SOS34-all that glitters...

wahey, it's tuesday, and time for another fabulous challenge at shopping our stash!  let's get right to it, k?  here are miss carla's instructions:

Challenge 34  

All that Glitters or Sparkles or Shines 

use anything sparkly, blingy, shiny or glittery

and/or 

use an image by our lovely sponsor Dilly Beans 

and here is my project, it's a 2012 weekly planner i made from scratch using a calendar template in broderbund's printshop and my lovely new* bind-it-all:

i know what you're thinking.  you're thinking, "hey, lauren! for someone who generally 'drives the bus to bling-town' this is not allllllllllll that sparkly!!!" and let me just assure you no one is more surprised than i am about this! :) but there *IS* a bit of a bling flourish & the numerals have been liberally brushed with distress stickles, a fact that was not captured in ANY of the 9,000,000 photos i took. sorry.

sooooooooooooo maybe i should've made something else that really rocked the bling casbah and saved this for another day?? nuh-uh. because what this baby lacks in bling it makes up in MEGA-LEVELS of stash-usage: every page is (mostly quite elderly) scrapbook paper printed with a week's worth of dates on one side and xyroned onto vintage paper for the other side.

the bits that make up the cover collage are offcuts (vintage dictionary & hindi newspaper), leftovers (die-cut prima paper, part of a bling flourish, crate paper butterfly leftover from this month's pixie kit) or real-life ephemera (ticket, tag, fortune from a cookie). the only NEW things in this whole project were the BIA wire and the base of the chipboard covers; and admittedly, the latter easily could've been made with a recycled bit of card.

here are a few of my favorite pages, actually ALL the pages are my favorites, but there are 60 of them so i'll spare you, lol.  the set-up is the same for each: dates on one side; the other holding vintage goodness which can be art-journaled upon, collaged-up, or left as is, throughout the year:

as you know i have A LOT of book-sale aquired, falling-apart vintage books** and paper, it's the core of what's in my etsy shop in the form of ephemera packs, eclectic decks, etc. this year i think i might just add a few little hand-made books and journals, since they are SO MUCH fun to make.

being a paperholic, of course i have loads of 12x12" scrapbook paper too. for this book mostly used cardstock-weight to make thick, heavy, STRONG pages, but since i knew they'd all be backed with a second layer of paper, some thinner things (like these hilarious elephants) snuck in.
 

the big eye is from a (not particularly old) magazine, i just happened to like it. the finished planner measures 8.5 x 6.75" and is about an inch thick. which, as it turns out, is the top-end of how much you can stuff into a 1.25" set of BIA wires and have the pages turn all right.  phew.  :)

this one might be my favorite: since a lot of the books i rescue are distressed and discarded library copies, they have the remnants of that usage, including end papers with pre-made pockets in them. am i the only one filled with delight at this thought??!***

sorry to go on and on, but as you'll have noticed, i am inordinately proud of this and i am SO EXCITED that i get to keep it and use it all year! but of course the most important thing to tell ya is that the current SOS challenge: ALL THAT GLITTERS will run all week long and you should c'mon over and PLAY!!! ♥♥♥

*LHJ and i don't really "do" holiday or birthday presents to each other. however, if one of us knows the other really quite wants something in particular, like, say... oh, i dunno... a bind-it-all... they might well decide to perform seriously heroic levels of enablage using a major holiday as the excuse. i'm not saying that's what happened here, but on the other hand if you are ever considering a bit of an indulgent purchase and you'd like a guy to make you feel ok about it, lovely husband jeff is THE MAN!!! :)


**i realize that fellow bibliophiles who've only just met me are probably appalled right now. let me just say that NO HEALTHY BOOKS were harmed in the making of this journal, or in fact in the making of ANY of my projects or ephemera packs. i use 100% book-sale finds whose fate, should they not be purchased, is otherwise the pulper or the dumpster. for the most part, these volumes also have serious flaws--like a bunch of missing or torn pages, extensive markings, moldy covers, and so forth. even so, i make sure they're not valuable, and if they are i sell or donate them, instead. believe me when i say that as an avid reader and book collector myself, i've thought about this subject long and hard, and even written about it, in a post that could be called "DEAD BOOKS WALKING"; in fact libraries discard, sell-off and recycle millions of books a year! i take some of them and make them into art... or at least, into useful, pretty things. :) 


***ok, maybe i am. ah well.  :) :) :)