Dear Joanna: I can’t honestly say that I remember exactly which show you are referring to, but I can share a few of my thoughts on journals in general.

I have always been a sporadic journal keeper. I’ll go for ages not recording anything, then with a flash of inspiration I will start journaling with a vengeance. That flash of inspiration, as often as not, comes from running across a journal that is so inviting, so seductive, with all those blank pages just waiting to be filled with thoughts, ideas, ticket stubs from a favorite evening, photos, scraps of colorful papers and all the other important flotsam and jetsam of our daily lives, that I can’t resist its siren call and I will, once again, begin observing my life on its pages.

Recognizing that this is a powerful and personal trigger for me, we recently talked about journals at one of our “idea jam sessions” and decided to create some of our own blank books, books that would get our creative juices flowing, long before any thoughts were ever committed to its interior.

Organic material has always held an endless fascination for me, and lord knows, I have enough boxes of leaves, moss, bark bits, sticks, twigs, and other assorted flora to outfit a small forest, so creating “nature” books was a “natural” thing to do. Let me share a few of our ideas with you and maybe get you hooked too!

For these projects we weren’t interested in creating the actual book, only doing the creative embellishing. In all cases we started with basic blank books made of handmade paper. Handmade paper has a softness that we wanted that is lacking in a machine made paper. Then, looking through our collection of leaves we chose three, a Ginkgo, a Maple, and a Mango Fossil Leaf, to use as focal points on three separate journals. Using a variety of techniques, including gluing, imprinting and something we called “laminate embossing” we ended up with three very different and beautiful books.

I’m sure you are familiar with leaf imprinting, where you apply paints to a leaf (be sure to work on the back side to get the best detail and veining) then use the leaf in the same way you would a rubber stamp to leave an impression. Our Maple Leaf was our candidate for this. First we sponged on watered down acrylic paints in various gold and taupe shades, allowed it to dry, then pressed our leaf “stamp” down.

The Mango Fossil Leaf is so interesting itself that we simply glued it to our journal surface, then embellished over it with a “moss mush” that we have developed (Reindeer Moss and water based wallpaper paste). You can accent this clean, simple look with a twine closure anchored with, what else, an unusual pod!

The Ginkgo is such an exquisite leaf that we wanted to create a cover that was as elegant as the leaf itself, so using a liquid laminate (we use Beacon’s and LOVE it), we first covered the journal cover with Ginkgo Leaves we had gathered and pressed the previous year. We allowed it to dry, then picked all the leaves back off, then lightly gilded the entire cover, the imprints in the laminate leaving random and irregular leaf patterns. A small, torn (never cut if you want a natural look) piece of handmade paper and one perfect gilded Ginkgo in the center finished off this look.

What if you don’t have a journal with the softer handmade papers? We decided to do one of these too, and we took our Banana Bark, which is quite soft and pliable, and glued strips of it down to the cover of an inexpensive commercial journal. A dried flower stem was adhered to the side as the only adornment.

Joanna, I hope this gives you some ideas to get you started. One of the wonderful things about doing “nature journals” is that Mother Nature NEVER runs out of things to inspire us!