bookish adventures

Love Today is the ring-bound planner kit available from Stampin' Up! this year - I love mine!

In addition to monthly dividers, monthly pages and weekly pages, it comes with more stickers than I'll ever need (I used only three for the cover) as well as pockets, flags, sticky notes, and photo pages.  But I felt I needed a few more accessories.  I started with a simple tasselled paper clip.  I found the elastic band pencil pouch (seen in the corner of the photo above and on the left below) on clearance at one of the big box stores.  I found a vinyl pocket folder at Dollar Tree, turned it horizontally and cut it down to provide another pair of slip-in pocket pages for loose papers:

The small art journal in the slot of the left pocket was one I made while I was still working, folded from one piece of copy paper according to an Instagram tutorial I saw.  The "art" is office junk mail collages and highlighter designs lettered with encouragement.  The Instagram version wasn't covered, but I used a discarded report cover to give mine a little more protection.

In the other pocket, I felt I needed a small separate notebook.  When I read about the Mini Album Makers Challenge blog launch, I decided to make one:

I had many blank dot and grid pattern pages left in the back of an old spiral-bound planner, perfect for card sketches or notes on the run, so I removed and slightly trimmed them.  My original intention was to make a traveler's notebook style, and the cover was a file folder that I cut down for that purpose.  I didn't want the signatures nested, though, because that would separate the patterns from each other, so I perfect-bound the pages (folded each sheet in half separately and spread glue on the spine edges).  I inserted the pages into the cover using the traveler's-notebook-style elastic spine, so I could reuse the cover.  It's sort of a hybrid, but I think it's going to work for me!

Just this evening, I tried my hand at another type of book art.  My public library hosted a workshop where we used fabric and trims (and a lot of glue) to transform blank bound dollar-store journals: