Sugar*Sugar : January 2011

January is almost over and that makes me happy. January didn't bring me much sun and therefore, I am ready for it to be over. :) I need some sun and warmth and the grey skies to go far far away.

I wish I had more time to devote to my shop and to creating right now. I am finding myself blog browsing, flickr browsing and etsy browsing more and more and making things less and less.

Happily, I did find time this month to try something new. It is a bit of a small project but it took me over a week to finish it just because I was getting frustrated with the project. Do you ever do that?

I do it quite often... I start something and begin to hate it when it isn't working. I walk away from it, leave it for a few hours or days and come back to it when I am not so angry at it anymore. The projects and I have a heart to heart. Sometimes I win the argument and sometimes the project wins.

This time, honestly, I am not sure. I don't know if I'm totally happy with the outcome...

I set out to make an altered journal. I see other people make them all the time and I've wanted to make one for myself for a while.

I started with a really old Girl Scout Handbook. I glued some of the pages together to make thicker pages and tore a bunch of pages out to make room for embellishments.

This is what took most of my time. The pages were quite fragile and kept tearing and breaking. grrr. Then I couldn't close the book because the pages were too thick!

I finally decided to cut off the spine of the book and use round rings to hold it together. I used my Crop a Dile Big Bite to chomp the holes through the thick pages and book cover. Waaaaay better! Now the pages were more flippy and easier to turn.

One of the reason I don't do traditional scrapbooking is that I find that I tend to "over- do" and overthink on the embellishments and placement of things. For this project, I tried my hardest to keep it simple and remember "less is more".