Altered Journals - Teacher Gifts

As you know it's Teacher Appreciation Week so I've been sending in little bits of goodness to my son's teachers everyday this week.  Thursday was "Stock the teacher's room with school supplies" so you could send in any kind of supply.  So I decided to send in altered journals but I did things a little different than I normally do:

 Instead of covering the journals with scrapbook papers, I thought I'd treat them like canvases and paint them.  So I started by priming up the journals with Gesso.  By doing this, I ran into a little problem.  The paint started to get into the pages of the journal so I added some scrapbook paper but this didn't work either because my paper was to small.  I ended up using 12x12 sheets and in retrospect, I should have used some parchment paper instead because the paint ended up sticking to the scrapbook paper and tore a bit when I pulled it off.  Oh well, lesson learned, right......

Next came a coat of my favorite shade of blue! :D

Now that the base color was down, it was time to start adding texture.  I decided it needed some transferred print so I tore a page from a book, slapped on some Gel Medium and placed it on the journal.  The key to making this work is giving it a good rub down with a bone folder. 

Time to pull it back and see what we have........

Yay it worked!! 

You see how some of the paper is on the journal, you can spritz it with some water and gently rub that off.   Okay, so at this point thing started popin so I forgot to take more pics along the way.

 

I used some Stazon to stamp on some sheet music.  Then I used a polka dot stencil with a sample of the new Liquitex spray paint that I got in the mail.

There was a lot of paint on the stencil from the first journal so I flipped it around and used it as a stamp on this one.

Ta Da!  Here are the finished journals.  I stamped the sentiment onto some white cardstock and outlined it with India Ink then added a strip of black tape.  To finish it off, I wrote little notes for them.  I wanted to add some flowers but I don't think adding a lot of dimensional items is practical for a daily journal.  I've made some like that for myself and they always seem to fall off. 

If you add dimensional items to your journals and don't have a problem with them falling off, please let me know your secret :D

TGIF!!! 

Have a Wonderful Mother's Day Weekend!!!!!