Elmer's Glue: Main Ingredient for Homemade Mod Podge for Gothic-inspired journal covers

One of the finest things that La Simero Handmade was able to showcase to its clients in the Philippines are the following journals sold months ago. These are one of the Gothic-inspired journals made out of mod podging. 

Before I never knew about mod podging. Not until after searching about crafts in YouTube and found out that mod podging is what I have been doing years ago. It is placing texture to crafts through using the Mod Podge and whatever materials you could find at home. 

In my case, I usually use some plies of tissue paper and place it to the cardboard and wet it through my so-called mod podge with a mixture of Elmer's Glue and water. Neither did I know that by having that particular mixture is already a mod podge. Well, the homemade one. 

You can find several ingredients to make your own mod podge. But the basic ingredients are water and a whole bottle of Elmer's Glue. That's it! You already have your own Mod Podge. 

What you can see below are the products of mod podging using my homemade Mod Podge. After that, I colored the entire covers with some poster paints then repeat the the process of placing mod podge to the painted covers. Wait until they dry. 

To achieve the Gothic look, I placed some of the stuff like chains, and some charms I bought from the market. Then, I placed them in the covers through the use of my hot glue gun. Voila! 

To bind the pages, I used Coptic binding stitch to make the pages flat while doing sketching, whatsoever with these journals. 

Thanks to Elmer's Glue, I was able to achieve these good looking, stunningly amazing Gothic-inspired handmade journals! 

Arnold Grummer's Paper Making Process As an Inspiration for La Simero Handmade paper sheets

I have been working with our new branding for our handmade journals here in the Philippines. Through the help of several media such as Pinterest, Etsy, and other crafty blogs available, I was able to establish my own crafty stuff by doing something creative out of the things available at home.

One of the newest things I did is making our handmade paper taken from Arnold Grummer's paper making techniques as an inspiration. Several weeks ago, I saw his videos about how easy it is to make new sheets of paper from recycled scraps of paper and other materials to blend in to the new sheets. You may click on the video below to see yourself how Arnold Grummer recycled papers to make new sheets of papers. 

Based from the video, I have innovated some of his techniques from what is really available at home.

Above are some of the products made from the trimmed handmade paper sheets. These are made from scrap papers blended together with some botanical like dried flowers, leaves, and so on depending on the available resources.

These handmade bookmarks with cute felt designs came from 12 x 12 inches handmade paper that you can see in my Etsy shop listing through this link attached.

12 x 12 in La Simero Handmade paper sheets
Regular sized handmade, recycled paper sheets - Etsy listing

If you have more suggestions for DIY, crafts to make out of recycled and handmade papers like the ones posted, you may leave your comments below.

Journals with Stylish and Unique Designs To Feature At La Simero Handmade

Selling cute and stylish journals are our thing. So, after depth research and inspirations from other crafters in the world, these are just one of the outcomes of these combined ideas. These are already sold to different clients in different places.

Designs featured here are in accord to their requests. What we really do is to make their demands [to the styles they want for their ordered journals] and how it should appear on the covers. With the help of great imagination and research, I came up with these truly unique journals. All produced at La Simero Handmade.

These journals are bind through Coptic Stitch binding method and Perfect Binding. You can search these techniques in YouTube through searching Sea Lemon's instructions. She has a lot of clear tutorial videos on these methods. So you can see them through clicking the links below.

Sea Lemon's Binding Method Video Tutorials: 
How to Make a Sketchbook: Coptic Stitch
Perfect Binding Tutorial 

Anyway, these are the products produced by La Simero Handmade.

1. Gothic-inspired Journals
-Stylish amulet placed on the covers
-Purple, Pink combined in the covers

2. Altered Cover - Mesh Combo with Silver Lining

-These are made from old pages placed to make an altered look

3. Gothic-Inspired Journal with Skulled Crucifix

-Key made as a bookmark for the page

4. Strawberry-Owl Feathered covers

-Ribbon are placed as requested by client

-Cute heart charm placed as a bookmark

5. Tribal Ribbon Lock
-The tribal covers make it look amazing for a journal activity
-pages are actually lined and recycled from an old notebook

6. Blue Covers with Ribbon Lock and Tribal Spine

-This is purely hand-stitched. Since we don't own a sewing machine, we sewed every cloth by hand using back stitching to achieve the machine-sewn look outside. 

-Ribbon bookmark is placed on the book spine.

7. Dream book-inspired journal
-Quotation is placed on the covers
-Cool charm placed as bookmark on the spine
-The pages are bind using Coptic Stitch binding method.

8. Gothic-Inspired Journal - The Green Version
-Handmade crucifix placed below skull charm
-Gothic key placed in the book spine
-Edges are placed with cool designs
-Pages are stained to achieve a more Gothic feeling.

9. Strawberry - Owl Inspired Brown covers
-This is as requested by the client.
-Metal "H" charm placed on the spine
-Pages are stacked together and bind using Coptic Stitch Binding Method.

Me and my younger sister both managed to make journals and helped each other especially in designing the journal covers. So, every client really is assured that the journals they received are really unique and above all, affordable. 

If you wish to know more about our journals, you can leave comments below. Thanks for visiting our blog! Wish you a nice day!