:

I enter this journal into the "Wings and Things" challenge over at Vintage Stamping challenges. 
And last but not least an image showing the things I used for creating my journal: