To Do - A Tall Thin Journal by Gill Humphrey

Last week I shared how to make the large journal with Liz Wheeler's journal templates and so this week I am sharing a how to for the tall thin journal that can be made with the same template - Set 2. All it requires is a little movement of the template. I started by taking A3 300gsm white card stock and placed the cover template in one corner and then drew around it - this time to create the thin album I scored down all of the longitudinal slots and then cut our my paper before folding along all four lines. Simply folding in the two outer score lines allows you to reinforce the edge of your book and also create pockets for the inside of the journal covers. 

To decorate my cover  I chose to add Distress Oxide Dusty Concord ink to all of the edges - in retrospect given this ink is water reactive you might me better off using an Archival ink particularly if your album will get a lot of handling. I then added paper to the inside of my journal before gluing down the two side flaps being careful only to add glue to the top and bottom edge of the flaps so that I had a functional pocket. You could just glue these down to reinforce the edge and then cover with paper if you do not want your journal to have pockets - this is the real beauty of these templates - you can customise to your hearts content.

The pocket was then covered with a strip of paper from Fuschia Mood 12 x 12 paper pack and the edge re-inforced with one of the lace border Craftyboard pieces and a die cut chipboard from Beauty Restless. I then created tags using more templates - this time from Liz's original collection Set 1.

To decorate the front of the journal I cut papers from purple hues and Plum in Chocolate paper collections to fit on the cover panels before three black elastic bands round the spine area. On the front of the cover I added some strips of paper and flowers fussy cut from the papers. I stamped my words from The Plan It stamp set on to white card stock and adhered to a chipboard die cut frame before adhering that in place too.

I also added some more of the chipboard die cuts on top of the elastics to keep them evenly placed along the spine. Finally for my closure I have simply tied some ribbon round the elastics and left the ends long enough to pass around the journal when it is full. 

To create the pages for this album I took the pages template and A3 card stock - I placed the template in the bottom left corner of the card and then moved it to the left so that the first longitudinal score slot was lined with the edge of the paper. I drew along the top of the template marking the central notch until I reached the notch above the furthest score line when I marked the top of the notch when I moved the template again to the left until the edge joined up with the tip of the notch and then drew a line. I made sure I had scored the center of the drawn pages and then cut out the paper. I created 3 booklets in total for this journal filling them with some card stock and printer paper pages. To create my signatures I stacked the pages together and then used the page template to mark 3 evenly spaced holes along the fold line before sewing the layers together with twine. I took my thread from outside through the centre hole then back though the upper hole before taking it down the outside of the booklet and through the bottom hole before passing the needle back through the central hole and tying off the ends.

For the outside of my booklets I used card stock which I decorated with papers, stamped words and die cut chipboard and on the inside of the first book I added a tag with stamped words from set. 

 

 

For the inside back cover I took a trifold template from the first template collection and drew round it before scoring and folding. I then covered each panel with more papers before slipping it in to place.

Finally I slipped my booklets through the elastic bands around the spine. The beauty of this type of spine is that it is really simple to create as it requires no stitching or threading of cord but at the same time means that the inside booklets can be taken out when full and replaced easily with new ones.