National Card Making Day---and no card!

As I emptied out a box of Ritz crackers today, I remembered seeing some journals made using all kinds of cereal, cracker and toy boxes for the covers.  As I recall, they were selling for around $10.  They were cute but since I have the supplies to make them myself I decided to give it a try.

It's been so long since I've used my Bind-it-All that I had to spend some time online watching tutorials so I'd remember how to move the pages through and get the correct number of holes punched.

The Bind-it-All does a good job, but it's not simple (to me) to use.  I'm never 100% sure where those holes are going to wind up! Maybe if they had made it out of clear plastic so I could see the blades, it would make more sense to me!

Anyway, the video gave specific instructions on how to punch an 8" album so I managed to get this one reasonably spaced. 

After struggling to keep the pages together while standing them up in the punch slot and counting over 5 holes for the second punch and 7 holes for the third punch, wrestling the wires through the holes and getting them compressed, I was through!

The cracker box wasn't quite heavy enough for the cover so I adhered a piece of SU cardstock onto the back side.  The interior pages are just copy paper cut to size and I interspersed some colored cardstock dividers.

My oldest granddaughter loves journals and sketch books; my oldest grandson loves to sketch too so it's a nice little stocking stuffer that I can use for either of them.