Tuesday, March 31, 2009

Covered Spiral Notebook

I am starting a Medical Terminology class for work today. It will help me to become a Certified Professional Coder. To encourage me I decided to make my notebook pretty. I will definitely need this incentive to go to class after work! I am usually not a big fan of orange but I needed another accent color and my background paper already had orange. First I cut a piece of 12x12 paper to fit a spiral notebook. This step would up not being important because when I adhered it (with TONS of adhesive so that it became unpeelable) it got a bit off kilter. I then used my Big Shot to cut out "medical terminology" in baby blue card stock with my Quickutz 2x2 alphabet dies in Moxie. This made the process so much faster because I could put multiple letters in at once. I cut some Stampin' Up! card stock in orange into 1 inch wide strips. I am not sure what the specific shade of orange is because the paper was from some scraps that were genrously given to me. This shade of orange coordinates perfectly with my non-Stampin' Up! paper. I used my Xyron machine to put adhesive on the back of all of those letters. I save the lines under the O's and the I's dots for later. I adhered all the letters to the strips and left a one inch margin on either side of each word. I then used my two way glue pen to adhere the I's dots and O's lines. I knew that my notebook needed something else to be special and I have really been on an owl kick for the past couple of months so I dug out a cute owl from my Hero Arts Sparkle Clear Set called Yoo Hoo. I stamped him with StaZon Jet Black ink so that he would not smudge. I colored him in with colored pencils and used Gamsol to blend him I decided that he wasn't brown enough for me and used a Marvy marker to accentuate him with more brown. I colored the edges of his eyes blue to match the background paper. I then stamped the whole paper with the owl with Versamark ink. I poured clear embossing powder on it and heat embossed it. I only added one layer because I wasn't really going for a full on faux glass technique just an even layer of shine without the curling effect that liquid glue has. I then cut out the owl. It is important to cut out the shape afterwards so that you get an even coat of embossing and have something to hold onto while embossing. I then adhered the strips to my notebook after laying them out and deciding where I wanted the owl. For the final step I adhered the owl. I was not too happy with the amount of black notebook showing around the edges and the background paper overlapping so I decided to take an Exacto knife and trim the edges. This wound up cutting into the notebook cover some and making it uneven. I would recommend using scissors next time.

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