Keeping Crafty Busy

I've been busy crafting, keeping busy any way that I can to kill the time until the hubby comes home in a few weeks from his 6 month deployment.  We've all miraculously survived intact even though my munchkins have had a few close calls, mostly due to their own evil behavior.  Here are two projects I created this last week. 

The top blue one, is an album made from cereal boxes, glue stick, cardstock and some brown linen paper.  It's just a base, I have yet to embellish or add pictures but I will get around to it. 

The second book is a journal I made out of yes, what else, cereal boxes, glue stick, card stock, scrapbook paper, linen paper, thread and needle.  Made completely from scratch, hand stitched by me.  This journal is the smaller of the two that I made.  The larger one was made as a gift and I mailed it out and forgot to photograph it, not that my photography is all that great but you may have wanted to see a visual of them side by side.  Hindsight is awesome. 

It has nine signatures made from three sheets that make six pages when folded in half for a total of 54 pages.  The pages were cut at 5x12 and folded in half.  This is actually the second and smaller one I made.  I made two journals from 30 sheets of 12x12, a cereal box, thread and two small sheets of linen paper plus glue stick.

 You can see here on my album blank that the papers all coordinate and that I made sure to make the hinges allow for a pretty thick embellishment if I so choose to use say a 3d flower.  The hinge will expand and the spine will accommodate it all up to a certain thickness.

 My SinL actually gave me the papers for X-Mas. 

 Blank, basic pages waiting for pictures and embellishments.

 My journal.  These are surprising easy, fun and addictive to make and considering the scrapbook papers used and the variety, pretty cheap as well.  I got a huge stack of something like 300 plus papers from Sams for really cheap and have just barely a year later run out.  The paper was labeled as cardstock but it was way lighter than what I think of as cardstock and did not work well in my cutting machine but was awesome for all sorts of other projects I've done this year.

 Inside my journal.  Great little size at 6 1/2x5 1/2.  Small enough to put in my handbag and large enough with enough pages to really get some use out of.

Lots of neat double sided papers in various colors and patterns.  One side is a solid color while the other is patterned.  Fun!

I will definitely be making more of these in the future.  I just need to get some more paper first.  :)