Christmas Cards Art Journal

As I promised you in a previous post I can now show you the finished art journal made from recycled Christmas cards. This was the result of coming across a marvellous and entirely free tutorial on YouTube by Jennibellie, an artist here in the UK. The tutorial is in two parts. My link takes you to the first one and you'll find your way yourself to the next one. Jennibellie herself can be found online here. She has a great selection of very informative videos up and I hugely enjoyed watching them. So no info here about how to make this journal. And there is no need to just use recycled Christmas cards, any other greeting cards would serve just as well. Of course my journal has a bit more stitching than Jenny's! So I sewed around the cover using zigzag. The cover was made from hand painted paper.

Jennibellie also has a video tutorial about how to make your own beads but I have used beads from my stash as you can see above.

The other thing I did differently is that I used Gelli plate printing to cover my cards. I so enjoy working with my plates that I can't resist putting them to use at every available opportunity, as you can see in the following images which feature pages from the journal. Sometimes you can still see the original card through the painting and I have done that for those cards whose imagery I particularly liked, such as the one at the very bottom of this post.