Autumn Colours Layered Journal

Good morning!!! I'm Teresa and I am thrilled to be guesting here on the Colourcraft blog today. Autumn is one of my favourite seasons, I love the changing colours in the trees and the drifts of leaves washing up at the side of the roads. I wanted to create something reminiscent of that and came up with this beautiful layered journal cover.

Colourcraft sell an amazing range of products (many of which I have never seen anywhere else!) and I wanted to try out their Tissuetex, as I was intrigued to see how I could colour it with Brushos. It has the look of tissue paper, but doesn't disintegrate when wet, making it perfect for water based colours.

I cut several lengths of Tissuetex and used Brusho powders to colour them. I spritzed each piece with some water, sprinkle the Brusho colour over it and spritzed again before scrunching the Tissuetex to get the colour all over. (Tip: wear rubber gloves if you don't want orange hands!!) I used a mix of colours on each piece and love the random colour blends that occur.

Tissuetex can be torn along the length, so I tore strips approximately 1 inch wide ready to create my layers.

I cut a piece of cotton fabric for my base. To get the right size, I placed my sketch book on the fabric and cut the fabric slightly taller than the book, and allowed enough on each side to fold inside the covers to create a 'pocket'. I used pinking shears to cut it so I didn't need to hem the fabric.

Then I layered the strips across the fabric base and sewed them in place using a straight stitch on my sewing machine. Make sure each strip overlaps the previous one slightly so that the fabric doesn't show through.

Fold the ends in and stitch in place top and bottom to create the pockets that the covers fit inside. I added some coloured seam binding to create a tie closure. Now it was time to add the extra details. I glued a selection of sequins randomly over the cover and stamped affirmation quotes using Sepia Archival ink. I used a fine brush to splatter some gold acrylic ink for a little extra subtle sparkle.

I added a stamped tree inside the journal and highlighted the image with dots of gold ink.

I love how this turned out, the wonderful warm colours, and crumpled texture really captured the essence of autumn for me. I hope you are inspired to try out the Tissuetex - it was such a wonderful product to work with.

Thanks again to the Colourcraft team for letting me play with some of their great products, you can find more from me on my blog: www.thefatcactus.co.uk 

Check out my YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/c/TeresaMorgan