Hey Guys! Today’s post is a little bit different than usual, a how-to: DIY pretty mid-term academic journal.

The reason I decided to do this type of post today is that last year, near the end of summer, I decided that I wanted to get a journal with all the days of the year in it that I could write homework assignments for college and to-do lists in.

But when I went shopping for one, I noticed that all the cool academic journals with the entire school year going from July to the next September were all ugly, plain black leather ones, and all the pretty looking notebooks were just plain lined pages and I wanted my journal to be both useful and nice looking so I came up with the idea to make one myself.

So I made one myself and used it all year round until it came to July and I decided I should make a new one for this year.

Here is what I used to make it:
1. A plain mid-term academic journal (you can get these a most book shops for around €8.99)
2. A nicely designed gift bag, preferably two different colours (my one was €3.80 from The Card Company)
3. Any clear, extra strong glue.
4. A scissors

How To: DIY Pretty Mid-Term Academic Journal 2

What I did:

1. I cut one side of the gift bag out and fitted it to the journal to try and figure what way I would have to cut it to make it fit perfectly around the front of the journal and this is the shape I got.

How To: DIY Pretty Mid-Term Academic Journal 3

2. I then did the exact same for the back of the journal. Because there were two holes in the front of the journal (where the ribbon was before I removed it and cut up the gift bag) when I placed the cut out gift bag on the journal, I decided to put a bit of ribbon through it and tie it in a bow. And when both back and front are placed on the journal (Not glued yet) it will look like this:

How To: DIY Pretty Mid-Term Academic Journal 5

3. Next, I cut out a big strip from the pink part of the gift bag and tried to figure out what way to cut it to attach it to the spine of the journal and this is how it came out:

How To: DIY Pretty Mid-Term Academic Journal 6

4. I then placed it on to the spine of the journal and bent the tabbed parts into the back and front covers of the journal so it looked like this:

How To: DIY Pretty Mid-Term Academic Journal 7

5. Then, when I was 100% sure that everything would fit right I glued each side one by one, putting glue on both the card and the journal and then leaving a heavy book on top of it while the glue set.

The Finished Journal looked like this: