Come Travel with me to an Unknown Destination…

With our Travel Event coming up I thought if fitting to create a travellers Journal to add our adventures into.  I have created a You Tube Playlist for this journey if you want to follow and play along.  In the first episode we created the little booklets for our traveller’s journal, and in this episode, we will create the cover of the Journal as well as add the first entry into our booklet.

The Story…

Like a small ripple in my thoughts, my mind kept wondering every now and then… what it would be like to go somewhere new, a place not yet named, just imagined.
Sometimes, while sipping tea or writing and playing in my journal, I’d picture distant skies, narrow streets, soft rain on foreign rooftops. I didn’t tell anyone. The dream felt too delicate, like a candle flame and I didn’t want the wind to find it.

I started a new page in my notebook with the title “Someday.” First, I think I must make a list of what I’d need to go on my imagined trip: my passport, Is it still valid?  My camera, definitely my traveller’s journal, pens, and a lot of courage.
The more I wrote, the more real it felt. I browsed maps online without focusing on names. I just followed the lines of rivers and train routes, imagining myself moving through them.

In my dreams I imagine the flight number, the train schedule.  All those lines of text are more than just details; they are the first footprints of a new story.
I am making tickets for my someday page and imagine that they were printed and that I held them between my fingers, feeling the paper still warm from the printer.

I add the tickets between the pages of my journal. It felt like tucking a secret into a safe place… The dream might just become reality…

 

The Make…

The first step in our making process is to calculate how big the Journal Cover should be.  The Covers of my booklets are all 22 x 21cm.  I want them to be 1cm apart from each other but 0,5cm from the front and 0,5cm from the back page.  This means I have to add an extra 3cm to my measurement.  I will also be adding 1cm for the length of the cover to fit the booklets snug.  Therefore, my final measurement will be to cut the cover 25cm x 22cm.

To find the middle and to find where to add the holes for the elastic bands I will measure 11cm from the left and mark it and then 11cm from the right and mark it.  Then mark 0,5cm from the left mark then add 1cm and mark and another 1cm and mark and finally mark another 0,5cm to the right.  You can then fold the book spine on the 0,5cm marks.

Once I had my measurements done and my cover folded, I added fabric plaster over the folded area on the inner side of the cover to re-inforce the book spine and to make it stronger for the holes that it needs to hold the elastics, that will hold my booklets.

From another sheet of paper, I cut two pieces to decorate the inside of the cover, their measurements are 11cm x 22cm.  With my favourite binding glue, I added the decor pieces to the cover.

 

To make the cover stronger I painted it with Art by Marlene’s Matte Gel medium as well.  This also gives the cover a nice feel to it.  I added some Vintage Photo Distress Ink around the edges and in some places on the page.  This will move around and create a different effect on the page because of the Gel medium, as well as giving it an aged look all around the sides of the cover.

We have some humid weather currently and the cover kept on feeling sticky after I had dried the Gel medium, so I used some powder to get rid of the stickiness.

To create more space for ephemera I added two pockets on the inside of the cover and decorated it with a saying from the saying fussy cut page.  To re-inforce the holes for the elastics I added eyelets and then added the elastics that will hold my books.

This is a quick and easy project if you are in the mood to create something small to hold certain memories of an event, you can add pockets for the treasures from your event and also all the photos.  There are also loads of space to do journaling so that you can revisit this awesome moment in your life.

For my Someday page I created THE LIST to manifest my travel dream and in my list are all the things I will need to capture this moment in my life and to keep record, so I can revisit the memory as often as I want.