Making Altered Journals and Notebooks with Digital Scrapbooking Kits as Printables

Note: Tutorial created with the help of my daughter's hands.

As the new school year begins, my kiddies each need a few marble notebooks. Over the summer, we make them unique! You can too.

Start by designing your front and back covers. Your kids can help with the design process, mainly picking out the backgrounds and telling you where to drag things in your digital scrapbook software program.

Roughly measure a composition book and make your digital layout a little larger. For this book, I used a single digital scrapbooking paper from my Serene Collection for the back, but you can be as creative as you wish. If you know what subject the book will be for, add that to the digital page. If not, the kids can add that after school starts.

Print out your covers on cardstock. Trim off the left edge for the front and the right edge for the back. This step is important if you have designed the back! I have put many back covers on upside down!

Position the printed digital scrapbook page where you want it to be on the notebook, aligning the trimmed edge of the print with the binding tape on the book. While holding the printed cover in place, flip the book and cover over and roughly trace (in pencil) around the printed cover. Do the same to the back cover. The pencil line gives you guidelines on where to spread your glue.

Glue the back side of the printout, making sure to go beyond your pencil line and all the way to the trimmed edge. Position the trimmed edge along the binding tape of the notebook and adhere. Use a burnisher to smooth the printed paper down.

Use an X-acto knife to trim off the edge of the printout, making sure to get as close to the cardboard of the notebook as possible.

Add any extras you would like at this point... ink the edges, add some ribbon, have fun!

Depending on the age of your kids, let them help you throughout the process! My daughter even had an end of summer party for her friends and they all made altered notebooks! They were old enough to do all of the work. I simply printed out some digital scrapbook paper for them to play with and they personalized them with stickers.

Altered Notebook by dinny [Diane Miller]
larger view

	Commercial license versions of Brush Set: Bitsy FRAME Mini are also available.

Free hybrid scrapbooking tutorial written by dinny [Diane Miller]

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