Christmas Notebook

It's that time of year where the shopping centre's are full of the Christmas Spirit, the trees are up the banners and bannering, the songs are a singing and more often than not we have Boney M singing as part of the backdrop. To get us all in the Christmas spirit I've made a small little tutorial to get us all inclusive in the Christmas spirit. I love lino, I'm one of those people that believe that lino can get you everywhere the uses are just stumognous.

I'm also of the belief that you use what you have, recycling in any way you can. This tutorial is only a guideline of what you can do. You don't necessarily have to follow everything to the T, but you are allowed to go off on your own.

The supplies are easy, you only need a small piece of lino, your lino cutting tool, a template of your Christmas ornaments you want to make, distress inks or any other inks you have on hand, I usually have pre-cut A5 brown cardboards that I use to make small little books. I use all the recycled paper from the kids books that they don't use any more from old school books to use as fillers for these little notebooks of ours. A black pen always come in handy. I have a stapler that extends and that's a very useful item to have.

 Firstly just space your templates out on the lino and cut the lino into the different squares.

 Trace the Christmas template onto your small square and cut out with your scissor or exacto knife. OR You can cut out your ornament  after you have filled in your design. Either or is fine.

 For these purposes I've kept the lines plain and simple. You can make your own designs with small little circles, lines, squares, the options are endless.

 In the interim I took the brown cardboard paper, folded it in half and folded the notebook paper in the middle.

 With the extended stapler, I stapled all the pieces together.

 Taking out my distress inks, I browned the edges of the book to give it a bit of an antique feeling.

 With the red distress ink I inked my lino prints and printed the ornaments onto the front page of the notebook. It's a bit wet, but get's dry quite quickly, when it does it gives it an old vintage feeling look.

With the black pen I use it to give it a bit of a dimensions and just finish off the notebook giving it a homemade finished feeling. 

So there you go, something for you to try for the Christmas season, this can make a nice little gift for that Christmas Stocking.