When I came close finishing the Adori I came across a beautiful scrapbook in a department store. This one:
It houses different types of paper, has some fold out pages and also some sleeves to put ephemera in. It measures 25x25 cm, that's approximately 8x8 inches. It was the perfect candidate to become my next journal. So despite the overflowing amount of candidates I already had at home I bought this one to use as my next journal. And so I have.
Now that I have been working in this journal for three months I'm almost halfway through and I'm beginning to see a practical problem that is totally the maker's fault. They did not consider that when you present something as a scrapbook it will get filled with extra paper and so become at least twice as thick. The spiral binding was perfect for the amount of paper that was already in there, but does not leave enough room to really fill it up. As you can see it's already starting to get quite full. I may have to remove at least a quarter of the pages if I want the binding to hold. I'm not there yet, so we'll see how far I can go, but I'm quite sure I will not be able to keep all the original pages, which is a bit of a pity, but not the end of the world. We'll cross that bridge when we get there.
For now I wanted to show you some of the first spreads of this journal. Hope you enjoy!
I don't know if you can tell, but some pages are blank, some are lined and others have a grid on them. The grid pages are the ones that fold out, which is really cool. I really like this book and I enjoy working in it, even though every time I tackle a big book like this one that takes a long time to fill, I start to crave a smaller journal. So no doubt when one day I finish this one I will move to a small journal again. You know, for variety's sake. ;-)
Wishing you all a wonderful and artsy weekend!