Art Journals can be FUN instead of Torture! Really!

I have always and forever been impressed by the gorgeous art journals that are shown in magazines.  So I would buy a nice blank journal - and then sit and look at the blank pages and just about cry because I had no idea where to start.  Two things saved me:  Art Journaling - Pages in Stages (a Cloth Paper Scissors DVD featuring Dawn DeVries Sokol) and Teesha Moore's web site (her advice for making an art journal including directions for actually constructing and binding a journal).

 So even though these pages are only partially finished, I am going to share them with you.  After all what is the point of having a blog if there is nothing new to see when you visit? 
This is the outside of the journal.  I built it with book board covers so it will be sturdy and covered it with some really great paper.  It will have a title on the front and beads on the strings that you can see along the binding.  There are several signatures (a bunch of pages folded together) that are sewn into the Italian Book Cloth that acts as the binding holding it all together.  I used waxed polyester for the binding cord.  Barbara