Crafting Beautiful Journals & Albums: How to Personalize, Embellish, and Make Diaries and Scrapbooks

I'm so inspired by this book, that I can hardly wait to get home from vacation so I can pull out my craft supplies. One project is a vacation journal with a cover sprinkled with sand and sea shells. It's beautiful. She shows a variety of designs and techniques like weaving torn paper, using embossing liquid, and making your own special papers (one uses corn silks). I like the examples using lace to frame an old photo, and ways to dress up ordinary books (a standard visitor's book and a ring binder). These are great for personal use or make very special gifts.

Anna Morgan has the eye of a czarina when it comes to creating visual richness. The book is full of marvelous ideas great and small, many of which are quite inexpensive. For example, she suggests saving colored foil candy wrappers to smooth out and use as raw material to decorate the covers of books. Now why didn't I think of that the last time I crumpled and discarded a candy wrapper?Morgan presents three categories of ideas: ones to use in decorating the covers of books, ones to use in embellishing the interior pages of books, and ones to use in making unusual books themselves.It has very clear instructions for all the projects, and has many detailed photographs and drawings. Very useful are variations on each idea, so you can see examples of how she takes her concept and reapplies it to make it look totally different.If this book has a fault, it is that papermaking and bookbinding, both of which are described in the book, might each be the subject of detailed treatises much longer than this volume. No matter, this book is an inspiration.