I have found a super fun glue book project (En masse Glue Book) that is just too good to keep to myself! I am sharing my inspirations today – and a video tutorial so that you can get started too!

En masse is French and means “in a group; all together” or “in a body : as a whole”; here a collection of many similar images in one place.

So an En Masse Glue Book is all about “a lot of images on one theme collected together in a notebook”, to put it simply. And it really isn’t anymore complicated than that.

En masse glue booking – what it is

Each spread is dedicated to one type of images that you collect over time (or find in your own stash of collage images). For example, I had a lot of cat images that I had cut out over many years, so I decided that cat images was one of my themes. I glued as many as I could find onto one spread in my notebook and covered the whole background with cat images. Kittens, lions, house cats and funny looking cats, all together overlapping and crazy. To me it simply looks awesome together, like a cat cafe of my own creation. I love that spread, and continued on with dog images and so on.

I suggest you make a list of a few themes when you get started, inspired by your own preferences: what makes you smile? What images are you drawn to? You’re more than welcome to take inspiration from my themes if you find it hard to get started. I like anything colorful, so images with lots of colors were strong contestants around here.

Maybe you always cut out certain images with smiling babies or architecture? Travel inspired images? Fishes or birds? Vintage labels? Woodwork images? Movie posters? Those are the ones you have a lot of, and could already get started with in your glue book. It could be anything really, as long as it speaks to you – and you can find more than a few of that theme of course. It could even be color, if you want to make a monochromatic spread instead of doing a whole Rainbow glue book like I did.

I will show the process of a few spreads in my En masse glue book in upcoming videos, so stay tuned.

Start an En masse Glue Book

Here’s my introductory video on my En masse Glue Book, talking a whole lot as usual about what, how and why. Enjoy!

How to get started with your En masse Glue Book, give it a thumbs up on youtube and share it with a friend…

If you want to do this on your own, the first step is picking a notebook to place your images in. I used mine to store the different images as well, so it is good to have it handy as you start looking for and cutting out magazine images.

Picking a Notebook

I used a free A4-paper pad (A4 is 21 x 29 centimeters or 8,1/4 x 11,3/4 inches big) which is the European standard size for printer paper and lined paper pads.

It had an extremely boring cover, but since I had two (one for mom and one for me) it felt serendipitous and perfect. I like that it is a bigger size so that we could fit a lot of images onto each spread because that’s what we want! I wouldn’t recommend a smaller notebook than this. If you can’t find a good one, you can use a brochure, folder or magazine, or make your own booklet.

In any case, this paper pad had a staple binding which didn’t hold together very long, so in the end I sewed through the spine with a cotton thread to keep it nicely together.

I covered my notebook with a thin patterned paper (from Flying Tiger) and a huge Hello Kitty image (just because I love Hello Kitty) to make it pretty, and then sewed around the whole thing after layering it with a transparency film ? l? Melanie Sullivan, see her video tutorial below. I then covered the spine in a pink, glittery duct tape that is just so cute! Pimping notebook covers might be one of my favorite things to do, as you will discover if you look through my blog archive!

After finding images for all my sections of the Rainbow Glue Book that project slowed down a bit, so I went on to find another intense, fun and super rewarding Glue Book project. I found the “en masse glue book” idea on YouTube as well, and will link my inspirations below. There are a ton of videos on this idea already on YouTube, but of course I wanted to add my two cents about it and made a How to get started-video as well… I hope it inspires you to give it a try!

En masse Glue Book Inspiration

One of my favorite YouTubers is Melanie Sullivan, I only wish she’d make videos more often… She shares some very chatty and wonderful videos on her personal journaling in composition notebooks, her stitching projects and her various inspirations, and I love all of it so much. It’s from one of her videos that I learned how to use a transparency film for a journal cover that I did for the first time on my En masse Glue book – and it turned out super cool I think. I will definitely do that again.

Here’s Melanie’s video Preparing her next composition book for journaling where she demonstrates this technique, and shows some of her beautiful composition notebook journals:

Shannon Green is a glue book aficionado, and she has inspired a lot of glue booking through the years. I only found her last year, and her first intro video on the En masse journal project is from 2016, but still her enthusiasm is contagious! Here’s that first video:

If you can’t see the embedded video above visit the blog or click to watch it on YouTube: En Masse Collection Journal Intro by Shannon Green. Tell her hi from me.

Shannon has a list of prompts if you need help to come up with your en masse themes. In her video Shannon mentions her main inspiration as Karla of KagedFish on YouTube, and her video Scavenger Hunt Book in particular:

It is far from what my En masse Glue book looks like, but just as inspiring to me. There are no right or wrong, just different ways to be creative and to explore possibilities – and it is awesome that we can be inspired by so many different free resources online, right?

Karla of KagedFish is also the inventor of “Glue Book January” which of course I missed this year as well, but one year I will jump in and do it I’m sure.

I hope you’ll send me a link or tag me if you start your own En masse glue book project inspired by any of this. Are you inspired yet?