Destination Cover

“Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.”

Are you familiar with this quote by Mary Lou Cook?

Just perfect for our today's post... Experimenting and taking risks totally paid for France when she came up with this great idea for a journal cover. :)

Working in this journal overstimulated my ‘let’s add volume’ vibe and I ended up with a big crocodile style book.

Nevertheless, I love it and decided it should have a nice cover. It took me a moment to step away from all Finnabair influence when deciding how to get started.

So I went extreme and took everything apart: I separated the whole thing, took the envelope from the cover and cut a square in the front cover.

I trimmed the square left over from the front cover and glued paper on top of it, using a generous layer of gel medium. Once it was completely dry (I left it aside for a couple of hours with weight on top of it), I melted some beeswax over it simply using my heat gun.

While it was cooling, I applied a thin and irregular layer of gesso on the covers. I dried it, sprayed some Ecoline on top of it, dried it again and finally rubbed Archival ink on it using a blending tool. To bring the gesso back to the surface, I rubbed a baby wipe over it.

Once cooled, I added PanPastel on the edges of the wax, to give it a distressed look. I places a tiny piece of plaster strip and cambric fabric over the wax and heated it with my heat gun again. To force the plaster and cambric in the wax, I pressed it down with the tip of my scissors.

To attach the square to the rest of the cover, I placed a piece of chicken wire in the opening. All that was left to do, was to add the rest of my embellishments, some stamping and some Archival on the edges of the covers.

I have to admit I wondered if things would be ok after cutting out that square in the cover. Now I’m very happy I did so!

Materials from Mixed Media Place: