Little Summer Joy and a Doc It Journal

Good morning friends. Brenda Smith [1] here with you today and I am really excited to show you a little extra project I've been working on in my planner. 

Have you seen the Doc-It Journals [2] that coordinate with The Reset Girl and the Posh planners? They are a Traveler's Notebook size and one of my absolute favorite things about them is how thick the paper is! I stamped and painted and had no bleed through on the other side.

Little Summer Joy is a project that I've seen several participating in on Instagram. I knew that I wanted to join and a lot of people were doing the Traveler's Notebook format this year but I've never done one. However, as soon as I saw this Doc-It Journal that coordinates with The Reset Girl line, I knew I'd found my album. (If you'd like to find out more about this particular project, please visit the Little Paper Projects blog [3])

Doing this notebook pushed me out of my comfort zone and got me away from my beloved typewriter a little bit. I love the idea of including handwritten journaling in my documenting projects. 

The Reset Girl SN@P! Pack [4] makes it easy to get some color and pattern into your albums. I hand-stitched around the J for June to give it a little bit of depth. 

I tried not to overthink the process too much. I printed photos at various sizes and picked journaling cards to type or handwrite our stories on. Whenever I would get stuck and not know where to go next with my design. I'd just start moving things around the page until something looked good and then I glued it down. No second, third, fourth-guessing myself like I usually do. 

I relied pretty heavily on my stamp stash, including one of my favorite new roller stamps [5] for the Reset Girl line. My daughter graduated from Kinder in June so I made to sure to document her friends and teacher. 

Little Summer Joy celebrates the small moments, and while this moment was a bit of a failed experiement, my heart was full watching my three working together to accomplish a goal. I used a label punch from my stash and the 6x6 pad [6] to create the background of the left page. For the full-sized photo, I used Photoshop to resize to 8.25" by 5" and the printed and rounded the corners. 

In case you were wondering, you can sew in your Doc-It Journals! It required a little bit of pre-planning on my part because I had to place this page on the backside of a page that I would be covering up with patterned paper so that the stitching on the back didn't show through to the other side. Again, I used some punches and the 6x6 pad to make the shapes for the background. 

I trimmed some patterned paper and a 4x6 horizontal card down to cover the left side. I filled in a pie chart in Silhouette Studio with my photos and then cut them out. I used the number stickers [7] from the Posh collection to mark the photos and then used stamps from my stash to write the coordinating journaling. 

I wanted to challenge myself to get a plastic page protector inside my Doc-It Journal. I wasn't sure it was going to work but I decided to try to stitch one into the middle seam. My hands were shaking the entire time I was machine-stitching because I was terrified I was going to mess everything up, but it went smoothly!