It's All About the Bees

This is my first Bee themed journal book. I've been wanting to make one for a little while now. I started gathering materials together a few weeks ago. I don't really write in journals myself but I wanted to add more writing pages to these as an option.

They are approximately 5" x 7" and feature a hard cover, huge pop-up flower and hand made charms on the binding.

I got my papers from old books, online resources and printed some sheets from the Graphics Fairy.

I drew the petals of this flower and cut it out in layers to pop up. It's hand colored with pastels.

I love to use spray coffee and colored inks sprayed on the pages. I also used stencils on these pages with gold ink and other colors too.

I must have cut out a gazillion roses for this book. Glad I got my Cricut for that. Still, it takes time to load the paper and remove the cutouts from the mats. It would be so much easier if I just made my own paper prints from my roses but I never know where on the page I want to put them. So that's why I use cutouts.

The outside of the book is hard cover. I covered both sides with paper and then added embellishments to it. I reinforced the spine with gold duct tape. I love that stuff. And then added ribbon tassels with handmade polymer beads.

I will be making more of these books just as soon as I get all those roses cut out! LOL!

  

Butterfly Garden - Ostrich

I think this one has the prettiest pop up flower of them all. It was made from leftover flowers from the other pop-ups but WOW! It is not a left over.

The fourth and last in the series. This cover is made of faux ostrich fabric. The pages are not shown in chronological order as they appear in the journal. The pages shown are just a sampling of the over 80 pages in this journal.

Butterfly Garden journals - Tooled Leather

I really love the tooled leather look of this journal cover. What pulled these pages together was the use of the leaf stamp in the background of the papers throughout the book. This is the third one of the series of four.

These are pictures from the third journal in this series:

Green Journal

All the journals in this set are similar in design. The pages are slightly different because many of them are a one of a kind. The paintings are similar too.

This is a beautiful fabric with a lot of texture. All the journals are lined with the same material and have the same number of pages.

I've also used the same decorative washi tape and background treatments throughout the books.

Popup flowers are my trademark. I love them and use them in most all my books. In fact, I don't think I've seen them in journals before but I really like them. They add some 3D to the flat pages.

There is plenty of space for writing and several pockets for cards decorative tuck spaces too. The graphics in all books are from an illustrated garden book.

I'm using the same binding method with all these books. A wrap around closure with a decorative handmade bead.

I'm already knee deep into the next set of journals. I have the papers dried and all the graphics printed out and cut for the pages. I also have some very pretty pop up flowers done for them. They are huge! Bees, bees, bees! That's the theme for the next set. You can almost taste the honey!