Over the holidays, I was super busy making gifts for family and friends. That's right: I made all of my gifts this year. Fortunately, my list wasn't very long and I truly enjoy being creative. After I was done, I noticed a little spiral notebook that I had received in a trade show bag a couple of years ago. It had a camera company logo on the front and was black...hardly what you'd call attractive, but it was free and I still had it. Hmm...time to spruce it up a bit!
Since it was spiral, I knew I'd have to remove the binding to be able to alter the entire cover. I carefully bent back all the little coils just enough to remove the cover. I had thought about covering it with patterned paper but then I saw the Forest Stamp & Stitch set still on my table from another project and decided to use that instead. I envisioned a pile of autumn leaves, but I didn't want just a mixed up jumble of stamped images so I decided to mask a few of the leaves. This technique gives the appearance of some of the images being in front of the other. I pulled out the Eclipse Tape that I had purchased at a convention awhile back, stamped a few images and cut them out. This worked like a dream, even with the skinny stem of this leaf. If you haven't tried the masking technique before, it's well worth the few minutes it takes to cut out the mask. In a nutshell, you stamp the "front" images first, cover them with the mask, then stamp the rest of the images. The mask keeps you from stamping over the previous images and makes them look like they're on top (or in front of) the others.
When I was done stamping the leaves, I inked the bare spaces between them (this started out as a white piece of cardstock), then stitched my "top" leaves. I added Zip Dry glue to the back (awesome glue...I use this whenever I know I want it to last) then put it on the cover. Since my cardstock was about an inch larger than the cover, I turned it over and used my Multi-Tool to cut around it. Then I repeated the entire process for the back cover (but I didn't stitch on that). When I was done with both covers, I put them back on the notebook and squeezed the wire binding back together.
I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Instead of being a generic black notebook (with an advertisement), I now have something I'll enjoy using. And, it was fun to do!
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