Guest Designer Andrea Ockey Parr: Stenciled Notebooks

Hi, everyone! Andrea Ockey Parr here!

As an English major and lit nerd, I am obsessed with notebooks!

One of my favorite craft projects is to revamp the covers of store-bought notebooks to give as gifts to friends and family. By revamping just the cover, they don't take forever to make and yet they're still perfectly personalized and unique.  

I made two notebooks using Rae Missigman’s Closed Leaves and Mix and Match Scalloped Edges.

I used the stencils as templates for cutting out shapes and I used the same technique on both notebooks. 

I started the process by sticking Washi Tape on a cookbook page, then smearing paint onto the page.

Next I traced leaves from the Closed Leaves stencil onto some text paper using a black Sharpie.

I cut out the leaves and decided to use the negative space "frames" of the leaves

as a decorative element for my notebook cover.

I glued the leaf frames onto my Washi Tape background

and outlined the leaf shape on the inside with a black Sharpie.

Next I punched up the color by smearing on some acrylic paint

in shades of blue, pink, green, yellow and orange.

I cut my collage to fit on the front of a notebook.

The last step was to sew my collage onto the notebook cover using a sewing machine.

I also added some additional stitched lines to the background and added black around the edges.

Here's a close-up of the cover:

I did the second notebook the same way by tracing and cutting

scallop-shapes from the Mix and Match Scalloped Edges stencil.

I glued these onto the edge of my cover and added some paper scraps

and a "color" sentiment I found in an old book.

Here's a close-up of the cover:

To see more of Andrea's work, visit her blog.