Did you ever get excited about office supplies as a child?  I remember a couple of weekends where my Dad had to work at the office and I went along with him.  Oh, the joys of the typewriter!

I see that same sparkle of excitement from my young children when my husband comes home from a business trip with a notebook or journal in hand from his business meetings.  The pages where notes were taken were carefully removed beforehand – and placed into their hands a blank canvas for ideas to be written down.

Truth be told, I get just as excited about those blank canvases.  And on a recent trip he came home armed with one for me as well.  LOL!  Ahhhh, white chipboard covers and lined notebook pages.  What could be better.  I’m easilly pleased, I guess!

So I set about to decorate this journal with all these thoughts running through my head.

Overview

The quotation seemed apropos, “the world is a wonderful place when you’re young.‘ – e.b. white

First, I selected the colors I wanted to work with.  I’m a big fan of pink, personally.  Brown goes nicely with that of course.  And perhaps some blue and green.  So I chose:

• Sweet Pea
• Frost
• Olive Vine

And I always work with some metallics, to upgrade the look of the elements I’m working with.  I chose:

• Dew Drop
• Graphite

I printed out my sentiment on vellum paper using a laser printer.  Then I sprayed Dew Drop lightly over the top – voila!  I had shimmering, pearlized vellum!

a very vellum improvement

Next, I worked on my title letters.  I chose the Regal Alphabet Framed Fonts.  These are initially a light cream color.  I pressed them onto the misting mat, lightly sprayed with Sweet Pea Glimmer Mist.  This placed the color on the raised, embossed areas of the letters.  I also dipped a makeup wedge into the leftover mist and colored the edges of the letters.  Once this was dry, I sprayed them with several light coats of Graphite Glimmer Mist.  I love the end result.  They look like tooled metal letters – and it took no time at all to achieve this look!

faux tooled metal

Now with all that gorgeous Graphite laying around on the misting mat, I decided to dip the edges of my book, and decorative papers in – for an added richness to these elements as well.

Graphite Edging on corners

And at the same time, after I stamped and heat embossed an image in brown embossing powder I took a waterbrush and painted inside the image with my Glimmer Mist colors.  I edged it in Graphite and once dry, sprayed over the entire piece with Dew Drop.

Graphite edges and painting of stamped image

I sprayed a couple of white Festive Flowers from Prima with my Glimmer Mist colors and embellished the center with a Glimmer Chip fleur de lis in Regal, Creme de Rouge.  I also placed a photo corner from this set at the top right.

And finally, a few birds from the Glimmer Glass, Nature – Cocoa set came to nest on the cover as well as felt and satin ribbon, a few punched leaves, which were highlighted with their coordinating Glimmer Mist for ‘veins’ and a twig from outside my front door.

Glimmer Glass bird

So now that my journal is done, I intend to take it on the road with me – to jot down little glimmering ideas and see what they turn into.  I hope you’ll join me in making a project that will help rekindle the simple joys that we so often forget  while we go about our everyday lives.   Thank you for reading.