December Daily Art Journal | Making Pages

I am continuing to work on my December Art Journal today, and talking a bit about making the pages. I am making a spiral bound notebook, so there is no folding of signatures here, but instead, it’s cutting different kinds of papers down to size. Randomly mine are 19,5×15,5 centimeters (7.6 x 6.1 inches).

In this process I tend to never want to stop. I love making the foundation pages of a notebook so much! It’s partly a design process, where you combine colors and patterns (cardstock, scrapbook paper, wrapping paper and wallpapers) as a foundation for other elements.

The “elements” I am mostly drawn to at this stage are borders (stripes of paper, washi or deco tape), imagery (postcards, magazine imagery and stickers) that frames the page and then also labels (where I journal, write lists or take notes when I use the journal).

Once I start with this I tend not to stop in time. I make way too many pages for the spiral that I have on hand. But then I do not care if the book is a bit too bulky when you add everything into it. The more pages the merrier book, and you can quote me on that.

Some pages become finished before I even make the book, with no room for journaling. But that is fine with me. Then I try to add pages with more space to collage or write on next, so that I can also work in the book. I am sharing a few of the pages I made today, hoping that you’ll find them inspiring and happy. Enjoy!

The first page will be this Welcome to Christmas page, where you can see how I like to mix strips and blocks of patterned paper into a foundation page with room for journaling.

I don’t need a reason to let a tab stick out either, but maybe there will be a natural reason for this later on:

Some pages are not extremely Christmas-like, but because they are in this specific book I find they are Christmassy anyway.

Love the right page, with an image of vintage books as the foundation. So pretty!

Brown is a Christmas color when you think about gingerbread cookies and gingerbread houses of course.

All the dotted papers reminds me of falling snow…

…and my love of vintage Madonna imagery is celebrated in many of the pages. Finally a place where these iconic images fit perfectly. And really, I collected a lot of vintage looking imagery for this journal. I think the old school Santa Claus, Christmas trees, and angels are much prettier than some of their more modern relatives, don’t you?

The backside of pretty silvery wall paper pages are often not very pretty to look at, so often I’ll cover them with collage:

I am thinking that my hologram stickers from Beauty and the Beast (one of my favorite Disney movies ever) are from sometime when that movie came out 15 years ago…

So it’s about time I use them, and why not on a movie themed page, though snowy mountains behind Julie Andrews in the movie The Sound of Music – it’s not really related to Christmas…

I just feel that I need to watch both movies again soon. Here is another sticker in the corner:

I always thought he was a hunk, in any form.

The last page of the book will be this one, a sewn pocket for extras:

I am not really a Christmas person right now in my life. It’s probably because I don’t have kids and the importance of Christmas crafting and traditions is less important than it used to be. Plus, I am not a great cook and my kitchen is not made for baking. All that said, I still want to infuse my life with some holiday spirit and this is the perfect little project. I say little, but at least I started small…

I will share the covers I made next week, and then how the book looks assembled and finished.

Also see Part 1 Collecting Christmas Papers and part 2 Starting a December Journal for ideas on what to include in your book.