This is what I did in the break

In the Christmas break I had this journal I had prepared which I managed to get almost finished. The journal was one that Teesha Moore very generously gave directions on making, go to Teesha Moore's website to get details. Teesha Moore also with her family organises and runs the wonderful Artfest retreats, to do one of her retreats is on my list of things I would love to do. This is my cover with the fold back flap showing. Flap closed and first two pages.
And flap open. Pages 3 and 4 pages 5 and 6 with flap closed and flap opened. Middle of journal
pages 7 and 8 with flap closed, these are my Australian pages
last 2 pages with flap closed, the flap has not been journaled yet
inside of flap showing back cover of the journal.
I tried not to think too much about the collage, used a lot of clip art Teesha Moore's, Art Chix, Lynne Perella paper and bits and pieces I cut out of magazines. I used the french Rives in 300gm instead of the Artistico that Teesha used the reason being that I liked the softness and flexibility of Rives. I used the Golden fluids to colour my pages and Pan Pastels to shade. I tried a variety of pens for text, the sharpie hi lighters are good but change colour with the background, they are transparent and also I found they took a long time to dry so had to wait to add other colours around the letters. The zig calligraphy pens where great for shaping your letters with the lovely chisel led ends, but also transparent. The Copic also good but still the same problem with transparency. I found the best for true colour was the Sharpie poster pens which I could only get on ebay, they don't come in chisel, great for thinner lettering. Unfortunately Sharpie have been discontinued. My preference for a white pen was Uniball sigma available in stationery shops, just a hint with this pen, write with pen vertically doesn't work very well on an angle. I would recommend you give this journal a go, because there aren't a lot of pages its not so daunting. As to the journaling I didn't want to think about what I wrote and concentrated on the lettering, I wrote quotes and poems I found on the internet and in books, don't look to close you are bound to find spelling mistakes, I know, now you are going to look for them. Entering this post has been a challenge, as there are problems on Internet Explorer and too impatient to download the thingy to fix it, I have used Mozilla Firefox. This site is interesting downloading the photo's was much quicker, but once they where downloaded to move them down the page I had to drag the photo onto the top of each photo until I reached where I wanted it to go, a bit of a long process, maybe there was another way but couldn't see one. Also when I went back to close up gaps and centre some of the text I lost the last photo, so if it turns up twice when I publish the post, it must have been hiding under one of the other photo's. To those readers in Australia, enjoy your Australia Day Festivities.