Handmade Journals - Handmade journal cover art

Let's work on your cover art. After you've chosen out your design and you've cut everything out you want to now place that on the board. What's happening here is this flap is going to be the opening of your book. So, this is the outside and this will be the inside of the book. Since I'm going to put the ocean on the outside I'm going to put that on a part that flaps up. So, I'm going to put my glue right on that board. Rubber cement kind of dries fast. You can also use glue sticks if you've got kids, that might be a little more kid friendly. I'm going to flip this art over. I want it to go this way to be my front so I'm going to flip it over, flip my cover over and just make sure that it's in the center. Press it down, flip it back over. I like to take a ruler or if you have a bone folder, a lot of you scrapbookers will know what that is, and just smooth this out. Make sure you get all the air bubbles out of there. Then when you've done that, turn it over and we want to cut these corners so that these will become flaps. Cut it right up to that corner edge. Then also where this fold is, you want to make a little slit cut right there. Put some more glue on and we'll fold these flaps in. It may have to set a little depending on what kind of glue you're using. Then, as soon as you get those in, go ahead and put the contact paper on there. So, get your roll of contact, clear contact paper out. It's OK that these aren't sticking because as soon as I get that paper on there it's going to make them stick. But, then you want to fold this. Kind of get your nail in there, run it along the side so you get a nice crease on that edge so when they open the book it doesn't have any weird bubbles or anything.