Jonas Returns with his Travel Journal

My favorite hand-carved by me stamp, with augmentation by Jonas. It looks like the chicken is pecking at a melon half!

Jonas returned from his road trip with a full travel journal! If you remember, I made a little book for my boy to take with him on his adventure with my mom and brother. They went to Indiana to visit a family beloved and East Coast transplant, Giselle (she is one of those Kid Magnets, who is a kind of a fairy godmother to many). He filled it with writings and drawings and doodles and hangman, lots of lists, some ephemera, and my mom and brother and others had their hands in it too.
Note torn cover, above, a good sign of use, at upper right hand side near the binding!


One of the new people that Jonas met was Abdul, who wrote Jonas's name in Arabic, here:

And here is the Arabic alphabet :
Jonas and my brother played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons while on the trip. Here is my brother's map of the capital city:
A filled-in chart...This car game is popular in our family:
We're so glad he's home with us again.

Book Arts: Travel Journal

Jonas (my 9.5 year-old), my mom, and brother are taking a road trip to Indiana. So I put together a little Travel Journal for Jonas, inspired by the Visual Chronicles book that I first mentioned here. My idea was to make a book that would have some pages of prompts and plenty of pages of almost-blank for my boy to embellish on the road. The paper inside alternates between lightweight rice paper in a light tan, and white heavyweight printmakers' paper (because this is what I had, thanks to Joanie's dad).

Any real bookbinders should not look too closely at the binding because I totally winged it.

Inside front cover, some ideas for embellishment:
Bee stamps:

We're big fans of the car game of "If you were a _________, what would you be?" So I made a grid of the three participants on the trip, some starters (time of day, color, animal, season, mountain vs. ocean, etc.) and left some blank space too:


"How many times did you stop for someone to pee?" and "How much did Nana spend on gas? Keep track of each time and then add it up here." Questions on this page:
The back cover:Some things I found out:

• The oven at low temp can help dry out tacky pages of acrylic paint, but doesn't help dry gel medium.
• Gel medium is tacky forever. A little cornstarch rubbed on the affected areas helped smooth things out a bit.
• Drilling the holes for the binding made me almost hyperventilate a few times.
  

More Baked Goods
Could there be a summer post without a special dessert?
This apricot tart (OK, so it's baked in a pie plate because I have no tart pan) was baked in honor of Baby Alice (almost 2), who came to visit with her parents and charmed us with her tiny voice and many words. The tart above was not nearly as yummy as Alice herself.