Morning Glory Notebook

I hope you all had a wonderful Easter! We had a really nice day even though it looked more like Christmas outdoors than it did the start of spring. Funny...we didn't have a "White Christmas" this past year but we had a white Easter! Oh well...I'm sure everything will be turning green and flowers will be popping up before we know it. Until then I'll have to be happy looking at stamped flowers!


I finally got around to altering a notebook for myself, and since I am thinking spring, this detailed, realistic image from the Morning Soft set was what I grabbed. Being that this image was going on the cover of a notebook which would get handled a lot, I wanted something that would provide a little protection to my finished work. I figured doing the cracked glass technique would be just the ticket. If you've never tried this technique you should give it a try...it's fun and the result is pretty cool. Here's how to do it:

1. Water colored your image
2. Cover it with ink applied directly to the paper from the Versa Mark pad.
3. Cover with Glassy Glaze embossing powder
4. Emboss using your heat tool - this provides an extra thick, clear coat.
5. Place the embossed image in the freezer for a minute or two
6. Here's the fun part: take it out and carefully bend and twist the embossed card stock...it will crack as you bend it creating a crackled look. Keep going until you get it cracked into a pleasing pattern. You may have to return the piece to the freezer again to stiffen up.
7. If you want to highlight the cracks even more, you can sponge on some ink which will settle in the cracks. I did this on mine using So Saffron reinker.

Here's another photo showing a close up view of the cracked glass.

The background paper is from the Porcelain Prints collection of double-sided designer papers. I applied it using Royal Decoupage medium. I knew I wanted to use this notebook to keep track of my stamping stuff so I added some card stock category dividers using the Spiral punch and some tabs to the side with the Round Tab punch.

The notebook was purchased at Target. If you want to see what it looked like before I started click here. Now I can use this notebook to keep my business papers more organized. (no more post-its all over!)

Well, gotta run...I'm in the process of creating a project that I'm really excited about. Hopefully I'll have it ready to share later this week. Thanks for stopping by! Have a great day!