The assignment: @Renstar wished for a summery journal or similar, with positive prompts, themes, things to do… and mentioned she regretted missing the positive affirmations swap.
Challenge accepted! Papercraft is somewhere in the outskirts of my comfort zone, but I do love playing around with glue and bits of everything and create mixed media pieces. My papercraft stash is quite large for not being a main craft so a lot of this was born out of gleefully rummaging around in the stash 
The inspiration: Renstars pinterest, doomscrolling artsy parts of instagram and reddit instead of crafting, cool craft room treasures I found.
The result:
Finished journal with bonus summer monster. My last addition was the ribbon with a sewn on ring closure. I figured the book would get quite thick and could use something to hold it together. Plus, I have a sad lack of purple felt tip pens so I had to go with the ribbon stash to get some purple action.
The first page I finished ended up as the front page. I was inspired by an artist I stumbled over on instagram. They did a spread in their art journal with this affirmation in a few bright colours that looked like it was coloured with felt tip pens. I really liked it and added it to my page ideas. After drawing my own take on it I decided it would look better as a front page than hidden inside the journal.
I’m not confident I could bind my own journal so I bought a notebook for this. I wanted blank pages and ring bound pages since I knew I’d end up cramming it full of stuff. I would have been happier with slightly thicker paper, but it works. There’s some bleed through, but since there are a ton of pages I hope it’ll work to only draw or decorate on one side of each page.
First page in the book: make some summer plans.
This is one of my favourites, and also an early page. I raided my stash for sunshine. The idea is to be able to collage or create some sunshine when the weather is not so accomodating,
I had to sneak in some swedish parts in the journal too, since this was made for the Summer in Europe swap.
This is serious business! Inherited recipe from my paternal grandmother. You can see my beat up recipe book in the background.
Art prompt. Imagine the rest. Draw/collage/paint/art to finish the picture.
There are also things to try… I might have ordered A Lot of bookcrossing bookplates when I learned the european bookcrossing store would shut down, so I shared some in case Ren wants to try.
Some prompts and positive affirmations were found or inspired by Ren’s pinterest.
Some ideas for photos to try
Another kind of pinterest inspired piece. I strongly believe profanities can work as positive affirmations.
More things to do, postcard included.
There are drawing prompts scattered through the journal
More swedish activities. The book page is in swedish, for trying to read or crafting with.
More bookmarks for ”imagine the rest” type crafting. I couldn’t pick just one, so the rest was included here.
There are also some stamped easter eggs scattered through the journal.
Making this gave me so much joy, from planning it all out to crafting. I hope it’ll be fun to use too. I had two notebook pages of ideas for the journal. A few didn’t make the cut since I couldn’t figure out a good way to create them, and others were spur of the moment additions.
With the exception of the notebook, everything is from my stash.
Thanks for watching! Check out the gallery for the Summer in Europe swap for more fun summery crafts: Summer in Europe gallery
