Cardboard Crush Journal

The Documented Life Project, in which I participated last year and again this year, is completely free to do. All you have to do is sign up. That is incredibly generous of the organizing artists as the project must take huge amounts of their time and energy to organize, so I like to try and pay them back in a small way by signing up for their online classes. The latest one is called Cardboard Crush. It comes in 4 different versions, all included in the price, each by one of the artists in question. I have thus far only done Roben-Marie Smith's version and this is the finished journal, made as you would expect, from cardboard!

I would find it quite difficult to explain just why I love making such journals which it must be said I seldom use after I've made them. For me the fun comes from the making and from the looking at the finished article. There is something deeply satisfying about it that resonates with me. I won't be walking you through how I made this as you can sign up for the class yourself if you are interested. One day I will no doubt make the other versions too but I know by now that Roben-Marie is the artist whose work I like best. Above a close-up from the cover. The amount of layers we added to the cardboard is quite incredible but that is how you achieve that wonderful mix of colours and shapes. The closure that you see above features a stamp called Sunflower-Ornamentum from the Uptown Design Company.

 This is a detail from the back cover. 

The inside of the journal is as satisfying to look at as the cover. There is a decorated Moleskine journal in there on the right and a luscious mix of papers that you can fold in and out using tabs on the left.

The journal can be folded out completely to get this overview of the cover and as you can see I have used some treasured Liberty ribbon on the spine.