Nature's Blessings Journal Swap Pages

Advance notice - LOTS of photos in this post! Click on any of them for a slightly larger view.

Karla Nathan is hosting a Nature's Blessings journal swap. The fact that there are 78 participants in this swap is testament to how wonderful Karla and her projects are. She drew the artwork for the front and is individually creating a cover for each of the 78 books, plus additional blank books that were available for purchase. She's also making some journal pages. I don't know how she does it all! You can see her post about the swap here.

Anyway, participants are to make six journal "pages" with four sides each (each is a folded 8-1/2" x 11" piece of cardstock.) We send our pages to Karla and she'll send each of us a book with pages from six others, three blank pages, and a pretty doodled sheet she's created.  She's also done a tutorial for those who want to make their own journals (does she ever sleep???) You can get more information on the tutorial here.

My pages are, as always, not what I intended to create but I do like them. Since we have no idea whose pages we'll end up with, I'll share mine now. Here are the fronts of my six pages.

We were supposed to leave at least fifty percent of the space for the recipients to fill in with words or photos or whatever. I'm afraid I fudged a bit on that, although most of my "open" space is on the insides and backs. There are a couple of notecards, too, that open up for space to write.

Here are the inside layouts.

I did all the backs the same except one, which actually turned out to be my favorite. This page was on "Beauty" paper from Authentique's Harmony collection. Of course I only had one sheet, but if I'd had the patience to wait until I could get to Paper Crown I'd have made all my pages on this paper. I'm hoping they have more when I go Thursday (fun class, more on that in a later post.)

The others were very similar to the page below.

I found some really lovely washi tape on Etsy from WashiTapeManiac. I got the nature-themed tape in the photo above and also the pretty blue rose print with the background wording and the metallic gold dot shown in some of the earlier photos. WashiTapeManiac has die cut tapes, cute labels and lots more. I'm only passing this along because I feel they have a great selection and thought some of you might be interested (no benefit to me.)

So there you have it. I can hardly wait to get my book back from Karla and see the pages created by six others - I'll share when I do - but I have a feeling it may be a bit before she gets all those 78 books together and mailed. Gotta love her!