In the meantime

Sometimes I come up with a made-up DIY project (or even try a diy project that someone else has done) and it is a flop. (I'm going to blame it on all Pinterest.) Other times, I come up with a project and it actually turns out! Yay!  This little project was one of those those projects that turned out.  It was a simple project, but it made me feel quite accomplished! haha... Anyway, a while back I found a nice maternity t-shirt for a couple bucks.  I liked the color and style.  The only problem with it was that it had long  sleeves!  And considering that I plan to wear it during the height of summer, that is a major problem! But I decided that it shouldn’t be too hard to make it into a short-sleeved shirt.  So I went ahead and bought the shirt. I found another shirt with sleeves that were simply cut off, folded up, and then tacked in place with a few simple stitches. (You can kind of see one of the little stitches.) How hard can it be to do t...

After the project sat on my kitchen table for a week or two, it is finally finished!   Yes, I filled  the journal that I made  a year and a half ago and decided it was way more fun to make another one than to just go out and buy one!   Here are the two together -- the one one the top has held up pretty well for being well-loved for   1 1/2 years  now!   I wanted to go with a burlap cover this time...we'll see how if it holds up as well as the other cover.  It took a little trial and error to figure out how to make the cover, but in the end, it worked out well! This new journal ended up having twice as many pages as the last one, so time will tell how well this cover holds up! I also decided to connect the front and back covers with some cloth for a bit of color and girliness.  It added a little more of a challenge to the book-binding process...it's not perfect, but it's not bad for a beginner!  And...

Journaling has been a part of my life for quite a while now.  I’ve never been one to sit down and journal every day, but I do enjoy recording encouragement from the Word, music, and books, as well as things in my life that God is using to teach me. I started my last journal in 2011 and it was only last week that I finally filled all of the pages (so you can tell how often I actually write in it!)  With that one filled, I needed to get a new one…which gave me the idea of making my own!  A friend made one recently and it looked pretty cool, so I looked up DIY Journals online and got a few directions on how to do it. Here’s the finished product: And the back of it: From this angle, you can see a little more of the binding.  It uses a special stitch—called the coptic stitch--to keep it all together.  I found a youtube video on how to do it and it’s pretty straightforward.  With this stitch, the boo...