The Finished Product!!!

My most EXCITING POST YET! 

I got my sewing machine back from the repair shop on Saturday and closed myself in my studio the entire evening. My poor husband was completely abandoned on a Saturday night, replaced by my burning desire to finish an art journal!

So I've taken a bunch of photos to show you my process with this journal. I made up all of the pages this past week while my machine was in the shop. You can look at this post to see what pages I included.

Once I sat down to sew the signatures together, I realised that I had been WAY too ambitious planning my pages. The cover that I had made last weekend  was too small by about an inch and a half on the outer edges. After a couple of chuckles at my overzealousness, I decided that I would DEFINITELY make a new cover that would be even MORE awesome than the one I made last weekend! Since making the cover was the most creative and fun part for me, I was definitely A-OK with making another one.

I used orange embroidery thread to sew my signatures together.
Since this is the colour that I use the least in my sewing,
 I thought that I would use it for this job since once the book is done,
these stitches are hardly seen. 

Definitely too many pages for the cover I made last weekend!

Back to the drawing board to create a NEW, larger cover... a SUPER fun "problem"!

Assembling the art pages was a really fun part of the project. I have stacks and stacks of neat papers that I store away for a rainy day. For this project, I took out all of my favourite papers and put them into this book. Since it's my own art day timer for ME, I figured that I might as well use my favourite papers and fabrics!

Some of my pages were stitched together to include different layers of papers. 

My Contacts section was created using a set of alphabet tabs that I trimmed down, then sewed onto trimmed cardstock using a zigzag stitch. Very cool looking and just as strong (or stronger?) than glue!

Now for the Piece de Resistance! I've made a VIDEO to show you how the finished product looks. It's about 4 minutes long, and I am so proud of myself that I actually made a video and did the voice-over. In this video I share a lot of my techniques, how I store my papers, my thought process for putting the journal together, and a general tour of all of the things I've included. 

I would LOVE to read your comments, questions and suggestions on my new art Day Timer! Thanks for looking!

Update - New Journal is ALMOST DONE!!!

Alright, so I've been going CRAZY working on pages for my new journal.

A list of my pages to include:
- week at a glance
- grocery list and meal-planning
- actions list
- project planning guide
- daily activity record
- daily BBT record/graph (for baby-making!)
- calendars for 2012-2013-2014
- pockets to stuff cards and notes
- art journal pages
- inspiring quotes including one that I had my mother write out so that I would have it in her hand-writing!
- contacts a-z
- a page for my contact information and useful phone numbers (services, emergency numbers, doctors, etc.)

A lot of stuff, right? Well I didn't realise how much stuff I actually wanted in there until I went with all of my pages back to my journal cover. Yep. WAY too much stuff. In fact, my journal would be over twice as thick if I included all of the pages that I want. Of course I want to have a journal that I can use day in and day out, but to what end, right? Do I really want to carry around a suitcase just so that I can bring my journal with me everywhere?

My solution? include everything, but pare down the quantity of each section. For example, I had about 75 week-at-a-glance pages printed out. This takes up over half of my journal once they're folded in half to make the 5.5"x8.5" size that I want. I also went from 20 sheets (40 pages) of project planning, activity, action list and grocery list sheets down to 10. I figure that once they're folded in half, I will still have 20 sheets double-sided, which is a total of forty pages for each of these things. Definitely enough, right?

The cool thing about paring down the size of my journal is that I have almost enough pages for a SECOND journal! This means that I can be working on numero dos while I'm working IN numero uno! Love it! :)

I am DEFINITELY going to show you the different pages that I've put into this journal in a future post because I've customized ALL of them to suit my own needs and I'm pretty darn proud of them. Stay tuned!

Oh wait! The reason why I wanted to talk to you in the FIRST place is to tell you that in the midst of all this creativity making my new journal, my SEWING MACHINE BROKE DOWN!!!! How inconvenient! I'm going to drop it off today at a local repair shop with the hopes of getting it back tomorrow (fingers crossed!)