Happy Mail Travel Journal
Hey, everyone! Stephanie Manuel of Smiling Sunlight, one of our amazing new Junk Journal Design Team Members, created a fabulous Happy Mail Travel Journal for us this week. As you know, we feature one new Junk Journal project each week created by one of our creative team of artists. Our Design Team Members select from the 100’s of Vintage Image Bundles on our Premium Membership Site, for their creations, in order to show you beautiful ways to use those images. We hope you will be totally inspired by this series!
Therefore, please make sure you check out the video tour at the bottom of the page…please scroll all the way down to see it. Are you ready to be inspired? I will step out of the way and let Stephanie tell you all about her incredible project…
Hi everyone, my name is Stephanie Manuel from Smiling Sunlight. I am thrilled to share my “Happy Mail Travel Journal”, which is my first design team project for The Graphics Fairy. I live on the tropical island of Mauritius and as a child, I would imagine traveling the world through mail received from my penpals. You know that great feeling of hearing the postman ring and seeing that you’ve got mail?! That’s what I love about Happy Mails; cultivating friendship, collecting beautiful postage stamps, sharing inspiration, exchanging unique creative crafts, and discovering places and cultures.
So many themed bundles on The Graphics Fairy Premium site inspired me to create that journal, specially the “European Train Travel” bundle where I found the photograph of the most adorable little girl, sitting on her trunk at a train station, all dressed up for a delightful voyage. I imagined that journal as a heirloom where that little girl would have collected all the Happy Mails that friends would send her from different countries.
She would also flip through it like a travel vision board.
It’s an album style journal where more pages can be added just by untying the strings. I enjoyed searching keywords such as postage stamps, postcards, script and ephemera on the Graphics Fairy Premium site. By following the clear steps in the Digital Tutorials, I learned to design my own stamps and airmail envelopes.
My most favourite creations in this journal is the butterfly wing specimen card with the see through window. The specimen labels glued onto my brown handmade paper really give it that authentic naturalist look.
Have you tried slow stitching or embroidery on paper? They add a wonderful texture to these designed vintage postcards. I then glued them on my handmade paper for a nice finish look.
For the pages, I used mostly my tea dyed and handmade paper. Whenever I want to save ink and have an image on only one side of the page, I would print on my tea dyed pattern paper. The nice thing about the Script Ephemera bundles on the Graphics Fairy Premium site is that the letters are also available in PNG format with no background. This means that I only have to print in black on the tea dyed paper and then apply paper ageing techniques to get the distressed look. These techniques are clearly explained in the Handcraft Tutorials section on the Premium site.
One of the destination that fascinates me the most and that I would love to visit one day is Egypt! I wanted the envelope to look like a torn papyrus so I printed a hieroglyph image from the “Ancient Travel” bundle on a piece of recycled brown packaging paper.
I like exploring origami paper folding and printing techniques. For example I printed the train image on tracing paper to facilitate the folding of the envelope and the school themed envelope is a no-glue origami folded envelope.
It’s fun to have interactive elements in journals so as to immerse into the story therefore I made a mini exploding Egyptian book and an expandable world map.
I wonder from what country my next Happy Mail will come… where would you like to travel?
There is a full flip through video available at the bottom of this page and also make sure to check below the list of the Premium site bundles that I used. Thank you very much for reading this post! I hope that you have found some inspiration in my Happy Mail Travel journal.
HAPPY MAIL TRAVEL JOURNAL SHOW & TELL VIDEO TOUR
Premium site bundles used:
European Train Travel
Junk Journaling
Tropical Finches
Florida Vacation
Tropical
The Lepidopterist
Bohemian Butterflies
Take Flight Butterflies
Back To School
Green Gables
Ancient Travel
Best Wishes Retro
I also used the following words to search the Images & Printables:
Stamp
Girl
Label
Notebook
The world map was a free image from The Graphics Fairy website
Stephanie’s YouTube
Stephanie’s Instagram
Stephanie’s Facebook
Check out the Graphics Fairy Premium Membership Site HERE!
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