Florida Journal

Hi everyone. Happy Friday.

Today for Nicole's Friday Face Off and for  Gillena's Friday Lunch Break let me share this vintage photo.

The little girl on the right is my daughter, and the girl on the left is her cousin.  The girls were 5 and 6 here, and we were on a 2 family Disney trip back in 1996 or 1997 (I can't remember the exact year but it was the 25th anniversary of Disney World). It was a fun trip, but I remember it was really cold, which none of us packed for. 

The reason I'm sharing this photo is that the girls are now 30 and 31, and  this week they're back at Disney  World with their husbands. This is a celebration for their husband's birthdays, since they both married men who were born on the same day. I hope they're having as much fun as they did when they were kids. 

And speaking of Florida, let me share a few photos of a trip journal I have started. I'm having so much fun making this little book that I'm buzzing right through this project.

I used an old book and cut out all of the pages so I could use the covers. I painted and stenciled the covers with some bright colors, and then I covered the spine with some duct tape. I bought this Florida gator sticker  because I liked the vintage look of it. We did visit the Sunken Gardens, although I wish it didn't say Sunken Gardens on the sticker. But oh well, it is what it is.

My journal pages alternate between white watercolor paper and also some heavy duty kraft paper. I like the sizes of the pages to vary slightly, as you might notice in my final photo. I made 3 thin signatures for this book, and I machine stitched down the fold of each signature to hold the signature together. A quick, easy and bit of cheating book binding technique I learned is to use heavy duty tape between the last and the first page of each signature. That connects the signatures together. Then I used more of the heavy duty tape and connected the very first page of my connected signatures to the front cover and the very last page to the back cover. You do lose some actual journal pages this way which you wouldn't do if you stitched the binding to the cover, and it definitely isn't as pretty as the stitches can be. However; it's fast, and it works as long as you use heavy duty double sided tape.

My journal pages contain a mixture of items from my stash, trip info, and any little bits of pieces I managed to accumulate on the trip. Some you probably know that already though because I say it every time I make a trip journal. Smile.

One of the first pages was about our flight down. It was a great flight since there were only 14 passengers on the plane. The flight attendants were joking that they hoped we enjoyed our private flight. I'm sure they were also happy because, since we flew down on a Saturday evening, this was the last leg of their day and it wasn't a crowded flight for them to deal with.  I must say, I've never been on a commercial flight with that few people before.

There are also lots of faces on this page, if you include the mechanical gauge faces too.

You can also see the pilot's face when I lift up the tag. (Not our pilot obviously-smile.)

And here's the other half of the  spread.  It's the smaller white watercolor page, and it is not attached to the kraft paper page behind it. 

I wonder what the face behind the helmet looks like.

I'm also linking this post up to Art Journal Journey where this month's theme is Seeing Red. My flight page has some definite pops of red on it.

Happy start to your weekend. I hope it's a nice one.