Marie’s French Scrapbook Journal

Hey, everyone! Stephanie Manuel of Smiling Sunlight, one of our amazing Junk Journal Design Team Members, created a fabulous ‘Marie’s French Scrapbook 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…

Bonjour, it’s Stephanie Manuel from Smiling Sunlight. I am really pleased to share with you my design team project for the Graphics Fairy Premium Membership website. I named it “Marie’s French Scrapbook Journal”. In my collection of original French documents, I have a letter from a young man named Jacques who wrote to his parents asking why a young man of 22
years old was not allowed to be with a woman of 25 years old. I was inspired to create a journal telling the love story of Jacques through his “bien-aimée”, Marie. In this way, he can be with the woman he loves despite what others have said. So I imagined a lovely French lady called Marie, living in Paris and in the early 1900s, she created this scrapbook journal to not only collect souvenirs but also use it as a vision board for her dream life with her beloved Jacques.

Marie was passionate about nature, paper crafting, collaging and like you and me, she collected old documents for her art. I was delighted to explore the fantastic selection of French bundles on the Graphics Fairy Premium Membership website, almost six bundles, where I found elegant chateaux, invoices with stunning calligraphy, letters, postcards, cabinet cards.

Inspired by authentic scrapbooks, I recycled and aged a red file folder for the cover and tied the pages together with a simple cotton thread which enables me to add or remove pages. I created my own words in French digitally by designing with an alphabet image found on the premium site. To celebrate the love story of Marie and Jacques in this journal, I designed the words “Parle
moi d’Amour” (Talk to me about love) on the cover, “Billet Doux” (Sweet love notes) on one of the Valentine cards and even personalised the poem letters by adding “à Marie”.

To represent Marie’s dream farm château, I created a French version of a tunnel booklet.

In French we call this paper craft ”Théâtre d’Optique”, a technique used a lot for French theatre decor.

I also explored an old optical toy called the “Thaumatrope”, which was popular in the 19th century. It’s a paper disk with a picture on each side and two pieces of string attached. When the strings are twirled quickly between the fingers, the two pictures appear to blend into one. It was perfect to represent Marie and Jacques photographs as kids holding hands.

Something special about the creation of this journal is that since my color ink cartridge was low in my printer – a situation that a lot of us do experience from time to time – I thought about a creative solution; I would print mostly in black and then add color with my colored pencils. I love the result of the colored images, almost as beautiful as the color pictures on the Premium Membership site but with extra texture and intensity.

I explored several ways to store and display the ephemeras such as folding paper into pockets, circle tuck spots, string photo frames and envelopes.

Loving to play with different techniques to get an ageing effect, I printed black and white photographs on my handmade paper and black advert on tea dyed paper.

Thank you for traveling back in time with me to Paris in the 1900s. Make sure to watch the flip through video on my YouTube channel (link below) and have fun with French images by checking the list of bundles below.

MARIE’S FRENCH SCRAPBOOK JOURNAL SHOW & TELL VIDEO TOUR

Premium site bundles used:

> The Traveller
> Favorite French Things
> French Paperie Collection
> French Attic Ephemera
> Instant Ancestors 2
> French Ephemera
> Mini French Ephemera
> French Blue & Cream Ephemera
> Ephemera Romance
> Newspaper Ephemera
> Vintage Paris
> French Floral Engravings
> Ephemera Collection
> Vintage Store Ads
> Chateau Life
> Realm of Blue Fairy
> Vibrant Valentines
> Scents & Soaps Ephemera 2
> Birds in Midflight
> Marsh & Pond
> Farmhouse Style
> Silent Night

Merci !

Stephanie

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