Creating Gideon's Art Journal Part One: The Preparation.

After reading Alice N's comment about doing an art journal for Gideon in my Bit By The Bug article I started thinking about acting on her suggestion.

This angel notebook has been lying around here maybe 10 years without ever having found a use special enough to warrant a pretty book. Well, it has found it's use now.

I got to work collecting some things for his art journal. I put it all in an old shoebox so it's all handy when I need it. (I have another box of stuff for mine set aside)

Here you'll see some photos of just a portion of my materials for this project.


The plastic bag has lace, ribbons, decorative edged scissors (about 4 pair) and a Marvy hole puncher (it has decorative cartridges)


The cat box is a rubber stamp kit with Victorian cat designs. Just a small portion of my rubber stamps. There's also a glue stick and a few packages of confetti and some scraps of scrapbooking papers in with the scissors.

Under the stamp kit is some scrapbooking papers and a sheet of stickers.

The folder is Gideon's artwork some of which will be included. I might take photos of some bigger pieces like Gideon's necklace to include in the journal.


Gideon's necklace. He picked the beads, thread color and order they were strung and I helped him string them all together.


Another large Art Creation: His giant DIEGO coloring book page. (It's on his bedroom wall)

The box. Well, this is stuffed as you can see. So what is inside it, anyway?


On the top are plaid heart, scottish terrier and bunny rub ons. There's also a pack of lizard, snake and reptile rub ons and a pack of halloween themed rub ons in there. (My box has a zoo animal pack of rub ons that are for use in either art journal)

There's some ribbons (astrological, bunny and Easter themes)

Plenty of stickers in all shapes and sizes including foam, scented stickers, foil and vellum stickers. Many sheets of scrapbook paper from my scrapbooking calendar.

The blue box has a mini ivy garland in there along with decorative brads in geometric, golden dragonfly, and floral shapes with many colors, gold corner mounts and pastel colored corner mounts. There's also die cuts in there and silver tags for small journaling.

The bigger box has a case of multi colored rhinestones in a variety of shapes as well. There's a dual ended journaling acid free marker in there somewhere as well. There's buttons as well as messy transcripts of four stories Gideon told me for a story telling project we did in August. I need to format it into a story rather than just the messy notes that they are now.  There's a couple pages of craft foam in there and there's a third page here that was too big to shove in there.

 It's a box of treasures just waiting to be explored.

The journal can be seen on the lid of the box. (The spiral bound child angel book)

Here's the rest of my rubber stamps. Pity I don't have a use for them lately. I'll fix that, though!



I also have a lot of magazine cut outs to add to pages in another box.

Here's some of my postal stamps. They are from the US, Ghana, Ireland, Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Germany, England and more. :) Some of the images on them are fantastic for art journals.

Here's the rest of my postal stamps. (Yes, I have a lot of them)


When I said I was armed and ready, I bet you never imagined my having THIS much stuff.. and I have more set aside for my art journal. This is just Gideon's! (Stamps and supplies like scissors etc are obviously for either journal)

See what you've started Rene and Alice? Who would have thought an idea would spark all of this? *grin* Thanks for feeding my muse. :)

Stay tuned for the next essay: Part Two - Artist at work.