Craft Idea.

For those of you who are stuck in your houses this week due to air so cold it could freeze your boogers, I have a little craft project for you!

This is an idea Chris and I came up with after seeing something like this:

...in a boutique store in San Luis Obispo, California.

It was an old vintage children's book that someone had dismantled and then spiral bound with blank writing paper. They left some of the original pages throughout the journal as well.

Since I am attracted to vintage things (and cool journals) like a fly to poop, I really liked the idea. However, the spiral bound thing seemed kindof cheesy and predictable. So, Chris and I hopped on over to the used book store down the street and picked out some vintage books that we liked the look of in order to convert them into journals for ourselves.

I LOVE big, thick journals, so I picked out some really cool old children's textbooks/reader books. Then, I bought a super cheap lined journal with tear-out pages and just started gluing the blank pages into the vintage reader book. We used spray-on glue because we figured the white glue would make the pages too wrinkly. Also, as I went along, I discovered that the book was getting too thick with all the extra paper in there, so I started tearing out a few pages here and there to compensate for the extra thickness.

This was the end result:

I thought "Vistas" was an appropriate title.





I was writing in this journal when I was pregnant with Ezra, and I found the list of names we liked. (Some of these are completely embarrassing now. Gak!)


I didn't blur out the words because they were filled with things I didn't want you to know. I blurred them out because I was writing A LOT about feeling "bloated" all the time. (That was the first sign that I was pregnant- a symptom I now lovingly refer to as 9 MONTHS OF CONSTANT GAS.)

This is the page where I tried to sum up what it was like becoming a mother for the first time... a daunting feat I must have attempted at 3AM one morning or something, because it came out sounding like this: "Being a mom is, like, so cool and stuff. Ezra is really cool and its cool being his mom. And stuff. HAPPY FACE." How eloquent.







Anywho- I love this journal. You guys should totally make one. Also, I have 3 more vintage school textbooks that I bought around the same time if anyone wants them. I could mail them to you, or (oooh, here's an idea!) I could MAKE a journal FOR you for the low cost of, um, $25.00 if you want (including shipping). Email me at emerybored at aol dot com if you are interested.

(Look at me! I'm being all business-y and entrepreneur-ish and stuff!)

(PS. I added a killer vintage coat to my ebay store. Click the icon over on the right to check it out.)