Back in January of 2008, I was sitting around shooting the breeze with Tracy Moore and he confided to me that he hadn’t documented some event because he didn’t have a journal with him at the time. It was one of the most shocking revelations I had ever heard; anyone who has known Tracy any length of time knows that he always has a journal with him. For a while, I though he actually might have had a secret pocket sewn into his underwear to store them in. I remember making a joke — something about needing an emergency journaling kit, I even drew it out in one of my journals later that day.

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As I was thinking about what other things I might like to make to trade at JournalFest this year, I thought that a few of these kits might be fun and different. I started as I normally do by using a sheet of plain bond paper to work out the measurements. Once that was done, I used Adobe Illustrator to draw the design I wanted and scaled the to the measurements I’d worked out. I printed the design out on a sheet of French Paper Company’s Pop-Tone card stock. These kits will eventually be filled with some paper so when I calculated the initial measurements, I made sure that they’d be about 3/8″ deep for the paper to fit into. I used a Scor-it board to score the card stock so that when it’s folded, it will be able to house the sheets of paper that will go inside. If you study the image below carefully, you should be able to just make out the scoring.

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The next step was to trim out the areas that wouldn’t be part of the case once it was folded and after some experimentation with a couple of prototypes, it seemed like rounded corners would be a good ideal as well.


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With the trimming completed, the next step was simply to fold each case on the scored lines to set the creases into the right position.

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The case will be kept closed with a string and some paper buttons, similar to the ones you find on inter-office envelopes. After fabricating the buttons from some scrap I attached them using some standard grommets which pretty much wrapped up the exterior for this project.

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Stay tuned. I’ll post part 2 as soon as I figure out exactly what I’m going to put inside.