More About Travel Journals

   Hi everyone. I hope you're having a super weekend. Today I am linking up to Nicole's Sunday in the Art Room, Gillena's Sunday Smiles and also to Bleubeard's and Elizabeth's February challenge at Art Journal Journey.

  Last Sunday I shared some photos of a travel journal I created from my trip to Nova Scotia last fall. I've been making trip journals for years now. I love the idea of making a trip sketchbook while visiting someplace new, but that wouldn't work for me because it means I'd need time to sit and sketch during the trip. That's hard when you travel with others who don't want to make a plein air sketchbook. Plus, when I make a junk  or collage style journal after the trip, I get to relive the trip all over again. ❤

   I really love making books. Mine aren't the most formal looking, and that's OK with me.  I love to change them up too. Here's a few travel journal covers  I've made in the past several years.

    The above journal is from a Quebec trip in 2024. I made the covers using some recycled cardboard. I glued paper down on them, and used cloth book-tape to create the spine and to cover the edges (although I wished I'd beveled the corners a bit). The signatures are sewn in as you can see on the spine. 

    I knew my travel journal from my 2024 trip to Greece with my girlfriends needed to be big. This time I took 2 old rescued book covers and covered them in blue cloth. I was lucky because when I was teaching our school library used to put out some old books free for the taking. I would usually bring a few home, especially for journal making. And if there was anything interesting, I often took a few  reading books too.

    I then stenciled the Greek letters onto the cover. The spine is also made of cloth with the signatures sewn in.  I glued the edges of the spine down to the cover, and then wrapped that area with book cloth-book tape.

  Above is my 2021 trip to California cover. I actually made this in a smaller  old book with just the pages removed. I  painted and stenciled on some designs to fix up the cover. Since the back and front cover were already attached, I did not have to stitch through the spine but could attach my pages inside the book.

    For a national park trip book I used the covers off an old photo album and used waxed thread to tie in my pages with the cover.  You can see the thread on the left side. Below, an older trip book to New Mexico was made in a 3 ring binder, but you can't really tell from the cover as I "fixed" it up with paint, tape and some stencil paste. I started with a  chipboard cover, which I find works the best for fixing up.

   And here is the cover of my Nova Scotia trip cover from last fall. I also used a  chipboard ringed binder and fixed up the cover a bit. This is what I'm linking up to Art Journal Journey.

   The plaid is actually wrapping paper that I picked up in Halifax, and the design of that paper is the Nova Scotian tartan. I thought that would be appropriate for a journal about that trip.

    The spine is covered over with blue cloth book-tape, and the edges are covered with some white cloth tape that I roughly painted.  I thought about making them totally blue. That would have made the cover more  finished looking, but I liked the exposed white. 

   Putting the book  together goes faster when I use a ringed binder because I don't have to sew the spine and pages together. To finish it I added  some bits and pieces to the front. 

   For my final photos in today's post, let me share  the shelves where I keep many of my  journals. I also keep  my annual bought daily journals here too, so not all of these are handmade, but many of them are.  I've been making books for years, and just to clarify, these are not all travel journals, but some of them are. And yes, I need to clean off these shelves because right now they are not very organized. 😛

 

   My husband built this shelf into the back side of a closet. You can also see the purple door to this room. It doesn't quite close tight up to the wall (I've got a few things behind the door), so that's why the right side of the shelves aren't visible. 

    Have a great rest of your weekend and start to the new week.