My Journal Makeover

My family and I love traveling.  Ever since I was a kid every year there was some place we’d get to go.  Sometimes it just took a days drive to get a warm lake, sometimes we’d get on a plane for a months visit with family in Europe, other times it was a road trip into the states and no matter where we went my mom always had her little journal.  Mom always had her little journal on her trips, still does actually, jotting down things down about our day, with notes on things to see and do, things to not do, and where all the money was going!  Then the next time we’d be planning a trip mom would pull out her journal and we’d have something to reference to make our next trip even better.

Well lucky me I married a man who has the travelling bug.  We love to take trips together and now I have taken on mom’s tradition of journal writing for our own little family.  We recently took a trip to the East Coast and I was in need of a journal.  I came across a hard cover notebook that my hubby bought for himself and never used.  It was rather plain and ugly but immediately I had a vision so I helped myself to it and turned it into my new journal.

Here’s my little project:
           
BEFORE


AFTER

I had so much fun with this.  It’s just different layers of cardstock (the first layer wraps around the cover to the inside to give a finished look), with stamps and embossing.  I added buttons, a stamped butterfly and an accordion flower (watch my blog for a tutorial) as my simple embellishments,but my proudest moment is how I covered the ugly spiral of the notebook.  The folded tissue paper was perfect to cover the spiral and was soft so that I can still open the notebook all the way around and not worry about wrecking it.  

I can’t wait to give a few more journals a makeover!  They’d make smashing gifts don’t ya think?