Make A Custom Journal

I am preparing for the upcoming Craft Revival and I wanted to hand make a ‘guest book’ of sorts so people can leave comments, greetings, or their e-mail if they’d like. But this would make a great journal too.

Basic starting supplies…(plus an exacto knife, ribbon of your choice, and other decorative paper, artwork, or photo for the cover).

Cut sheets to your liking and punch two holes into each making sure to line them up. I chose a turquoise card stock for the cover, folded it and cut holes in it using an exacto knife (hole punch didn’t fit);

But a problem I didn’t anticipate came up, not only were the holes not so clean, but this happened on the fold…So instead I trimmed the paper and made a separate top and bottom, then used the hole punch to make nice clean holes -much better! I loosely looped white ribbon and finished with a simple bow.

Bonus, this altered design allows to me to add (or remove) pages if I’d like without having to make a new cover.

Now a little somethin’ somethin’ for the cover! since I wanted to use this as a  guest book I opted to put a phrase on the front. You could easily add art or a photo instead of text.

I used craft glue to attach the white paper to the charcoal paper. To attach this to the book I chose to use rivets, I felt this would be more durable. I got out that exacto knife again- no need to make the holes perfect since the rivets will cover the paper slightly.

Then, using a hammer I attached the rivets. The finished product is a custom-made guest book (or journal);

I’m hoping that people will feel free to write anything they’d like, or doodle a picture -who knows! I think the only other thing I may do is add a date stamp to the book pages after each show…so in a way it will be like a craft show journal.