A preteen journal

I made this journal for my little niece as a Christmas present.

I started by taking some of my white printer paper and folding it in half for the insdie pages. The covers are made from an old Cheerios box! I covered it in this really cool Basic Grey paper from the Obscure line. Then I bound it with my Cinch tool with that hot pink wire because what little girl doen't love pink? 

To  make a few pockets (for collecting photos, tickets, notes, etc) I cut some patterened paper and adhered it to a few pages (gluing only on the sides and bottom).

Then I put my die-cutter to work! Using the Indie Art cartridge I cut the skull and cross bones but added wings and a tiara! In metallic paper. Because it's for a girl. And girls love tiaras and sparkly things!

 I also cut the butterfly in 2 sizes and layered them and covered the body with glitter glue and added a random heart I had leftover from another project.

Then I cut the heart locket and key several times. I think the locket was cut about 5 times from cardstock and I glued all the layers together to make it thick. I then covered it in about 3 layers of silver metalic embossing powder (heating and cooling between each layer).

The red key was cut about 3 or 4 times and glued together to give it substance.

 To close it I intended the key to hang from a string to wrap around the front. So to lift the locket and give some room for the wrapping I hot attached a big eyelet (or grommet - I still don't know the difference honestly!) to the cover and then hot glued the locket to it. See how it raises it up from the cover?

Look at this pic again to see how I tied the twine to the heart. And I know you can't see but the twine is attached to the inside back cover and then covered with another sheet of pretty paper.

 Now to close it she just has to wrap the twine around the back of the locket. I left the twine fairly long so there is plenty of room for it to grow as it gets stuffed full of trinkets and memories.